The Agentic Buyer: How AI Is Rewriting Intent, Evaluation, and Trust — Fireside Chat with Sydney Sloan & Erik Charles

Julia Nimchinski:
Huge honor and pleasure, thank you so much, and we are transitioning to our next session. Welcome to the show, Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, and Eric Charles, fractional CMO and CRO at Ohana Operators. We’re going to be talking about how AI is rewriting intent, evaluation, and trust. Before we do this, the stage is yours. We are kicking off every session with one question. What’s your top GTM and AI prediction for 2026? Sydney, let’s start with you.
Sydney Sloan:
I think that… I… the crazy transition that we’re all going through right now, I think, is the trend, but that companies will go from what I’ve been calling the playground, where we’re just trying things out, to actually developing their playbooks. Selecting their vendors of choice, identifying ownership, and implementing their actual agentic workflows.
Julia Nimchinski:
Love it. Eric, how about yourself?
Erik Charles:
I think 26 is gonna be driven by the people trying to get ahead of the game. You know, they know that the old days of, oh, we’ll just crank out a bunch of blogs, isn’t GTM. you… cold calling my cell phone will… you’ll go to my, my voicemail constantly. Emails are being pushed into side folders, but… you know, answer engine optimization is gonna be the biggest thing. People are gonna… they know people are searching for, hey, what’s a good solution for this? And they know it’s pulling data from a lot of places, like, for example, G2, and they’re gonna wanna try and get ahead of that. They’ve got to make sure they show up on… I mean, the biggest… check that companies will be doing is searching for themselves versus other people and seeing what every single EngineBot comes back with, and trying to fix that.
Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. On this note, the stage is yours. Eric, take it away.
Erik Charles:
Yeah, that kind of leads into it. You know, I know the title is Agentic Buyer, How AI is rewriting Intent, Evaluation, and Trust. You know, I find these systems… it was interesting, just last night. I got a text from my brother, my niece is looking at some different universities to transfer. She’s a classic student and, you know, a student-athlete entering the transfer portal, but with long-term goals, and there are a couple schools they’re looking at. My brother said, hey, do you know anybody at these schools? Because I live in academia, you know, one foot in academia, and I just went into one of the engines. And I… actually, I ran it in two. I ran it in, in Gemini, and I ran it in Perplexity, and I said, so, hey, what do you think of these two schools for a pre-med student who’s entering the transfer portal? What would their life be like? And it just generated a beautiful summary. And if I’m doing that to help out my niece with college search… what’s going on in the business world. So, I don’t know, Sydney, you’re much closer to that, because I remember the launch of G2, good friends with the founders, and it was fascinating watching this shift, where all of a sudden, instead of someone saying, hey, what’s Gartner have to say? They were like, hey, how does this show up on G2? So, I mean, where do you see this? Where do you see this agentic buyer going? Let’s go deeper into this.
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah, well, we’ve definitely seen it, felt it, living it, and have done research around it. And the research, the staggering research, we used to do an annual buyer behavior report, now we’re doing it every 3 to 4 months, because things are just changing so fast. And so we… and, this is my favorite stat. In, April, when we ran, the survey, we started asking the question, where do you start your search, and, and which chatbots? And so, it excluded the Google summary, we said specifically, the ones you mentioned, plus GPT and, you know, the list there, And 29% of people said that they started their research on an AI chatbot. We re-ran the survey in August, so April to August, 5 months later. And it was up to 50% of people started their search there. So it’s like a 79% increase. And I can imagine when we do it in a few months from now, it’s gonna continue to go up. And I think that’s what we’ve all felt, right? It’s almost like a stat that, like, just validates how all of us marketers are feeling, because we, you know, we SEO’d and PPC’d our way to demand gen. And now that’s not the case, and we have to rethink, as you mentioned at the beginning, you know, how are we showing up And they answer. And thankfully, those, the AI chatbots love user-generated content, and we have a lot of it around software and software preferences from buyers, and so G2 is one of the top-cited sources. And we can definitely go as deep as you want into that, Eric.
