Machine buying
B2B purchasing done by software agents on the buyer's side. Around a third of it by 2030, and the transactional layer of selling with it.
Merkle forecasts that around a third of all B2B commerce will be machine-to-machine by 2030. Gartner expects AI agents to intermediate more than fifteen trillion dollars of B2B spending by 2028, and to outnumber the human sellers they deal with ten to one. Whichever number you believe, the direction is the same: the transactional layer of B2B is being automated, on the buyer’s side, whether or not the supplier has an opinion about it.
What survives is the part of selling a procurement agent cannot do: understanding a customer’s business well enough to propose something they had not thought to ask for. That is the third of the five pressures, and the strongest argument in the book for putting the customer value proposition, rather than the price list, at the centre of the account.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapters 1, 2 and 4.
Related terms
The five pressures
Volatility, changing buyers, machine buying, shorter product lives and geopolitics, arriving together. Suppliers have to trim their sails more often.
The dark funnel
The research, comparison and elimination that decides your fate now happens inside AI conversations you cannot see.
AI agent
Software that takes a goal, plans the steps, uses tools and keeps working until it is done. On the buyer's side it is the procurement of the future; on yours it maintains the plan.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.