AI is transforming how marketing and sales teams work, but an equally important shift is happening on the buyer side.
Buying journeys are becoming longer and less linear as buyers favor anonymous, self-directed research. The shift is weakening traditional lead-based funnels, and AI is accelerating the entire process by reshaping how buyers search, evaluate options and make purchase decisions.
Those are among the top challenges to business growth identified in Walker Sands’ latest report, The 2026 B2B Growth Maturity Assessment. The research surveyed U.S.-based senior leaders across sales, marketing, growth and other executive functions at enterprise B2B organizations generating more than $100 million in annual revenue.
In many ways, paid media sits at the intersection of AI and changing buyer behaviors.
Walker Sands research shows what this evolution looks like in practice — from emerging GenAI media opportunities and visibility measurement to attribution, audience intelligence and campaign optimization.
Key Takeaways
- AI is accelerating shifts on both sides of B2B growth. Buyer journeys are becoming more anonymous and AI-influenced, while growth teams are using AI to make faster, better-informed decisions.
- Paid media is taking on a bigger role in the buyer journey. The investment can help brands shape discovery and maintain relevance before buyers are ready to engage.
- GenAI is creating a new testing ground for paid media services. Teams have an opportunity to test AI-native placements early, but need clear hypotheses about audience, message and channel fit.
- Measurement and attribution must catch up with buyer behavior. Growth teams need clearer ways to connect paid media visibility and influence to pipeline and revenue.
- AI maturity expands paid media’s role to include market intelligence. Audience, creative and performance signals should inform decisions across marketing, sales and the full growth engine.
Paid Media Bridges the New Buyer Journey and AI Maturity
GenAI gives B2B buyers more ways to research vendors, compare options and shape their preferences before they ever identify themselves. For mid-market and enterprise leaders, that creates a serious challenge: Many go-to-market (GTM) strategies were built for a buying process that no longer reflects how buyers make decisions today.
Growth strategies must now address AI from both directions: how the technology is changing buyer behaviors and how teams can use it to improve performance. That means building visibility and relevance across more fragmented, AI-influenced buying journeys and applying AI internally to improve the speed and quality of GTM decision-making.
Paid media offers a bridge between these disciplines.
Externally, paid media can help brands shape discovery earlier, reinforce key messages across touchpoints and remain visible before buyers are ready to engage. Internally, AI can improve how paid media teams research audiences, test creative, interpret performance signals and allocate investment.
Together, these shifts are expanding paid media’s role in mature B2B enterprise growth engines. Paid media is both a way to influence an increasingly self-directed buyer journey and a critical source of market intelligence.
How AI Is Changing Paid Media’s Role in the Buyer Journey
The first dimension of AI maturity for paid media is adapting to a buyer journey shaped by GenAI.
Paid media already plays a role beyond lead capture. The channel can help brands maintain visibility across longer research cycles, test which messages resonate with priority audiences and generate behavioral signals that inform the broader growth strategy.
That role becomes even more important as buyers conduct more of their research independently. Rather than waiting for a form fill to signal interest, B2B teams need new ways to understand and influence the discovery process that’s happening before buyers fully identify themselves.
Walker Sands research points to three areas where that evolution is already taking shape.
1. Interest in AI-native media offers an early testing window
The 2026 B2B Growth Maturity Assessment found that 97% of B2B leaders are somewhat or very willing to experiment with advertising or sponsored opportunities inside GenAI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
That level of interest suggests AI-native media is moving from initial curiosity to a legitimate consideration within paid media roadmaps.
But being early shouldn’t mean experimenting without a thesis. Paid media teams should determine what they want to learn about audiences, messages and buyer behaviors before adding GenAI placements to their media mix. The goal is to understand where these AI environments best fit within a broader strategic communications program, not to adopt a new format simply because it exists.
The distinction matters as buying journeys become less linear. GenAI platforms introduce another discovery surface where buyers can research and evaluate brands. Paid media teams should evaluate how they can coordinate these new touchpoints alongside existing search, social and other channels to maintain a consistent narrative and experience.
2. Visibility measurement should come before significant investment
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of enterprise B2B leaders are already using a tool or process to measure brand visibility in GenAI platforms.
The use of tools like Profound, Meltwater and Peec AI signals that organizations are moving beyond awareness of AI visibility toward systematic measurement.