Erik Charles:
Yeah, no, and it’s funny, because I remember… I can’t remember the first person who tossed up the 65% of the buyer’s journey happens before they talk to sales. I’ve got a feeling…
Sydney Sloan:
Back in the day.
Erik Charles:
Was that a Gartner? Okay, that wasn’t.
Sydney Sloan:
It was, yeah, yeah. Now we all say it, yep.
Erik Charles:
Oh, yeah. You know, there’s some of those. That would be a whole different conversation. What are the industry numbers that everybody quotes? What was the original source?
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah.
Erik Charles:
For that, for that data.
Sydney Sloan:
You could ask AI, they can find it.
Erik Charles:
Like, probably. But… So if… we’ve got to be well past 65%. I mean, at this point, why not have an AI get you to your shortlist of just 3 companies, in reality, and then… and then… even being able to pull up, you know, concerns. I mean, one of the things that I always liked about G2 is it wasn’t just, here’s what the positives, it’s like, hey, here’s a few things you should be worried about. You know, here’s what people brought up, and I used to train… any company I work with when I’m training their sales reps, when I’m doing go-to-market work, I’m like, hey. what are the bad things people say about you? What are… not the generic objections, well, can you really get the implementation done, or whatever it is, but, you know, and where else is that? So, this consideration window is getting compressed, I feel. I mean, so, how are companies gonna… I mean, I tell all the reps, you gotta know what people are saying about you on these sites, and by the way, go use Chat.
Sydney Sloan:
Mmm.
Erik Charles:
whatever, to do it. I mean, I’m not going to make any calls on who’s got the best engine this week, because it’ll change, you know, on January 1st, I’m sure, but how do you get ahead of this compressed buying cycle if you’re trying to actually close business?

Sydney Sloan:
The crazy thing is, is those shortlists are shrinking. So you said the 3. And… and we also evaluate on that, and… and it was, last year, it was, like, 4 to 7. Now that whole element has shifted to shrinking shortlists as well. And what fascinated me was when they single-shot it. So the shortlist is a short list of one. And that went from 4% to 8%, so it doubled. So as we start to use these answer engines more and more. we trust the answer. We are getting better at prompting. We’re… we’re getting deeper into the types of questions that we ask. And so when you think about how do I, you know, how do I show up in the consideration stage. you have to understand the questions that are being asked. And that’s why there’s this exploding category that we’re calling AEO. Some people are calling it GEO. I’ll give a little factoid here that I learned, but I’m sharing with others so you understand why we called it AEO. AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. And that is when people ask a question, and the AI results in an answer. The GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. That’s when you asked it to create something. Give me code. Make me an image. So, you ask it to generate something for you. So we are focusing on AEO, the question and answer, because that is what we power. And in that same time window from April to August. When we started talking about this, there were 7 vendors in the category. By October of this year, there were over 117 vendors! AEO vendors, people that are trying to solve the biggest problem we’re facing today, which is how do I show up? And so here’s 3 things that I would do to start, right? First is, you have to understand the questions being asked, and it’s unlike SEO, where you could put in your query and know if you were top of the page, middle of the page, page 3 on your keywords of choice. That doesn’t work in the LLMs. If you have 10 people in a room, ask different LLMs the exact same questions, you’ll get 10 different answers. And so, this is what the AEO’s tools do. They aggregate the multitude, the hundreds of thousands of questions being asked, and then they show you what are the citation sources that are powering the answers. And you can tell, is my content part of the citation source? What are those citation sources, and how do I ensure I show up there? So that’s why, like, that’s one of the reasons G2 is having this incredible opportunity, this meet-the-moment opportunity, where it’s like, okay, we know they’re