In Episode 2 of The AI Shortlist, Mark Hillary and Matt Bowman explore how the B2B buyer journey has moved into places that sales and marketing teams can no longer easily see.

Buyers are increasingly using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to research problems, compare suppliers, explore pricing, assess risk, and even build internal business cases — often long before they visit a company website or speak to a salesperson.

Mark and Matt discuss why traditional marketing dashboards may now capture only the final stages of the buying process, how AI is influencing which companies make it onto shortlists, and why executives need to rethink where the buyer journey actually begins.

The key question is simple: if buyers are researching your company before you know they exist, what are they learning about you?

What are the AI tools saying about your company?

Your clients and prospects may already be asking AI about your company, but you have no idea what answer they are getting.

Buyers are not just asking AI 'who are the top companies in category X.' Far more often, they are asking AI how to solve a specific problem such as reducing agent attrition, evaluating insourcing versus outsourcing, or avoiding hidden costs in a contract.

When a company has published clear, specific, public evidence about that exact problem, AI can make available that company's name, language, or even a quote inside its answer. That is a backdoor introduction: the buyer never searched for the company by name, but the company still earned a place in the answer.

The fear every executive should now feel is not just 'is my company invisible.' It is 'my prospects are already getting answers to their real problems, and I have no idea whether my company is part of those answers, or absent from them entirely.’

Hosts

Mark Hillary

https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhillary/

Matt Bowman

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewabowmanmba/