RevOps News

Sales software company Apollo unveiled a set of artificial intelligence products designed to move more of a revenue team’s daily work onto one platform.

The launch targets tool sprawl, a problem Apollo says arises when organizations add separate vendors for prospecting, enrichment and outreach.

Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, an AI customer research platform that automates interviews and analysis. The transaction is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

Salesforce did not disclose financial terms.

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research and human simulation platform. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, subject to customary closing conditions, according to [Salesforce News](https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-listen-labs/).

Salesforce announced the agreement to buy Listen Labs to expand its customer and user...

Varicent introduced a new architecture for revenue performance. The architecture centers on Foresight, a multidimensional modeling engine built for revenue planning.

Foresight brings capacity, territories, quotas, incentives, market opportunity, and other planning variables into an integrated model. Revenue teams can change assumptions, recalculate plans, and see effects across the organization without rebuilding models from scratch.

Quantum Heaps appointed Roman Romancini as President, Latin America. He will lead the company commercial operations and expansion across the region and will report to Harsh Panwar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

The appointment comes weeks after Quantum Heaps named a global Chief Marketing Officer and Presidents for North America and EMEA.

Pipedrive Inc. announced the general availability of Nova, an artificial intelligence tool that briefs salespeople before calls and maintains records.

The announcement came on September 16 2026 according to [SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/09/16/pipedrive-launches-nova-ai-assistant-to-reduce-crm-admin-work-and-keep-data-current/).

Nova supplies salespeople with deal history, emails and past conversations already in Pipedrive before calls.

Hyperbound announced that it has been included as an Example Vendor in the 2026 Gartner Market Overview for B2B Sales AI Role-Play Applications. The report was published August 7, 2026.

Hyperbound, an AI-powered platform for revenue teams, received the recognition according to [MarTech Cube](https://www.martechcube.com/hyperbound-named-vendor-in-2026-gartner-b2b-sales-ai-report/).

Salesforce Inc. previewed two offerings to help customers build and manage artificial intelligence agents. The company introduced Enterprise AI Harness and AI Control Plane according to [SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/09/10/salesforce-introduces-enterprise-ai-harness-ai-control-plane/).

Enterprise AI Harness is a collection of technologies designed to improve the reliability and security of customers' AI agents.

A new global report from Validity finds that marketing leadership has advanced AI adoption faster than improvements to CRM data quality. The State of CRM Data Management in 2026 report surveyed 500 B2B and B2C marketing professionals across the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.

Nearly 78% of C-suite and 92% of SVP/VP respondents said they have acted on an AI recommendation they later suspected was wrong because of bad underlying data.

Heinz Marketing published its weekly selection of B2B sales and marketing articles. The post highlights findings on AI adoption, lead metrics, and product development priorities.

According to Heinz Marketing, a Gartner survey found that only 22% of organizations have scaled AI across multiple business units. At the same time, 85% of leaders plan to increase spending on AI this year.

The distinction between RevOps and Sales Ops matters more than most organizations realize because the two functions are related yet not the same job. Sales Ops makes the sales team more efficient. RevOps aligns sales, marketing, and customer success to grow revenue across the customer lifecycle, according to [HubSpot Sales Blog](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/revops-vs-sales-ops).

Revenue operations governs revenue processes across the entire go-to-market organization.

Sales reps spend 10–15 minutes after each call logging notes, updating deal stages, and setting follow-up tasks. Sales reps spend roughly 25% of their workweek on manual CRM data entry alone, according to [HubSpot Sales Blog](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/ai-reduce-manual-crm-tasks-hubspot).

Go-to-market planning sessions this year carry the same mandate of more AI deployed faster across lead scoring, outreach drafting, account prioritization, pipeline routing, and autonomous agent decisions. According to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/demanding-views/faster-wrong-is-still-wrong/54199/), the speed of these implementations is measurable while the underlying direction remains uncertain.

Teams had already identified that topical and probabilistic data only...

An analysis of 953 real-world martech stacks found that revenue outperformers align martech functionality and maturity to specific industry and business contexts rather than pursuing maximum features or maturity across the board.