citing G2 because they trust our content, it’s verified and validated, it’s in human speak, which is what the engines want. And we do all the work to compare, contrast, provide pricing insights, which align to the questions that are being asked. And so you have to understand that first. Understand the questions that are being asked, and what are the citation sources that are feeding those answers, and how do you make sure you show up there with the answers that you want? So, a little bit of an extra tidbit for those folks that are watching today. You can build out in your G2 profile, when you claim your profile and you’re setting it up, we allow you to add media and content. Well, one of your content pieces should be a very exhaustive FAQ. Of every question and every answer that you want to power those chatbots, because they are indexing on G2 content. If there’s a discussion that you think would be valuable, it will index on the discussion. So, like, tee up some discussion threads, actually answer them. It’s an underutilized capability on G2. And that’s… that’s the one… that’s the first way. So this is, like. My three-part answer here is, number one. Understand what questions are being asked, what are the citation sources, and make sure that you’re represented there. The second thing I would recommend is to really understand who your buyers are, and what are their jobs to be done. And it’s gonna change the… our content strategy. Because before, we were writing for, for Google and Bing, right? We were writing for keywords, and how to show up in those keywords, and doing all the tricks that we learned. That’s not what we’re doing now. We’re actually writing content for real humans that have real questions. And so if you understand your personas and their jobs to be done, which includes the products that you offer, but other things as well, then start writing content for them. And I recommend, as well, and we built agents, we built, Gemini Gems for our personas, we’ve transitioned those to GPTs now, but that are really deep. personas. And it’s so much easier to do it now than it ever was before. And the other persona I would add are… are create a persona for each of the engines. Understand what GPT likes versus what Perplexity likes, versus what Claude likes. And so those can be additional personas, quote-unquote, that you’re marketing to. And, and ask them how this content, or what is missing, or how should I phrase it? And so I treat those, also as additional personas. And then the last thing… yeah, go ahead, yeah, I know it’s a really long-winded answer.
Erik Charles:
No, no, no, I was loving it. Break it apart. Honestly, I’ve got a notepad over here, because I’.
Sydney Sloan:
I see.
Erik Charles:
I have both, like, digital notes, but I still have, like, just pads of paper. My desk is covered in post-it notes.
Sydney Sloan:
post-it notes that… You know what? Some things never get old. There you go.
Erik Charles:
No, no, no, but it was the fact that you were basically saying, you know, I love the personas. AEO personas. What is the… what is today’s persona of each of the… of the… I’ve been using AEO, because that’s the bigger concern I’ve had from the marketing perspective, although I’ve used GEO just to do some writing, but I don’t…
Sydney Sloan:
They’re getting better. Yeah, and image creation, and like, you know, code, of course, of that, yeah. And the, what was I gonna say? you know, when… when you’re… and… and building out those personas in… in those, in those, the AI chatbots, the… the… another data point that we just started asking in this last round in… in October was actually which chatbots are people using, so we’ll start to track that, too, and trending. And… GPT was 3X the next 2. So GPT is clearly in the lead, then it’s Microsoft Copilot, then it’s Gemini. And what’s interesting is Copilot and Gemini come with the operating system. GPT, you have to buy outside of that. And so that… that was interesting to me, too. I think it was, like, 12% or 14% for Gemini and Microsoft, and then 3X that for GPT. So if you’re going to, like, start to optimize for one, like, you know, also in that, when you’re doing your AEO research. like, understand what those, you know, where the questions are coming from, they’ll also show you that. So when you buy one of those platforms, they’ll show you, here’s the questions that are coming from the different platforms, and here’s the citation sources for each.
