Why B2B Marketing Budgets Are Shifting Toward AI-Friendly Channels A new survey from Forrester signals that B2B brand and communications teams are rethinking where they spend money, which roles they hire for, and which programs they prioritize. The driver: buyers are increasingly using AI-powered tools and answer engines to discover, evaluate, and shortlist vendors before ever talking to a salesperson. According to Forrester’s 2026 Brand and Communications Survey, budget growth is concentrating in three areas: website and digital programs, influencer relations, and social media. At the same time, creative services and content production roles face higher expectations for cuts than in prior years, even as overall headcount remains relatively stable. For small and mid-sized businesses, the headline matters less than the underlying question: if buyers are finding answers through AI-generated summaries instead of Google results pages, does your brand show up in those answers? And if not, what can you realistically do about it with a lean team and a finite budget? ## How AI-Powered Discovery Is Reshaping the B2B Buying Journey The shift Forrester describes is not theoretical. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot are already changing how knowledge workers research vendors and products. Instead of clicking through ten search results, a growing number of buyers ask an AI tool to summarize options, compare features, or explain tradeoffs. The AI synthesizes information from across the web and returns a direct answer, often without the buyer ever visiting your website. This changes the economics of brand visibility. In a traditional search environment, ranking on page one of Google was the goal. In an AI-driven discovery environment, the goal is different: your expertise, case studies, and positioning need to appear in the training data and real-time sources that answer engines draw from. That means the content itself, not just its SEO ranking, determines whether your brand gets mentioned. This pattern has historical precedent. When social media rose as a discovery channel between 2008 and 2015, marketing teams that shifted budget from traditional PR and advertising to social engagement gained visibility, while those that waited lost relevance. The mobile-first web redesign wave of 2013 to 2018 followed a similar arc: companies that rebuilt for mobile early avoided the double-rework costs that hit late movers. In both cases, the shift felt optional at first and became mandatory within a few years. ## Where B2B Brands Are Increasing and Cutting Investment Forrester’s survey identifies a clear reallocation pattern, though the blog post notably omits the specific percentages and sample sizes that would make those findings fully actionable. Growing areas: - Website and digital programs. This is the top area for both budget increases and hiring. The logic is straightforward: your website is the primary source that AI tools crawl and cite. Structured, authoritative, regularly updated content gives answer engines something to work with.

• Influencer relations. In B2B, “influencers” typically means analysts, subject-matter experts, and respected practitioners, not social media celebrities. These voices shape the information ecosystem that AI tools draw from.
• Social media. Platforms like LinkedIn remain primary channels for B2B engagement, and AI tools increasingly incorporate social signals and content into their synthesis. Declining areas: - Creative services and content production. Generative AI tools can now produce first-draft copy, design assets, and video at a fraction of the cost and time. Teams are expecting to need fewer dedicated production roles, though this raises real questions about quality control and brand consistency. Stable overall headcount: Forrester reports that most brand and communications leaders are not planning significant headcount changes. The shift is compositional: fewer content producers, more digital strategists and influencer relationship managers. This is consistent with what many organizations experienced during the social media transition, when community managers replaced some traditional PR roles without changing total team size. ## What the Forrester Survey Does and Does Not Prove It is worth being direct about the limits of this data. Forrester is a credible analyst firm with deep research capabilities, but the blog post that surfaced these findings provides no statistics, no percentages, no sample sizes, and no methodology. Claims like “strongest program growth” and “higher expectations for reductions” are directional but unquantified. This matters because budget reallocation decisions require more than directional trends. A marketing leader needs to know whether “strongest growth” means 5% increases or 30% increases, and whether those numbers apply to companies of their size and in their industry. Additionally, Forrester’s recommendation that agencies “help teams operationalize AI, redesign workflows, improve measurement, and accelerate adoption” serves the firm’s own consulting interests. That does not make the recommendation wrong, but it is worth noting the alignment between the finding and the business model. The survey also treats B2B as a single category. A SaaS company selling to developers faces a very different discovery environment than a manufacturing supplier selling to procurement teams. The degree to which AI-powered discovery affects your specific market depends