Across all seven industries examined, outperformers used broader marketing automation platform functionality than lower performers.

Companies invest in market research, third-party intent data and prospect intelligence tools to refine messaging and improve targeting. Many overlook the customers they already have as a source of insight, according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/demanding-views/your-best-prospect-data-comes-from-customers-you-already-have/54062/).

Over 70% of customer revenue leaders say their revenue comes primarily from existing customers.

HubSpot Sales Blog released a buyer's framework explaining RevOps tools that centralize go-to-market data, automate team handoffs, and provide pipeline visibility. The guide addresses common GTM issues where data sits in disconnected systems, dashboards show conflicting information, and reps spend hours on manual record cleaning.

RevOps tools operate through three layers.

New research from Walker Sands released Aug. 25 finds that while nearly all B2B leaders say their organization clearly understands what modern B2B marketing looks like, 95% still say their current marketing approach needs significant evolution to compete with the most advanced B2B and B2C brands.

The 2026 B2B Growth Maturity Assessment is based on a survey of 200 U.S.-based senior marketing, sales, growth and business leaders at B2B organizations generating more than $100 million in annual...

Seismic completed its merger with Highspot last week and now operates under the Seismic name as the leading company in go-to-market performance. The combined entity serves 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users worldwide, including Allianz Trade, Expedia Group, IBM, Invesco, Oracle, Royal London Asset Management, Thomson Reuters, and Uber.

Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff stated that AI has catalyzed the industry by shifting enablement from preparing sellers to sitting side by side with them through...

Kameleoon, a leading experimentation and CRO platform, implemented PartnerBridge to scale its partnerships function without adding headcount. The company operates a lean partnerships team and previously handled partner marketing across the broader organization.

Partner evaluation at Kameleoon relied on instinct, fragmented tools, and time-consuming research. As the ecosystem expanded, the cost of incorrect partner selections increased.

At one financial infrastructure company, the top 10 token users were almost entirely non-technical staff including marketers, operations folks, and customer support. These individuals generated the most AI knowledge through daily work. Useful AI practices often get trapped in personal docs and Slack threads.

At a recent roundtable, one participant described a nine-page Google Doc prompt for developing creative briefs that she pasted at the start of every session.

Enterprises apply complex AI systems to tasks that do not need them, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/how-to-stop-overpaying-for-ai-complexity/). The initial promises of what an AI system can do often do not account for long-term costs, the human oversight required, and the total cost of ownership.

A small number of moments decide whether a browser becomes a customer, a customer stays long term, or a customer leaves, according to MarTech.

Most journey maps assign equal attention to every touchpoint while only a handful of events carry the risk and opportunity.

A critical moment has a signature where opportunity and risk spike at the same event. Years ago finding these moments required data scientists and custom propensity models.

SaaStr published guidance on ACV sizes at which B2B companies typically add dedicated account managers.

Below $8K-$10K ACV, companies cannot afford dedicated account managers, according to SaaStr. They must instead systematize onboarding and support through self-serve options plus a lean support team. The unit economics do not support humans performing 30 or more days of embedded work per customer. In early stages, companies should still prioritize making early customers successful.

Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index report found that the average organization runs 305 applications across the business, with many going unmanaged or underused. When these tools do not connect, leads go cold, reps pursue already-closed accounts, and reports fail to align, according to [HubSpot Sales Blog](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/revops-software).

[Revenue Operations software](/blog/revenue-operations-software/) is a centralized platform that integrates data, processes, and tools across...

A survey of 101 product marketers at mid-market and enterprise companies found that 21% now cite ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini as a source of competitive intelligence while only 14% name a dedicated CI tool, according to MarTech.

Reddit was cited by 23% of respondents. One product marketer stated they had not seen any CI tools worth the investment and could replicate most of what Crayon and Klue deliver with an agent in Claude.

Founders at B2B AI startups report hiring executives who worked at good companies once or twice yet never performed the core work of the roles. According to [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/beware-the-mediocre-recycled-the-zombie-executives-of-b2b-ai/), these hires possess the right LinkedIn logos and speak fluently about PLG, enterprise motions and AI-native go-to-market but have not built AI workflows themselves.