Erik Charles:
Right, no, that’s… I mean, that’s interesting, because, you know, and this is back to, you know, and you’ve kind of covered the brand building and storytelling on there. What have you found really effective for y’all? I mean, because you want to stay on the top, you don’t want… Right. No, we’ve been working on this for a while, like…
Sydney Sloan:
Absolutely, yeah, no, this is… this is… I mean, this is our… not only are we helping our customers, but this is our business model. And, what we found at the very beginning, which is still, is, is to be true, is that, listicles. best of, like, best of software that’s coming up this year, it’s in February every year. Like, getting on the best of software, because people ask, what is the best? And G2 runs this best of software program. And so, you know, really ranking high does help you in getting on those shortlists that are being generated by the LLMs. And so you’ve got to have your review game on, you know, you have to be performing well there, and so I know it’s a two-sided question, but, you know, what’s working for us is the best of software program, because not only do we index the world’s software, but then we stack rank the world’s best software in all these different categories, and we have the stack ranking for every single category. So the way that we structured our content is… feeds into the LLMs in a way that is… is what they want. And then we’re always optimizing. And a couple of other things that that we have, realized is, you know, we’re looking at the same citation sources. What are people asking about the different categories? One of the things that is commonly asked is pricing. Well, some people put pricing on their profiles, and some people do not. And so, we started adding pricing insights from the reviews to people’s profiles if they had not filled it in yet. And so that’s just another example of, like, point number one, you have to understand what questions are being asked and where are people going. And so, now we tell our customers, hey, you really want to Think about your profile and how it’s structured. What are the capabilities that you want to highlight? You know, don’t just put in a generic blurb. like a 25-word positioning statement, you know, that a marketer wrote. Sorry, I can say that because I am one. And really describe your products and capabilities and the voice of your persona. And so you need to go back and re-vet every single piece of content that is out on the internet, because this is the third point that I wanted to make that is really important, which is also part of our strategy. And it’s this idea of consensus signal amplification. So this is not talked a lot about in AEO circles, and it’s really important, because what the answer engines are looking to do is to give you the right answer. And so, when you see it, right? Like, it’s searching, it’s going out, and it’s looking at all the different sources, because it’s looking for consensus to the question that’s being asked. And so consistency is key. And one of the things that G2 has done is, we capture all these great reviews, you know, from your customers, for you, and you bring them to us. And then we syndicate those reviews to other websites. So, AWS’s marketplace has G2 reviews, Azure Marketplace, RAMP, there’s about 15 different sites that we syndicate our reviews to, and that means a G2 review is worth, like, 10 or 12. It’s creating consensus.
Erik Charles:
Right.
Sydney Sloan:
And so, what else you can do is have your teams, your content or your product marketing teams, audit your brand positioning and how you’re showing up on the internet. Is it consistent? Is your description on G2 match your description on your website? Match descriptions that maybe are on partner websites, on other places that you’ve decided to put your brand, and is it in human speak? And if not, go clean it up. Because that’s also going to help you perform better when your message and positioning is consistent, not only in the words, but the tone and what it’s highlighting. And so you… a lot of people, like, oh, I forgot, like, gosh, we wrote that description from our company before we acquired the last two companies, and added all these new capabilities, and so go back out, audit, and clean it up.
Erik Charles:
And it’s interesting, when you were talking about this, one of the things that came to mind was, if you’re trying to figure out what people are searching for, and I know the engines will do it, there’s also a human side in there, and I like to always go out to the sales engineers. What are the questions that are showing up in the sales cycles that you have to answer? Not the rep… I love the rep, because the rep’s going to say pricing, or some of the costs, and there are great reps who also know the products, but the sales engineers who actually know your product. You know, and at the same point, this is where having stuff from support and customer success. What are the features that our customers keep on asking us about how’s this working? And it’s… you don’t want to necessarily take that, but that’s going to be a huge… driver of information that you need to be pulling from those areas, those three groups. Support, success, sales engineers. And that’s gotta be in your listicles, you know?
Sydney Sloan:
Oh yeah, and externally expose it, right? If you have a community right now, that is golden content. And a lot of times, people get it, right? All the good stuff is behind the login. Start putting that stuff out in front. Right?
Erik Charles:
You know.
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah.
Erik Charles:
Do you remember the fights when nobody wanted to put the demos online? You know, they’re like, no, no, no.
Sydney Sloan:
Yes, right.
Erik Charles:
Yeah, it’s like, come on. And I finally said.
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah.
Erik Charles:
Google owns your demos in there.
Sydney Sloan:
the transcripts on YouTube. Exactly. That’s where you’re going, yep.
