B2B buyers want to serve themselves. They still want a person to check the answer.

Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers in August and September 2025 and published the results in May 2026. Three of its numbers explain what a business buyer now expects from an online store. Read together, they point to a store that lets buyers work alone and keeps a person within reach.

Buyers start alone, on your store

Sixty-seven percent of the buyers said they prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 70% prefer one that is completely digital and self-service. Forty-five percent had used generative AI to gather information on vendors or products during a recent purchase.

For a wholesale store, this means the first visit is often a quiet one. The buyer reads your product pages, checks the price and compares you with two other suppliers, perhaps with an AI assistant open beside the tab. Nobody on your side sees it happen.

Then they look for a person

The same survey found that 69% of buyers turn to a sales rep to validate what AI told them. Gartner's release says reps remain the most important source when buyers are identifying a preferred supplier and finalizing the purchase.

Buyers did not say the rep is always right. They said the rep is the person who can confirm. In the figures CX Today reported, buyers were 39 points more likely to say a rep understood their needs and 32 points more likely to say a rep made them feel confident, compared with AI.

A store that only offers self-service leaves that second step to someone else. The buyer takes the AI's answer, still unsure, and either emails a competitor's rep or does not order.

Neither source is trusted blindly

Fifty-one percent of buyers said they had met misleading information from generative AI. Forty-nine percent said the same about sales reps. The gap is two points, so a buyer who has just read an AI summary of your product is already checking it against something.

What settles the doubt is a fact the buyer can see: your own page, your own price, a person who names the same figure. The fastest way to supply it is a short answer from someone who knows the product, given while the buyer is still on the page.

Three things to add this month

First, put the details an AI summary tends to get wrong on the page itself: minimum order quantities, lead times, case sizes, compatibility. Our post on what a rep knows that your store does not lists where those gaps usually sit.

Second, add a visible way to reach a person on the pages where a buyer is checking something, not only on a contact page. A short live conversation beside the product is the digital version of the call a buyer makes to confirm.

Third, read the questions people ask. If the same one arrives every week, that is a gap in the page, and a person can close it in a morning. Gartner's numbers do not say reps are going away. They say buyers have moved the rep to the end of the process, where one clear answer decides the order.