B2B companies increasingly rely on post-sale systems to turn acquired customers into sources of retention, expansion, and advocacy, according to MarTech. Every customer carries a cost, a revenue expectation, and an opportunity to expand. When value realization moves slowly or remains fragmented, acquisition spending becomes harder to recover.

The post-sale experience functions as a shared commercial system that connects marketing, sales, product, service, customer success, and revenue...

The marketing-to-sales handoff determines whether signal intelligence contributes to revenue. Every delay, routing error, or missing piece of context reduces the value of the insight marketing worked to uncover, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/the-marketing-to-sales-handoff-is-where-revenue-leaks/).

A fast, context-rich handoff from marketing to sales requires visibility across opportunities, product lines, and account relationships.

Backstory completed an account tiering analysis covering 141 accounts in three to four days. Haya Kamola, who leads customer success at Backstory, presented the project at SaaStr AI Day. The same exercise previously required five teams working a full quarter. The board requested the tiering framework with a short turnaround.

Kamola first gathered input from account teams and senior leadership to describe specific customers that stood out.

Many CMOs receive the directive from their board or CFO to hit the pipeline number while cutting the budget, according to Heinz Marketing. AI is introduced in these conversations as the immediate answer to the task of doing more with less. The source states that AI writing first drafts or scoring and routing leads is presented as a way to reduce the need for writers or operations staff.

Heinz Marketing explains that treating "do more with less" as a strategy leads teams to burnout or reliance...

New research indicates software vendors collect more customer data than required for their services and incorporate it into commercial products sold to competitors, according to MarTech.

Clark Barron, founder of Blackout, examined browser code, JavaScript, network traffic, and application behavior across more than 700 vendors. His analysis identified a defeat device in one vendor's source code that performed de-anonymization of website visitors.

James McArthur, VP of Product Advocacy at Nue.io, conducted a live demo of an AI agent at SaaStr AI Day this week on conference Wi-Fi. The session showed the agent building a guided selling playbook from plain English instructions and validating it against real SKUs and tier limits, according to SaaStr.

The demo covered a typical B2B revenue setup where reps spend days on quotes and deal desk teams rebuild closed deals by hand.

B2B companies falling behind on AI lack infrastructure rather than advanced technologies, according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/demanding-views/from-pilot-projects-to-progress-making-ai-innovation-stick-across-the-organization/53831/).

Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that 70% of CMOs consider becoming an AI leader a critical goal for this year. Only 30% report mature AI readiness capabilities. Marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue and remain flat.

Many marketing leaders respond by changing the org chart through new structures, titles, or team consolidations.

McKinsey’s State of AI research shows roughly 6% of organizations qualify as AI high performers because they attribute at least 5% of EBIT impact to AI...

Jason Lemkin stated that B2B startups should collect at least 100% of MRR in cash each month, with an ideal target of 110%. According to SaaStr, falling below 100% signals a finance process failure and indicates runway may be shorter than expected. The advice applies until companies establish a strong VP of Finance or CFO role.

Most B2B startups struggle to collect cash outside payment gateways, with performance often declining as they move upmarket.

A sales content management platform centralizes sales-approved content in a single source of truth. It makes it easier for revenue teams to find, share, and track materials that move deals forward. More than half of sales leaders report using sales enablement content, and 79% say those materials are essential for closing, according to [HubSpot Sales Blog](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-content-management-platform).

A sales content management platform organizes, distributes, governs, and...

Zoom has expanded Revenue Accelerator with AI-powered capabilities that support sellers before, during and after customer interactions through roleplay, live guidance and post-call intelligence. The updates include the general availability of Sales Assist, Ask ZRA, Sales Roleplay and its MCP Server.

The new Essentials and Premium offerings reflect growing demand for connected revenue intelligence that unifies conversation data, CRM context and coaching workflows.

Theorem research shows that manual errors and disconnected workflows in the pre-sales phase are slowing deal execution and introducing risk into advertising revenue operations, according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/pre-sales-phase-is-advertising-sales-most-overlooked-revenue-risk-theorem/53548/).

New research from Theorem found that 77% of organizations experience manual errors in pre-sales that disrupt advertising revenue execution.

