When Agents Become the Buyer

Julia Nimchinski:

Next up, welcome Brandi Senders back to the stage, and Godard Abel, co-founder and CEO of G2, who needs no introduction. What a pleasure. Couldn’t be a best topic for G2, agent to agent. Super excited for this.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Well, I, am super excited to be back again. I feel like we were just here 5 minutes ago, and I feel wonderful following the Maria Pergolino, who is just absolutely fantastic, and a maven in her own right. And good morning, of course, and welcome to everyone who is here.

Obviously, they say no introductions, but we’re gonna do one. And I’ll lead in, though, by saying, for decades. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: We as marketers and leaders have fought for human clicks and eyeballs, because we’ve assumed a human was always evaluating options. And today, I think that assumption is breaking.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: We are moving from search to answers, from SEO to GEO, and honestly, from answers to autonomous agents in a lot of different ways.

And what happens when your next customer never visits your website because an AI agent builds the shortlist for that person doing the research before a human even gets involved?

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: That’s a big difference for us as marketing leaders, and I do think we are no longer competing just for attention, we are competing for inclusion and a machine’s recommendation set. And so, as Jillian mentioned earlier, I’m Brandi Sanders, CMO of Apromore from Salesforce at Salesforce.

Naturally, we are leading the industry into this agentic enterprise with AgentForce, and with Apromore, we provide deep process intelligence.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: into operational context, which you really need that if you’re gonna have successful deployments and all of the wonderful things that come with some of the failure rates that are hot topics among leaders right now.

So, to win this future, you really have to have your brand’s trust, intent, and reputation.

That’s all a big part of it, and it has to be entirely machine-readable, which is why we are on this conversation right now, because Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: because there’s really no one better, in my opinion, as a huge G2 fan, to decode this shift than our guest today, and he is a serial B2B tech pioneer and the co-founder and CEO of G2, the very well-esteemed Goddard Abel.

So, honestly, the platform’s most, the world’s most powerful platform and repository of authentic human validation. So, super excited to have this discussion with you, and very much welcome to the chat.

Godard Abel:

So, thank you, Brandy. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here to talk all about agents.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: For sure.

I feel like if you’ve got buzzword bingo going on anywhere in HSC right now, you’ve been hitting the Agentic AI and agents buzzword bingo all morning long, but don’t worry, we’re gonna get into some real meat and potatoes here, I think that will be very interesting for the folks who are leading those teams as CMOs and as go-to-market engineers.

So, I think we’ll kick off right at the very top with, like, this idea of a macro shift that is definitely happening in the market. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: And I’m gonna always, as always, lead in with data. So we’ll start with, G2’s reach… it’s the… I think it was the Answer Economy report that we were talking about earlier.

It shows that 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with a chatbot. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: more often than, obviously, Google Search, which is up to, I think, year over year, 29% over the past little under a year, 11 months.

So I do think, as we go into this great fireside chat, when software buying shifts so aggressively, on such an incredible velocity, towards these conversational intelligence, conversational interfaces, the things that usually close a deal, like a slick UX wall.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: that white paper, that case study, that download, or even a charismatic rep, they don’t really matter quite as much as they used to. So the first question right off the bat would be.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: How do foundational concepts like trust and intent change completely when the initial buyer is an algorithm, or, frankly, an agentic AI agent, versus those human aspects, I think? Like, you know, you’re going into a human executive?

Godard Abel:

Yeah, no, I think, and we are seeing that big shift. You know, as you mentioned, our latest answer economy research does show that 51% of enterprise software buyers, they’re now starting in an answer engine, so they’re starting ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. And so I think the discovery journey has really changed.

And I remember, you know, G2, when we started it over a decade ago, back then it was all about winning on Google Search. And that’s probably true for all of us in digital marketing, right? 10 years ago, it was all about how do you rank number one on Google Organic, and how do you do SVM and SEO?

And I think now what we’re seeing marketers really focused on is AEO. Or answer engine optimization, because, you know, with 51% of buyers starting there, you really have to make sure that if you’re gonna make the shortlist.

when someone is, you know, prompting ChatGPT on topics relevant to your company and your products, then you have to make sure you show up there. You have to quote-unquote win the answer, as we like to say.