Erik Charles:
Yeah, we were both in the same place. And that’s a wildlife… The other thing that I like to do, and…
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah, and in that, like, now you don’t even have to go talk to the reps, right? You can just go audit the gone calls, and who are the most successful reps, capture theirs, what do they… what do they talk about, say, what questions and answers are being provided, and… and then the SE, same thing, so exactly what you did, but, you know, it’s easier to do. And… and then how do you, you know, also expose, the… What I like to do is, like, create an RFP, microsite. that… that has the sample RFP that works well for us, right? But the most common questions and answers when creating an RFP is, sorry, baller website, just gonna say it, because then it’s like, oh, wait, you know, like, help me create an RFP. That is also one of the questions for the more technical products that are out there, and if an RFP microsite already exists that you’ve optimized for the LLMs, whoop, there it is, they’re gonna create it for you. And this leads me to one of the other things that I think people that are, you know, you go the crawl, walk, run. And, and so, I think in the walk, almost run. category, you start to not only look at the question that’s being asked, but the chain of questions that are being asked. And so your content strategy goes from the simplestical FAQ to really understanding the interdependencies of the question, because they’re no longer saying, what is the best product for buyer intent? they’re saying, I use SalesLoft, or Salesforce and Sixth Sense. I’m looking to replace my marketing automation platform. Should I be considering Clay, or this, or that? Like, the complexity of the question. is… it varied. And so, advanced people are actually building content for the multiple use cases of compare, contrast. Does it work well? Like, how… like, tell your integration story externally, like, you know, here’s how Sixth Sense and G2 work really well together. And then you also, you know, so start with those extra nuances. But, you know, get your basic content. Strategy set in place, and then that’s a little bit more of the advanced.
Erik Charles:
Right, and that’s… that’s where the GEO can help you as well. It’s like, you can write a lot of stuff, and… And I’m fond of using GEO to clean up, edit, and even do some formatting for me, as I just… You know, I remember early content work that I did at a company where they had hired a third-party content company that wrote the blogs. That was fine. They had 3 writers. They came in and they would drop old-school tape recorders, digital. in front of me and say, can you just start talking on these issues? And then a month later, they come back with stuff. Well, now, you can do that, obviously, with GEO and make it happen, so that it gets going. So, but that brings me to… and I’m watching our clock, we’re still good, we’ve got another 5-6 minutes, but… So what… let’s talk about the skill sets. I mean, who do I need to have on my team now? I mean, demand generation is… growth marketing, demand marketing… feel it’s broken. I mean, it’s… it’s… people are trying to figure it out. So, what do I need to be hiring?
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah.
Erik Charles:
with this agentic bias.

Sydney Sloan:
So, I’ve had this conversation a lot with my community of CMOs, and we’re all still working through it. So what we wanted to do first was, like, make sure you, you know, teach them to fish. Teach them how to prompt. So, a lot of work was put into, like, getting people on the team comfortable with prompting. A lot of my friends would, like, pull together teams and do hackathons around specific use cases. You know, just getting people comfortable. From that, you could… the… the curious and AI-fluent people emerge, and they are given more opportunity to look at other things that they can do. And so, there is definitely a conversation going on around the rise of the AI engineer. And there’s kind of two camps there. Years ago, before there was SaaS, which I’m sure you remember, and so do I, you know, we were responsible for building our own tools and workflows, and… and, you know, we partnered with IT, and then SaaS came, and it was like. repackaged off the cloud, you know, capabilities that are built just for me and marketing. That is so amazing. Well, now we’re kind of taking a step back, and now we’re having these build versus buy decisions and conversations, and so they’re technical, right? You need to have… hopefully there’s folks already on your marketing ops team. go partner with your IT team again, get them built into what it is that you’re thinking of, so you’re working in partnership. And so, my recommendation is. that we go back to what we knew before, where you have a single architect, either for your team or for the company, that is responsible for architecting how AI is to be used within your company. They have the governance, they have the underlying tools, different ALMs are built on different platforms. Which ones are you going to allow? Therefore, then when you’re auditing. technologies that are built on those underlying LLMs, are they able or not, right? So the architect is responsible for the overall strategy of AI in your company, and then the engineers can be specific knowledge experts. in those different areas of the business. So yeah, you might have an amazing SDR that’s just prompted their way to high performance, and you want to promote them into the AI engineer role around your RevOps team. So that’s, I think, what a lot of people are looking for right now, is that engineer, but I don’t want people to forget the architect that’s going to have the overall responsibility to keep everything from going, kind of, like, it was all about testing, that’s why I talked about the playground at the very beginning of the call, or our webinar, to, like, know the playbooks, and that’s how we need to, like, move forward, with consistency in the way that our companies want AI adopted and used.