Alta closed a $25 million Series A round led by IN Venture less than a year after launch. The funding supports expansion of the company's coordinated AI agent platform for revenue teams.

Alta reached a $15 million annual run rate with clients including Snowflake, Deel and Atlassian. The company hit its first million in revenue within months of commercializing and is on track for 800% revenue growth this year.

Brian Le, Global Sales Compensation Partner at Notion, scaled the company's sales compensation processes from 80 to over 400 employees. He previously worked at Salesforce and Carta. According to [Sales Hacker](https://gtmnow.com/gtm-198-sales-compensation-plan-blueprint-brian-le-notion/), Le identifies sales compensation as the operating system for go-to-market strategy.

Le's first priority at Notion was earning organizational trust by replacing manual spreadsheet-based commission processes.

In Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report, 87% of sales organizations said they now use some form of AI for prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, or drafting emails, with more than half using it specifically to prospect. Fifty-five percent of sales pros already use AI to prospect, and another 38% plan to.

[Customer acquisition cost](/tools/cac-calculator/) is rising across virtually every B2B category while deal volume, deal velocity and deal size show no corresponding improvement, according to MarTech. The source material states that spending more to acquire customers without gains in those outcomes points to a proof problem rather than market conditions.

The B2B go-to-market profession operates from the thesis that awareness plus information equals purchase intent.

Gong recently released Mission Big Dipper, a new agentic execution layer and expanded capabilities across the Gong Revenue AI Operating System. The release introduces the Gong Revenue Harness to govern, orchestrate, and connect AI agents across the full revenue cycle.

A customer who had used Adobe Marketo for nearly two decades and served as a reference account decided to churn after the vendor raised pricing at renewal with no new features and a more limited API.

The customer cited broken unsubscribe handling, daily API rate limits, a six-month history cap, and general hostility to agents as reasons for leaving. Three foundation models all indicated they would not send email through Marketo because they could write a better one themselves.

Aurasell has released Agent Builder, a platform capability that lets GTM operators design, orchestrate and run agentic workflows in natural language without writing code. The tool unifies structured and unstructured customer data from across the GTM stack and continuously captures cross-channel conversations.

Most GTM teams advancing AI initiatives operate on incomplete data spread across 15 or more disconnected tools.

SaaStr AI operates a portion of its go-to-market motion through custom agents rather than replacing its CRM. The company maintains Salesforce as the system of record for deals, contacts, sponsorships, registrations, and support tickets while agents handle most interactions.

SaaStr AI runs an AI SDR, a custom AI VP of Marketing named 10K, and QBee, an AI VP of Customer Success. The 10K agent consists of more than 14,000 lines of code across 74 files.

MarTech reports that as martech, adtech, and salestech blur into unified ecosystem platforms, enterprise architecture leaders must evaluate the trade-off between specialized features of best-of-breed point solutions and the reduced friction of a single consolidated suite.

Enterprise procurement teams often compare individual software subscription lines.

Vercel launched a lead qualification agent in August 2025 that reduced a 10-person SDR function to one full-time employee in the US plus 20 percent of one person covering Europe and APAC. The agent costs $5,000 per year in infrastructure and tokens and requires 20 percent of one engineer to maintain. According to SaaStr, the change delivered a reported 32x ROI by replacing 10 salaries with compute while running 24/7.

The lead agent began as 20 percent of a single engineer’s time.

On April 1, 2026, a new line item labeled inride – Trade Agent AI appeared in the Tier III co-op claim dropdown inside the Ford dealer portal. The entry treats an autonomous AI agent as a reimbursable marketing expense alongside billboard and radio placements.

Ford’s co-op program, older than the interstate highway system, had previously approved newspaper, television, internet, and digital retail expenses.

Seismic expanded its Aura Agents portfolio to support more revenue-team workflows across enablement, customer conversations and connected execution. The release includes nine new and enhanced agents that embed AI into daily work to address disconnected systems, manual reporting and inconsistent execution.

According to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/seismic-extends-aura-agents-across-gtm-workflows/53482/), Seismic has released the agents after a...