And what’s also interesting, 51% are starting there, but I think 71% in our latest Enterprise Buyer Survey, 71% are actually using an LLM at some point during the research process, probably no surprise. And so I think now the new challenge for a marketer is how do you, you know, how do you show up in the answer engines?

And I think there are some similarities, though, because obviously humans, we always relied on trusted peers, and I know most CMOs, and Maria was just on here. You haven’t done it for a long time, but they probably ask their peer CMOs, let’s say at events, community gatherings, right? Like, hey, what’s the best MarTech platform?

What are you running? You know, what Martech tools do you like? And so I think that human-to-human sharing still happens, and I think the LLMs, they also, they won’t learn like humans, but of course, they’re not going to have real-world conversations, but they are going to train on online content.

And I think the AI engines are also looking for trusted content. And specifically trusted, third-party, real human content. And that’s, I think, where platforms like G2 can help, you know, because I think much like Google, there was always domain strength.

where you had to make sure your domain had a lot of strength and would be highly rated in the Google PageRank. Now, you actually have to make sure that your domain is trusted. And I think what ChatGPT, Gemini, what Claude, they’re all trying to do, they’re trying to make no-regret purchase recommendations.

So they also want to make sure that if they’re going to recommend a product, that, you know, ultimately you like the product, and the way they do that, they like to train on real human content.

And obviously on sites like G2, but also Reddit, YouTube, they want real human voice, real human users, sharing how they’re using software for particular use cases. Are they having success or not? And that’s what the models then use both to train. So to train to what software they should recommend as buyers prompt certain use cases.

And then, of course, they’re also doing real-time search and retrieval, because we also all know the models, you know, maybe they were trained 6 months ago, then they have to go through a trust and safety process, full vetting until they’re finally released, so they also augment their model knowledge with real-time web search, and we’re seeing this on G2.

You know, more of our searches are now actually real-time retrieval requests from the AI engines and from humans, and I think probably every website’s saying that, and now you have to make sure your content is in a format that the LLMs can consume, and obviously they prefer markdown, simple HTML.

So in milliseconds, they can read your content, determine if it’s relevant to the prompt, and then incorporate it into their answer. So I think now, as a marketer.

yeah, you have to make sure that, you know, you have… one, you have a trusted domain, and or you’re sharing your content on trusted third-party sites, and that it’s in a format that’s very readable by the answer engines, and I think that is a, you know, massive paradigm shift.

I kind of think of it almost like you need two websites, you know, one still for the humans. But now you need another site for the agents for the LLM crawlers. to make sure that AI engines can also consume your content, and they can use it in real time. To also recommend your products.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: And it’s interesting, because I don’t think, if you go back a few years ago, as a CMO, and as a former CRO, that rag nodes were one of those things that were, like, coming up in conversations for, say, launches, or for digital reputation management, and when we would say things like share a voice, even.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: we weren’t necessarily talking about share of our category or our awareness in a pie chart on Perplexity or Gemini or GPT, and that’s very much, I think, a huge shift for the folks who are leading those teams now, where all of a sudden, it’s certainly become more technical, and then, to your point, readability and digestibility, it used to be whatever looked the best, had the prettiest UX UI, Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: you know, hearkening back to the days of Flash, I’m dating myself there, but like, is it beautiful?

Is it stunning? Does it go? And now it’s like, can it be read?

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: in a formulaic way, and then quickly assimilated by the algorithm, and then stack-ranked against competitors in that category, which is a really interesting way to think about if you’re doing a launch, and you’re not talking about share of voice, or share of mentions, or even the ability for agents to kind of assimilate and translate that information in regards to digital reputation.

It’s a bit of a blank spot. Which leads back into, actually, traditional funnel. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: So I think as a marketer, and as a leader, there’s a ton of… Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: I will go back into this again. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: That 69% of bi… Surprised anyone.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: poor vendor than they initially planned to, because of that chatbot guidance.

And I think for many, many years now, B2B companies have relied on kind of, like, that predictable pipeline, you know, rolling pipeline, 4.5, 5.5x, whatever it might be, where SEO leads to the landing page, and then landing page is the white paper, and then there’s the download, and you’re monitoring your MQLs and your SQLs and all of that.

So, the question here for you, obviously. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: especially with G2, is that if chatbots Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: are actively redirecting nearly 70% of those software shortlists. How do go-to-market teams actually reinvent their strategy to kind of capture those hidden intent signals?