Establishing a baseline for how a brand appears in AI discovery is especially important before increasing investment in GenAI paid media opportunities. Lacking that baseline, teams risk entering a new media environment without a credible way to prove impact on business outcomes.
As anonymous, self-directed research pushes more of the buyer journey upstream, paid media measurement also needs to account for influence that occurs before a form fill or traditional lead event. Visibility alone can’t prove impact, but understanding where and how a brand appears in the first place is an important step toward measuring paid media’s overall influence.
3. Attribution remains a major growth gap
Only 3% of B2B enterprises can attribute GenAI-driven sources to closed-won opportunities, while 14% don’t track the relationship between GenAI experiences and revenue at all. Many more organizations lose visibility at the MQL (33%) and SQL (21%) stages.
Paid media generates signals about audiences, messages and behaviors long before a deal reaches closed-won. Those signals can help content teams understand which narratives are gaining traction, support marketing in refining follow-ups and give sales reps additional context about how priority audiences are engaging.
But influence is not the same as attribution.
Paid media teams need measurement models that distinguish visibility from influence and influence from sourced pipeline, all while showing whether priority audiences and accounts are progressing toward revenue. Otherwise, emerging channels may be evaluated through shallow engagement metrics or legacy attribution models that weren’t designed for how buyers now move through the market.
How AI Strengthens Paid Media Performance
Adapting paid media to an AI-shaped buyer journey is only one side of the maturity equation. The other requires using AI within the channel itself to improve how teams across the organization learn, make decisions and optimize performance.
Because paid media operates on a tight feedback loop, it can shorten the cycle from signal to decision, testing and learning. As buyer research becomes more anonymous, purchase journeys less linear and lead-based funnels less reliable, that faster intelligence can play a meaningful role in shaping an organization’s growth strategy.
For paid media programs, the benefit of layering AI capabilities into human workflows is clearest in three areas:
Audience research and segmentation
Paid media teams can use AI to quickly synthesize data from CRM systems, campaign performance, social engagement and market signals. The resulting insights can reveal meaningful differences in buyer behavior, intent and engagement — information that helps teams sharpen targeting and messaging.
While AI can generate audience segments more quickly, marketers still need to determine whether those differences are meaningful enough to warrant a change in media strategy.
Some behavioral patterns may justify differentiated messaging or a shift in investment. Others may be statistically interesting but strategically irrelevant. AI can surface the pattern; human judgment determines what deserves action.
Creative development and testing
AI reduces the time it takes to develop messaging and creative variations across audience personas and buying stages. Without a clear testing hypothesis, however, faster production can create noise without insight.
A strong testing framework defines what the team wants to learn, isolates meaningful variables and connects performance back to strategic business goals. AI can accelerate the iteration cycle, but human judgment still determines which messages are on-brand, which findings matter and what those findings mean for the broader GTM strategy.
More creative alone isn’t the goal. The benefit is faster learning about which narratives, offers and value propositions drive action among priority audiences.
Optimization and performance analysis
AI-powered analysis can help teams spot performance shifts in real time rather than waiting until a campaign ends.
Earlier detection is especially useful for enterprise teams managing large budgets, where identifying inefficient spend sooner can reduce GTM waste and improve allocation decisions. Mid-market teams, on the other hand, can focus investment on the audiences, messages and placements with the strongest performance signals.
In both cases, the goal is better decision-making within clear strategic and brand guardrails.
The value extends beyond the paid media program itself. When performance insights inform landing page experiences, nurture content, sales follow-ups and more, paid media becomes part of a coordinated system for building buyer confidence rather than an isolated acquisition channel.
Build AI Maturity on Both Sides of Paid Media Programs
AI maturity in paid media requires progress on dual fronts.
Externally, teams must adapt where and how their brands show up as buyers spend more of the journey researching independently and through GenAI-powered experiences. Internally, they must apply AI in ways that improve audience understanding, creative learning, optimization and investment decisions — and share those insights with other leaders tasked with growing the business.
Audience insights, creative performance and media signals should inform marketing, sales and executive leadership strategies, and those functions should feed better information back into paid media programs. Over time, that feedback loop helps teams build a more responsive growth system based on how buyers actually behave.
That’s when AI stops being another layer of automation and starts strengthening paid media’s role across the entire growth engine.
If you’re ready to connect AI and paid media more effectively, reach out.
And for more channel insights like these, explore our related perspectives on B2B content maturity in the AI era and influencer marketing trends.
