Why 11% is the wrong number: 71% of B2B buyers use AI

Short answer71% of European B2B buyers use AI tools when they compare vendors. The 11% shared on LinkedIn is about how buyers keep up with vendors between purchases, not about how they choose one.

I kept seeing the figure in my LinkedIn feed: only 11% of B2B buyers use AI. The posts concluded that AI visibility can wait. The number comes from 6sense's 2026 report on European B2B buyers.¹ It measures how buyers stay current when they are not buying anything. On that question, AI tools come last.

The same report also asks what buyers do when they choose a vendor. There, 71% use AI tools, and 26% rely on AI more than on regular search.¹ That is when the shortlist gets made, and that is where the deal is decided.

6sense is a US company that sells B2B marketing software. The report covers 1,139 buying journeys in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium, collected from 14 July to 12 August 2026. Each purchase was worth at least $25,000. Sweden has 110 responses, too few for figures of its own.¹

The search box has already changed sides

In May, Google put AI into the search box in every country where AI Mode is available.² Google says AI Mode is not the default and that the blue links stay.³ But the links now sit below the AI answer. When an AI Overview shows, the top result gets 58% fewer clicks.⁴ If you are not the source behind the answer, you get seen less and less, and the established authorities in your field take your place.

The shortlist is made before the first meeting

The shortlist is the handful of vendors a buyer compares seriously. 73% of the vendors buyers evaluate are on it from day one, and the eventual winner is there from the start 92% of the time. 88% have ranked the vendors before they talk to a salesperson.¹ An AI answer that names you, or leaves you out, shapes a list that is mostly finished before you know the deal exists.

Only 11%. Cars started small too.

Laughing at AI tools today is like the rider who laughed at the first cars. They were few, loud and broke down by the roadside. A few decades later the horses were in the stable. And 11% is not even the right number.

The work is the same for both channels. An AI tool that answers a question takes its material from web pages, often the vendor's own, and 38% of buyers follow vendors through their websites.¹ Clear pages with the facts a buyer needs, structured data and text that works without JavaScript help in both cases.

Buyer intelligence moves into the product

Among the purchases in the survey, 85% of software and 84% of services had AI features.¹ Gartner expects AI agents to intermediate more than $15 trillion of B2B spending by 2028.⁵ Our view: buyer intelligence used to be a separate tool you bought on top. Now it is becoming part of the product and of how the purchase happens. Sellers then need facts an AI can read, and the best place for them is their own website.