A vendor pitch centered on a migration roadmap that replaces an existing marketing automation platform with a new one and projects an 18-month timeline remains the dominant sales motion in martech. The 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey shows this approach diverging from buyer behavior.

Marketing automation held the most-replaced category for five straight years before falling from 31.1% to 19.4%. CRM replacements dropped to 9.7% from 22.1%, the lowest level recorded in the survey.

Siva Rajamani, CEO of Everstage, has reviewed 300+ enterprise compensation plans and states that 90% contain the same mistakes.

Sales compensation functions as the primary lever in go-to-market strategy rather than a back-office cost center. It serves as the connection between stated company intent and actual rep actions.

2X announced on June 10 the acquisition of Knownwell, an AIaaS platform specializing in agentic artificial intelligence engineering, commercial intelligence, and next-generation GTM systems. The transaction values the combined company at more than $400 million according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/2x-acquires-knownwell-to-build-the-first-gtm-human-agentic-services-company/53395/).

2X, a subscription-based B2B go-to-market services company,...

B2B revenue teams now deploy CRMs, marketing automation platforms, ABM tools, sales enablement software, and AI-powered forecasting engines, yet many organizations report that results lag behind the level of investment. The CRM remains half-populated, automation sequences run without monitoring, and AI features stay toggled off since implementation, according to Demand Gen Report.

Research from Netguru found that companies lose 20 to 30% of annual revenue due to disconnected data across CRM,...

2X appointed Emily Atkinson as Chief Client Officer and Drew Murphy as Chief Financial and Operating Officer. The subscription-based go-to-market services partner for B2B organizations made the announcements to expand its executive team.

Atkinson will lead the global client organization and unify strategy, execution, technology and AI as one GTM engine.

Clozd’s Dani Talbot stated at B2BMX 2026 that revenue teams miss critical buyer signals when relying on internal assumptions. She presented a five-step process to turn customer feedback into business action and positioned AI-powered interviews as a scalable method to gather deeper buyer insight for sales, marketing, and product teams, according to [Demand Gen...

B2B retention has traditionally been measured at the moment of renewal, yet renewal decisions are shaped long before a contract comes due as organizations face tighter budget scrutiny and expanding software portfolios.

According to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/demanding-views/the-demand-gen-engine-why-b2b-retention-now-depends-on-value-realization/53001/), customers must now justify every vendor relationship in terms of measurable outcomes.

The Gainsight Customer...

According to two new surveys released by Gartner at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, B2B buyers now use an average of seven information sources during purchases, with 45% employing GenAI primarily to gather vendor and product information. Buyers reported a strong preference for low-friction experiences, as 67% favor a sales-rep-free process and 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience.

The Gartner survey of B2B buyers found that 69% prefer to validate...

Xactly launched its Fleet of Agents and Intelligence Studio to expand the Xactly Intelligent Revenue Platform.

The Fleet of Agents includes builder agents, workflow agents, and optimization agents. Early examples are the Incent Plan Configuration Agent and the Dispute Management Agent.

Revenue teams have added AI copilots, summaries, prompts, and workflow add-ons that accelerate pockets of the sales process. Gartner research found that 39% of chief sales officers say AI-focused sales initiatives have increased the percentage of sellers who meet or exceed quotas.

SalesboxAI launched a unified, AI-native GTM platform that uses copilots and specialized agents to coordinate marketing, SDR, and sales work from first signal to closed deal. The platform combines real-time intent signals, buying group intelligence, multi-channel outreach, and CRM-connected pipeline management to reduce tool sprawl and improve conversion speed, according to [Demand Gen...

A new Gartner report finds that AI tools deliver measurable efficiency gains for sales organizations, saving sellers an average of 4.8 hours per week. The survey of 210 CSOs and senior sales leaders, conducted in the first two months of the year, shows that 72 percent of sales organizations report low reinvestment of those time savings back into high-value sales activities.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) must use strategic solutions backed by reliable data to show the impact of marketing decisions on an organization's long-term financial strength and shareholder value, according to MarTech. The board's emphasis on metrics connected to revenue and profitability means CMOs should avoid discussions centered on vanity metrics like increases in social followers or website page views, which do not link to financial outcomes.