Godard Abel:

Yeah, no, I think what is interesting about the AI engines, they are also more likely to recommend a long-tail vendor. Yeah, and what’s interesting, also one of the other facts in our answer economy report, I think 33% of buyers ultimately chose a vendor they hadn’t considered, or they wouldn’t have considered, without the AI prompt.

And so you’re right, it’s changing shortlists, you know, up to 70% of shortlists are changed by the AI engine, and the AI engines, like I said, they’re better at also, you know, maybe producing longer-tail alternatives, not just the leading brands.

In a given category, and so I do think now it’s more important than ever to make sure, well, one, that you are included, you know, so you do make the shortlist, and then two. That the content the AI engines get is confirmatory?

You know, so it actually confirms that your software can handle these use cases well, that your customers have success with it.

so that… you know, the answer engine will both recommend you make sure in your shortlist, and then when it’s listing the pros and cons, and we’re probably all doing that, you know, when you’re buying anything now, you’re probably asking ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to help you compare the products, and so you have to make sure your content, and we think the best content is actually real human users.

And, you know, actually what we’re doing at G2, I think the best reviews, the best content is actually tied to a LinkedIn verified ID.

And you might have this, Brandi, you know, I know I’ve done it with my LinkedIn, where I’ve used… I think I used my Colorado driver’s license to actually have it validate, hey, I really am Godhard Abel, you know, I really am C of G2. And I think that’s a little bit the challenge now with the whole internet, right?

Because AI is also producing so much fake content. you know, we’re all hearing about deepfakes, and it’s so much easier to also just create AI content. It may or may not be the real Brandy. And so we think that’s kind of the key, you know, the beginning of the content. One, it has to come from a trusted person.

We do think, like I said, LinkedIn validated ID is a great way to do that. to actually tie user voice, user content to that person, and obviously, I think LinkedIn gives you all the protection of context. You know, like, I can see you’re actually CMO of Apromore from Salesforce, otherwise, you know, how do I really know? It’s you?

How do I know you’re really a CMO? And so I think it starts there, you know, you have to have trusted human identity. That’s also the answer engines can see. And like I said, verified LinkedIn is a great way to do that. And then you also ideally want the content on a trusted platform.

Obviously your own website’s always good, but the challenge you might have, your website might not have… the same level of influence on the answer engines. You know, it’s a bit like SEO.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: No, that’s for plastic.

Godard Abel:

platforms, like I said, like YouTube, Reddit, G2 can really help, that actually have high ranks with the answer engines, and actually, your customer content might be more likely to be trained on G2, let’s say, than on your own testimonial page. And probably what I’d actually recommend is you push it into multiple channels.

You know, you make sure your user voice, your use cases, they’re available on G2, you’re answering questions on Reddit.

you’re posting videos on YouTube, of course you’re sharing on LinkedIn, so that, you know, as the answer engine is training across those platforms and doing real-time search across those platforms, it keeps reinforcing that your brand, your solution, is good for handling that particular use case.

And so I think this is now… yeah, I think the new frontier for digital marketers, and there’s also a whole new interesting set of tools. We have a new category on G2 around AEO, answer engine optimization, can also be called GEO. And of course, there’s many innovative startups now that can help marketers do this.

You know, G2, we’ve partnered with Profound. And they give you all the AO analytics, because you mentioned this, Brandy, share of voice. Like, how do you know what is your share of voice with the answer engines? And there are tools like Profound, or AirOps, or Conductor.

you know, many great tools, and like I said, if you go to our G2AO category, you can discover them, but they help you do those analytics, they help you measure your share of voice in the answer engines on prompt that your buyers would be putting into the answer engines.

They can actually measure, do statistically significant sampling to see what’s your share of voice today versus what’s your competition. And frankly, they can also tell you what’s driving it. So what type of content on what sites is most influencing the answers? And I think that’s always step one, is to get the analytics.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Yes.

Godard Abel:

to know what’s your AI share of voice. And obviously, step two is then seeing how do you produce more real, trusted, ideally real user content that these engines can read. And of course, the other interesting thing is now things like your docs. you know, your support docs. Obviously, they used to probably only be for support.

Some people had them behind the login, but now you want to make sure that those are public, they’re available.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Yeah.

Godard Abel:

your own FAQs, because obviously AI prompts are nothing but questions.

