G2: AI speeds up shortlisting, but deals stall on approval

G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, based on a survey of more than 1,000 B2B software buyers and interviews with 50-plus sales and marketing leaders, found that 82% of buyers sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last two years. For the first time, evaluation, not research, is now the longest stage of the buying journey.

The bottleneck moved rather than disappeared. AI lets a buyer build a shortlist in minutes, but the report found IT security review still delays 39% of buyers overall (50% among enterprise buyers), budget approval delays 32%, and implementation planning delays another 25%. G2 Chief Innovation Officer Tim Sanders summarized it as "AI has solved one constraint but created a new one."

That cuts against the instinct to keep optimizing purely for discovery. A prospect can find and shortlist a product almost immediately now; what stalls the deal afterward is a security questionnaire with no pre-written answers, a pricing page that requires a call to get a real number, or an implementation plan nobody wrote down in advance.

The report also found internal resistance to AI adoption itself is rising fast, from 16% to 29% of buyers citing it as a concern in a single year, the largest single-year shift in the study. That's a second friction point worth planning for: pushback on an AI-adjacent purchase from inside the buyer's own organization is now a real objection to pre-empt, not an edge case.

The practical fix scales down fine: a public security/compliance FAQ, transparent self-serve pricing, and a written implementation outline available before a prospect asks close more of the gap than another round of SEO or ad spend aimed at getting found in the first place.