Greenfire Strategy, a Cleveland-based B2B marketing and revenue growth consultancy, has acquired 21b Consulting, according to Demand Gen Report. The acquisition integrates 21b's expertise in HubSpot implementation and revenue operations with Greenfire's brand, content, and demand generation capabilities to strengthen growth strategies for mid-market companies.

The move brings together two HubSpot-native teams, allowing Greenfire to deliver a more complete path from strategy to execution for...

In a recent episode of Conversation with MarTech, Naman Khan, who serves as CMO at Reevo, discusses the growing shift from fragmented best-of-breed tech stacks to unified, AI-native operating systems within revenue teams. Khan, having previously worked for Salesforce and Dropbox, highlights how these stacks impose an integration tax due to brittle APIs that result in data loss and inefficient sales processes, according to...

Artificial intelligence now dominates conversations in B2B sales, with every conference panel, board meeting, and vendor pitch questioning how quickly it can accelerate growth, according to Demand Gen Report. However, behind this excitement, AI is not fixing most sales organizations and instead exposes weaknesses that already existed, as many leaders fail to address foundational issues.

Many AI decisions in B2B sales are reactive rather than strategic, with companies rushing to deploy tools...

Organizations have long treated enterprise content as a storage issue, organizing documents across shared drives, PDFs, presentations, and internal systems, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/you-could-already-have-the-data-ai-needs-to-deliver-value/).

The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) standard is positioned to unify fragmented data in Account-Based Marketing (ABM), enabling coordinated experiences across tools, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/how-osi-could-finally-fix-abms-biggest-data-problem/).

Marketing campaigns involve platforms, channels, and data flows, which can lead to alignment issues if not managed properly, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/moving-beyond-silos-to-align-complex-customer-journeys/). Maintaining a broader operational perspective improves speed to market, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction, as martech practitioners work across organizational and technical boundaries to navigate systems, teams, and processes in silos.

In multi-channel journey...

Anthropic has crossed a $30 billion revenue run rate amid widespread deployment of AI agents in core workflows, but 82% of companies' CIOs admit they cannot govern these agents' actions, turning potential gains into liabilities. This situation highlights an unpriced liability operating at production speed, as described in the concept of the Shadow Ledger, a financial register that accumulates from AI agents making commitments without authority, contradicting outputs, or producing unexplained...

Twilio announced a new conversation layer today at SIGNAL 2026, comprising three components designed to connect data, channels, and both human and AI agents for a continuous customer experience, addressing fragmented interactions across chat, voice, and email.

At Forrester's B2B Summit North America, the firm presented research from 'The GTM Singularity Is Here,' calling for B2B leaders to abandon outdated practices and adopt a customer-obsessed go-to-market (GTM) approach that leverages AI for enhanced buyer engagement and cross-team collaboration, according to Demand Gen Report.

As martech, adtech, and sales tech converge into a unified revenue stack, B2B organizations are advised to restructure their RevOps teams to break down cultural silos while preserving functional expertise, according to MarTech. The source highlights that the traditional separation of marketing, advertising, and sales teams has created barriers, but integration requires new structures to ensure technology achieves its potential.

RevOps teams are evolving from roles focused on fixing reports or...

This week's updates in AI-powered martech, as reported on April 30, 2026, show companies shifting AI from analysis to execution across various tools, including adMarketplace placing ads in AI search responses and Braze automating campaign decisions. According to MarTech, these developments involve Braze adding features to coordinate marketing tasks and ASAPP introducing agents for customer service tasks.

At the B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) 2026, a panel moderated by Demand.com’s Rick Robinson and featuring experts Terry Arnold, Whitney Goldstein, and John Johansen addressed how B2B decisions increasingly involve committees rather than individual champions, as discussed in a session titled "Champion to Consensus: Practical Buying Group Coverage That Improves Conversion." The panel dismantled traditional approaches that rely on single leads, noting that deals often stall despite positive...