You know, so the more you can get also your answers out there, and again, I do this on multiple sites, obviously do it on your own sites, on your own digital, but also do it on sites like G2, do it on Reddit, right, so that anywhere there’s an answer about… a question about your product, there’s a trusted answer.

And and so I think this is, like, kind of the whole new game, right? How do you win the CEO game? How do you win the answer? And but it’s… yeah, but it’s exciting, innovative, and I think the good news for marketers, if you do it early.

It probably reminds me of early internet search days, and I remember I was building my first company, Big Machines, way back in 2000. when Google was brand new.

You know, and then I remember, actually, at the beginning, I remember in, like, 2003, one of my sales reps was like, hey, Godard, we should run Google Ads, and I was like, oh, that’s only for consumers?

Yeah, no software buyer’s gonna use Google, but of course, that happened very quickly, and now… and I think AI’s happening much more quickly, right? We’re now all seeing, wow, it’s already shifted, right? Enterprise software buyers are researching on the AI engines, and so now… but with the technology shift, if you win early.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: You can probably.

Godard Abel:

some advantage, and I think that’s the thing for marketers, right? I think if you move quickly and move faster than your competitors, right now you can gain an edge, and you can win more share of voice and AI engines, you can win the answer faster than your competition.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Yeah, and kind of hold that trust as currency, which makes a ton of sense in this particular market.

So, we’re talking kind of about the idea of, like, that transformation, and I think there’s an area where, particularly if you’re running a team or an organization, there’s the idea of data mechanics and trust.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: And there was a great point, I know, it was like, G2 was talking about research indicating that 41% of buyers are now regularly using deep research tool for software evaluations, and their number one use case is, like you mentioned earlier, it’s that matrix with the checklists, right?

So, comparing strengths and weaknesses across vendors. So, we already know that, like, G2 is the most cited B2B data source across these platforms, commanding, I think. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: 22% of that citation share.

So the question would be for you, particularly, since we’re talking about what we would need to do as the mechanics of that, like the applicability, is what would a software company actually need to do to make that customer feedback machine readable, so that these deep research tools can more easily ingest, digest, and then pull them into winning that answer?

Godard Abel:

Yeah. Well, and one good news is if you do encourage your customers to leave reviews on G2, we do that for you. you know, we have made all of our G2 pages, Markdown and light HTML, and we actually look at the edge with Cloudflare to see, is this an agent or a human?

And then we serve, you know, obviously if it’s the agent, we serve the Markdown version that’s very readable in milliseconds by the answer engine. And so one good news is, if you push reviews to G2, encourage your customers, that will automatically be readable by the answer engines.

And the other innovation we’ve made, we acquired a startup called Unsurvey. about a year ago, they were a Y Combinator startup, and their vision was that, you know, web surveys are never fun for users to fill in. And frankly, the traditional G2 review form was a web survey.

You know, where… and let’s say it’s a marketing automation platform, you know, you might have to answer 30 questions in a web survey, and frankly, no user ever loves doing that. You know, we try to make the form as intuitive as possible, but nobody likes that. With Unsurvey now, it’s an AI interview agent.

They’ll interview you, Brandy, and say, hey, how are you using this marketing automation platform? What do you like? What do you dislike? what parts of marketing are you automating? What ROI are you seeing? What implementation challenges are you having? But it’s really now a smart market researcher as an agent that’s interviewing you.

And the cool thing about that, it’s a much better viewer experience, because they can do it by voice, they can do it by video, they can do it by AI chat, but the agent’s also listening, so it doesn’t ask the same 30 questions in the same sequence every time like a survey would.

It pivots, right, and listens to you, Brandy, and… would actually adapt the questions based on what you’re already sharing. And the cool thing about all of that experience, it also produces 3 to 10 additional words. Because like any human, if you’re having a conversation, you’ll talk more.

You know, because you’re no longer just typing into a dumb form. But that also means 3 to 10 times more tokens which are then all readable by the agents for training.

And, so that’s another innovation we’ve made that, you know, can make it easier for your users to leave G2 reviews, and then produces 3 to 10 times more tokens for training, because we’re getting deeper answers. And the other extension we’re doing with that AI agent, we can even do custom research for you.