on your buyers’ actual behavior, not on aggregate survey trends. ## Why Some B2B Sectors May Not Need to Shift Yet The case for reallocation is strongest in technology, software, and professional services, where buyers are digitally sophisticated and already experimenting with AI research tools. In other sectors, the shift may be slower or less relevant. Relationship-driven industries like commercial real estate, industrial equipment, and specialized consulting still depend heavily on personal networks, trade shows, and direct outreach. AI-powered discovery plays a smaller role when the buying process involves months of technical evaluation and face-to-face negotiation. Regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and government contracting have procurement processes that are unlikely to be displaced by AI summaries anytime soon. Buyers in these sectors often require specific certifications, compliance documentation, and formal RFP responses that answer engines cannot evaluate. Early-stage markets where the product category itself is new present a different challenge: there may not be enough published content for AI tools to synthesize meaningful answers. In these cases, traditional thought leadership and analyst engagement may remain more effective. The risk of over-rotating toward AI-optimized content is real. If you cut your creative and content production team to fund digital optimization, you may lose the quality and originality that made your brand worth citing in the first place. ## How AI-Driven Discovery Affects Small and Mid-Sized Businesses The Forrester survey focuses on enterprise brand and communications teams with dedicated budgets and specialized roles. Most SMBs operate differently: one person handles marketing, PR, social media, and the website. Budget reallocation is less about moving dollars between programs and more about choosing which of several urgent priorities gets attention this quarter. That said, the underlying dynamic applies regardless of company size. If your buyers are using AI tools to research solutions, and your company does not appear in those AI-generated answers, you have a visibility problem that traditional SEO alone will not fix. The good news for SMBs is that AI-driven discovery rewards depth over volume. A well-structured website with clear, authoritative content about your specific expertise can outperform a larger competitor’s sprawling content library. Answer engines favor content that directly and credibly answers specific questions, which plays to the strengths of specialized businesses. The challenge is that SMBs often lack the time and expertise to optimize for this new discovery layer. And the advice to “hire digital strategists” or “invest in influencer relations” assumes budget flexibility that many small businesses simply do not have. ## Practical Steps for SMBs Responding to AI-Driven Buyer Discovery Start with what you control: your website. - Audit your site for clear, specific answers to the questions your buyers actually ask. FAQ pages, detailed service descriptions, and case studies with measurable outcomes are the content types that answer engines pull from most reliably.
• Use structured data (schema markup) to help AI tools understand what your pages are about. This is a one-time technical investment that most web platforms support.
• Publish regularly, even if modestly. A quarterly case study or a monthly technical post signals ongoing expertise. Build authority through the channels AI tools trust. - Contribute to industry publications, podcasts, and forums where your expertise is relevant. These third-party mentions create the citation network that AI tools use to validate authority.
• Engage with analysts and subject-matter experts in your space, even informally. A mention in an analyst’s LinkedIn post or newsletter can carry weight in AI-generated summaries. Use generative AI to produce, not replace, quality content. - Use AI writing tools to accelerate drafts, but invest human time in editing for accuracy, voice, and originality. The companies cutting content production roles entirely may find their output becomes generic and undifferentiated.
• Test how AI tools respond to queries about your product category. Search your company name and your key terms in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. If you are absent from the results, that tells you where to focus. Do not over-invest based on incomplete data. - The Forrester survey provides direction, not a roadmap. Before reallocating budget, talk to your actual customers about how they found you and what tools they used during their evaluation. Your buyers’ behavior matters more than industry averages. ## The Shift Is Real, but the Timeline Is Yours to Manage AI is changing how B2B buyers discover and evaluate vendors. The Forrester survey confirms that enterprise brand teams are already adjusting their budgets and talent strategies in response. For SMBs, the core insight is sound: your brand’s presence in AI-generated answers matters, and it will matter more over time. But the pace and scale of your response should match your specific market, your buyers’ actual behavior, and your available resources. The companies that will benefit most are not necessarily those that move fastest. They are the ones that invest deliberately: strengthening their digital foundations, building genuine authority in their domain, and making their expertise findable in whatever channel buyers use next.