Xactly and ServiceNow have introduced the Dispute Management AI Agent as the first innovation from their AI-driven collaboration, focusing on streamlining compensation inquiries and workflows for sales teams. This integration, powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and ServiceNow Now Assist, enables secure, real-time coordination between Xactly’s AI-powered revenue platform and ServiceNow’s conversational AI to automate end-to-end dispute processes, according to Demand Gen Report.

The...

Salesforce launched Agentforce Operations today, a new tool designed to use AI agents for automating back-office processes across systems such as email, ERP, and collaboration tools, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/salesforce-launches-agentforce-operations-to-automate-back-office-work/). This addresses the issue where companies have modernized customer-facing experiences but face delays from manual back-office tasks.

Marketers are replacing SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives, resulting in increased vendor churn, as detailed in a recent MarTech article. Mid-market firms have experienced a 35% year-over-year decline in renewals for single-function martech tools, according to Chiefmartec & MartechTribe’s 'Martech for 2026 Report.' Chris Penn, co-founder and chief data officer at TrustInsights.ai, states that vibe coding makes software a complete commodity, with about 63% of its users being non-developers,...

IAB Tech Lab is updating OpenRTB to address the growing need to define live content in programmatic channels, announcing new attributes for describing live content and refinements to substitution macros. These changes, now open for public comment through late May, aim to reduce ambiguity in the bidstream as connected TV (CTV) and real-time inventory expand, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/iab-tech-lab-updates-openrtb-to-better-define-live-content/).

HubSpot released 15 updates in March 2026 that focus on increasing flexibility in automation, workflows, and CRM management, addressing previous limitations for managers and admins. These changes allow teams to adapt HubSpot more precisely to their business operations, particularly in areas like timing logic and data structure, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/15-hubspot-updates-from-march-2026-managers-and-admins-need-to-know/).

Today's buyers are researching independently, comparing options, and forming opinions before engaging with sales, while Google AI Overviews now appear in searches for commercial and transactional intents. This means the first interaction with a brand might be a synthesized answer from multiple sources rather than direct engagement, requiring brands to compete for inclusion in AI-generated responses early in the process, according to MarTech.

In an AI-influenced search environment, brands must...

The 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey indicates a broad-based drop in martech replacement activity, with marketing automation falling from 31.1% in 2024 to 19.4% in 2025, CRM decreasing from 22.1% to 9.7%, and email platforms dropping from 24.3% to 13.7%. This shift marks a departure from previous years of routine replacements, as reported in the survey.

Forrester published a blog post on January 15, 2026, outlining the GTM singularity as a convergence of buyer autonomy and AI that collapses traditional go-to-market fault lines.

According to Forrester Sales Insights, buyers now rely on AI-powered search, deploy AI agents, consult expanded buying networks, and make decisions before sellers enter conversations. The post states that this creates a state of unpredictability where traditional rules no longer apply.

SaaStr observed about 10 CROs leave or get fired in the past 12 months across startups connected to SaaStr Fund. AI contributed to some departures by creating tough times and slowdowns for many B2B companies. Some transitions occurred because the company outgrew the executive or the fit was not right from the start.

Forrester has opened nominations for the 2026 B2B Return On Integration Honors and B2B Programs Of The Year Awards, to be presented at B2B Summit North America 2026. Submissions close February 18, 2026, with winners recognized in late April in Phoenix.

The B2B Return On Integration Honors recognize organizations that aligned product, marketing, sales, and customer engagement goals, integrated two or more of these functions, and measured outcome-based results.

Shakeel Khan joined Forrester as principal analyst for revenue operations in October. The appointment follows seven years in sales roles selling car rentals, telecom voice and data solutions, and cybersecurity services.

Khan previously worked in sales operations and revenue operations at Neustar, Verisign, and several private equity-backed firms. He holds an M.S.

SaaStr published guidance stating that when growth has slowed, a VP of Sales pushing to hire more reps is not the right approach 9.8 times out of 10. The post frames the request as a desperation move.

According to [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/dear-saastr-growth-has-slowed-and-my-vp-of-sales-is-pushing-me-to-hire-more-reps-is-that-the-right-way-to-go/), the request signals that the CRO or VP of Sales does not know what else to do and seeks to brute force results with more humans.