We call it, Brandy, where, for example, we’ve done this for Adobe, where our agent interviewed hundreds of commerce… e-commerce leaders about, you know, how commerce was changing in the age of AI. And our agent interviews them. The CMO, you could actually determine what questions you want to ask.

And then it produces, you know, bespoke research, kind of like much our own answer economy report, but you could do it on, like I said, for Adobe, it was how… what are the trends in e-commerce in the age of AI, but you could do it on whatever topic you want, and the cool thing about that content, it’s also real-time.

You can put it in the Markdown pages, you can use all of that to further train the answer engines, and I think that’s now, I think, probably a shift for a CMO, every marketer, as you’re producing content. you kind of have two audiences, right?

And obviously, you still want to make sure it’s great, compelling content for humans, but at the same time, you have to think about how’s it great, compelling content for agents. And one of the things that’s different about agents, they’re kind of the nerdy student. You know what I mean?

They like to read the full book, and they want text only, like, no pictures, and it’s almost opposite of humans. marketing, I’ve noticed over the last 25 years, it’s kind of become all about shiny objects.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Yes.

Godard Abel:

JavaScript, it’s like, just, like, two words, one quote.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: pretty.

Godard Abel:

Yeah, one quick video, right? Because we humans probably have very little attention, we don’t read anything anymore, right? But the agents, like, that really nerdy students, like, they’ll read the 100-page book in, like, 2 seconds. And and so that’s what’s interesting, right? Now you have to serve both.

You still need, like, the shiny, engaging videos, snippets, quotes for the human, but then at the same time, you need the full book. with all the use cases, with all the documentations, in a light HTML, readable format for the agent.

And and so I think that’s just something now, probably every marketing campaign, you have to think about both, right? How am I serving the human buyer, but at the same time, how am I also producing content that the agent buyer can and wants to consume?

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Yeah, and I think that’s a really great note on, kind of, like, how the hemispheres of the mind have definitely changed with marketers, where it used to be strictly madmen.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: So, if you’re there at the boon, then you know it’s, like, what looks good, what’s sexy in the market, how can we make this, like, the Lamborghini, you know, profile for this product, and it’s, like, 3 words, like, motivate, optimize, anchor, innovate, innovate, innovate.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: And now, it’s completely different. Like, long tail, long form, standard, almost like an academic mindset.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: for how we’re creating that, which actually brings us to a really interesting place, which is the idea of that human authenticity, and then synthetic noise, that’s like AI.

Because there’s certainly, especially if you’re creating for agents, or by agents, or through agents, it can turn into AI slot pretty quickly.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: So, according to findings, there were some great findings in the report, it was 45% of buyers say that citations from trusted peer review sites are the single most Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: confidence-inspiring signal in an automated recommendation.

I think Maria was mentioning that, it came up on an earlier cast as well. Peer-to-peer just cannot be, you know, really shined enough of a spotlight on. But at the same time.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: there was the market being flooded with AI slop, you know, synthetic automated content, and in sometimes, in some effects, fake reviews, because everything is capable of being a deepfake now, all the way down from your LinkedIn to this review for XYZ platform.

So, I do know, you know, G2 recently integrated features like LinkedIn verification, we just talked about to fight that, but I would say, from, like, a higher level, how does G2 plan to kind of police that market?

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: place as that starts to evolve, so that automated buyers are training on genuine human experiences instead of that, sort of like that AI echo chamber that can very easily happen in other areas.

Godard Abel:

Yeah, no, I think you’re right, Brandy, there’s a lot of AI slop being produced, as you call it, and frigging a lot of fakes. fake LinkedIn profiles, right? AI, sadly, also makes it really easy to create slop and truly fake content, and so G2, we’re always on guard for that.

We do have a trust and safety team at G2, And we obviously, we also use AI, because AI can obviously do a front line, and we do that with every review, right? Kind of does a quick score, a quick verification, like, obviously you can tell if it’s just pure AI slop. Obviously, we also then check the identity of the user in real time.

To validate that. And then we do have humans, you know, if it’s kind of a questionable score that review it, and that will actually do verifications. They’ll reach out to the user, you know, validate they’re really them.

And so we do have a pretty high bar, and we’re also part of a trust and safety alliance, actually with their leading review sites, and this includes TripAdvisor, Amazon, Yelp, because frankly, every review site has this challenge.