Erik Charles:
Yeah, I feel like marketing ops has… has… it got pushed down by RevOps, you know, there for a while, because our first concern was RevOps. We’ve got to get the CRM talking to the pricing engine, talking to the…
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah.
Erik Charles:
each one of those, and marketing ops is over here is like, we’re doing this stuff, too. Then we got the CROs, which supposedly would have marketing in it, but most CROs… there are exceptions, there are exceptions, but most CROs come out of sales, not marketing. And then Marketing Ops has had… is… you know, I think companies that invest in marketing ops the same way they invest in RevOps, and those two people should have desks.
Sydney Sloan:
you know, very close to each other, to have that feedback loop coming into both. Yes, because we have to go back and, you know, we know it all starts at the data layer, especially now, because if you’re gonna be using AI, you have to have a good, solid data strategy, otherwise it’s gonna… it’s going to be trained on stuff that’s not good. So you start again with your data layer, then you have to go into, like, understanding the workflows and orchestrations, and that’s where you do the, do I want to use my existing, platforms that have added AI into them, which could be the right answer, or do I want to build, use an AI builder tool, like an 8N, or, you know, these types of tools that can, that can work across the systems. I think it’s gonna be a mix of both. Right? Or do I use ChatGPT? And so those are the decisions that they’re making, or whatever LLM of choice, right? So those are the decisions that they’re going to be making, is like, where do I build the agent? Where do I buy the agent? Where do I use AI Builder tools that help me orchestrate and have the pre-built integrations and templates that make it easier for me? So, we are… we are in a new era, and the radical idea that I talk about is just start fresh. Turn it on one day, turn the other systems off. this… the same day. Like, just… just do it. Because it’s going to be a lot easier. But if you can’t, which I understand a lot of people can’t, then you remodel one room at a time versus tearing down the whole house, and and, you know, go… go room by room, and… and, like, just, okay, we’re gonna focus on this team and these use cases, and we’re gonna build that out, and then we’re gonna go to the next set. So that’s the prioritization.
Erik Charles:
Yep, and I think that’s what it’s gonna take to fix it if you’re gonna survive, and it’s funny, we were talking about next 18 months, it’s gonna be 3 months at a time. I think you call it the same.
Sydney Sloan:
Oh, yeah.
Erik Charles:
We do annual surveys, it’s gonna be constant.
Sydney Sloan:
Exactly.
Erik Charles:
Thank you very much, Sydney.
Sydney Sloan:
To shout out Seth Mars. Hi, Seth Mars!
Erik Charles:
I know, I was gonna say, Zeth is, like, sending me texts, telling me to wrap it up, wrap it up, I wanna talk.
Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you so much.
Sydney Sloan:
Thank you, Eric.
Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you, Eric. And, what’s the best way to support you, Sydney and Eric? What’s the latest and greatest in the G2 world, Sydney?
Sydney Sloan:
I mean, everything I just talked about, right? We’re all in this, we’re learning together, you can absolutely directly DM me on LinkedIn, I’m happy to set up calls with teams, I do a lot of, like, ideation sessions, and put you in touch with the right folks at G2, so, Connecting with me on LinkedIn is the easiest way, and I will respond, I promise. As you know, Julia, that’s where we chat.
Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you so much, and Eric.
Erik Charles:
Same, the LinkedIn, wide open. I leave it open for people. You can also just go to EricCharles.com and chase me down there, too.
Julia Nimchinski:
Definitely will. Thank you. Well, coming up is CRO-centric panel, hosted by one and only Seth Mars. Super excited for this one. Seth, how are you doing? Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler. Forgot to say.