You know, where people are always trying to create fake promotional reviews, and so we’re really trying to follow best practices there. You know, both with humans and our trust and safety team, as well as algorithmically trying to detect it more and more.

Obviously, we’re not 100%, so we do also rely on our community, and frankly, if you’re on G2.com, you see what you think of a fake review, you can always report abuse, and we have humans follow up and verify that, so we do try to do everything possible, and we’re probably… we’re not 100%, I think nobody is, but we’re probably pretty confident you know, I’d say 95 to probably 99% of the content is very real.

That’s also key to us, otherwise we’ll lose our trusted spot with the answer engines, and with real software buyers, so there’s nothing more important than trust to our brand. But we are always… it’s a continuous process, we’re always working on it, because it’s an arms race, right? Kind of the… The good and the bad guys of content creation.

are kind of dueling each other, but we’re very focused on it, and as you said, LinkedIn Verified ID really helps. because, you know, I think if it’s a trusted human in the context, hey, is this a real CMO? Do they know what we’re talking about? Right?

So we’re really leaning into that, that we… ideally, like I said, everything would be tied to a trusted ID so that we make sure it’s real content.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: For sure. And I think… I can’t believe it, but it’s literally been almost 30 to the T. I think we have 3 minutes left, so I’m gonna skip through some of our earlier conversation pieces.

I’m gonna go straight to the idea of, like, visionary and looking ahead, because I don’t think there’s anyone in a leadership role who isn’t uniquely aware of the paradigm shift that’s happening in the market right now, both organizationally, when you’re going from legacy to this new world.

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: on the marketing side, on the revenue side, on the customer side. And just for G2 alone, if you look back at the fiscal year, incredible explosive growth, including a 391% year-over-year increase, and listed software products in that space.

We have the quality things that are happening we just talked about. But I’d say you started G2 as a destination, really, for human researchers. So as we look at this massive Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: shift towards automated discovery?

You know, do you think G2 would involve into, like, this infrastructure layer, essentially like a global data registry, that would feed corporate orchestration? Rather than just, like, a place that humans visit, do you have, like, an ultimate vision for G2’s role in this newer economy?

Godard Abel:

Yeah, and I think, Brandy, our vision for the Age of EA is to be the trusted source. of insights for enterprise software and enterprise AI, and I think it could become that we are really a trusted data layer. Because I think some people envision a future where maybe buyers are not going to any website anymore.

You know, they’re only going to the LLM of their choice, whether it’s Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and they’re gonna get all their information through an answer engine. And, but we do think those answer engines, they need trusted human content, you know, because they’re also… they realize if they only train on AI slop. They’re gonna become nonsensical.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Right, garbage in, garbage out. It’s the old world.

Godard Abel:

Exactly.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: up?

Godard Abel:

And, so they’re, they’re desperate for trusted human content. And so we really want to guard and build our reputation as the trusted source of data and reviews on real enterprise software and enterprise AI solutions. And so we do think we can be that trusted data layer, and we have also opened up MCP on G2, of course.

You know, that’s also a way for a marketer now, you can use all our data, you can just work in your cloud. But you can get our intent, you can get our content, you can get it all through your agent experience. And, so we’re very much betting on that future, where we have to be a trusted data source.

on the use of enterprise software, on the use of enterprise AI, and then buyers can consume it through an LLM, through an MCP, and yeah, and in 5 years, who knows? Maybe nobody will come to our website, but we can still be really relevant if we’re the trusted source of data that fuels that AI and that answer economy.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Goddard, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I know we are at time. Julie, I can see the other panelists coming through for the next session. It’s been fantastic talking with you. Thank you so much for taking your time today to talk about that.

Godard Abel:

Yeah, no, thanks for having me, Brandy. I appreciate it, and hi, Julia.

Julia Nimchinski:

Fantastic. So, Chad. God, before you go, what’s the best way to support you?

Godard Abel:

I would say… I love to connect on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me, share more feedback, and obviously, if you have ideas on how to make G2 better for the age of AI, I’m all ears. Like, every entrepreneur.

It’s really day one at G2, so looking forward to getting your feedback and input, and keep making G2 the trusted source of data for the age of AI.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Every day.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much.

Unknown:

Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Wonderful. Brandee Sanders, CMO Apromore from Salesforce: Julia, thank you.

Godard Abel:

Have a good day.