Owen BriggsAI Is Changing How Companies Buy Software and Vendors Are Not Ready for That
April 2, 2026
I got here at 7:30 this morning. My dad was already at his desk. I don't know how he knew to be earlier, but he always is. I made coffee and started pulling numbers on something I've been thinking about for a few weeks, and by 8 a.m. I had convinced myself the whole vendor side of the software industry is walking into a wall they genuinely cannot see yet.
Here's the thing: the way companies buy software is changing faster than the people selling it can track. And I don't mean that as a vague trend piece observation. I mean the mechanics of a purchase decision - who's involved, what they look for, how they evaluate a vendor, what they're willing to pay for - all of it has shifted structurally. The vendors haven't caught up. Most of them are still running playbooks written five years ago, and buyers have moved on.
The Numbers Make This Hard to Dismiss
Start with the procurement side. Weekly use of generative AI within procurement functions increased 44 percentage points from 2023 to 2024, with 94% of procurement executives now using generative AI at least once a week. Let that settle. This isn't "some companies are experimenting with AI tools." This is the people signing the purchase orders using AI constantly, as part of how they do their jobs.
And they're not just using it to write emails. B2B buyers are using AI tools to start their research, but often turn to peers and providers to validate AI outputs, precisely because they have learned not to trust AI claims alone. They're doing more research than before, more thoroughly, with less tolerance for being managed through a sales process designed to control information flow. The traditional vendor playbook - tightly scripted demo, friendly AE, gated case studies, reference calls after you're already emotionally committed - that playbook assumes the buyer comes in underprepared. They don't anymore.
Enterprise buyers today behave very differently than they did even two years ago. Research from Forrester's State Of Business Buying, 2026 shows that business buying groups have grown substantially and that purchases involving complex features like AI involve deeper validation and more stakeholders than ever before.
More stakeholders. Deeper validation. This is the environment vendors are trying to sell into while their sales motion is still built around getting a champion inside the company to push the deal through. That champion now has to convince a bigger group, who are all doing their own research, and the vendor doesn't even have visibility into most of those conversations.
The Pricing Situation Is a Specific Kind of Mess
If you want a concrete example of how badly misaligned vendors are with where buyers' heads are at, look at pricing. 19 of the 20 fastest-growing software companies prominently feature AI in their branding and some vendors are using AI features to justify price hikes as traditional seat-based pricing is disappearing, replaced by unpredictable, usage-based fees.
Buyers hate this. Not in an abstract way. They hate it in the way that makes finance teams send emails at 6 p.m. The pattern from major vendors has been to bundle AI features, increase per-seat prices by 15-25%, and make monthly billing more expensive to force annual commitments. Meanwhile, buyers are sitting there watching the AI tools make their teams more efficient - meaning they need fewer seats - and the vendor is asking them to pay more per seat and lock in longer. These two things are moving in opposite directions and vendors think they can charm their way through it.
According to Growth Unhinged's 2025 State of B2B Monetization report, seat-based pricing dropped from 21% to 15% of companies in just twelve months, while hybrid pricing surged from 27% to 41%. That's not a gradual drift. That's a category of pricing collapsing in real time while most vendor sales teams are still trained to sell it.
Nate wandered over around 10 and asked what I was looking at. I told him. He said something about how this reminded him of a Star Wars arc where a whole faction fails to see the ideological shift happening around them until it's too late. I told him that was not a helpful frame. He went back to his desk. He was probably right though.
The credit system thing deserves its own paragraph because it is particularly bad. Many vendors now use credit systems where credits buy services, but vendors reserve the unilateral right to change credit multipliers. A service that costs 10 credits can rise to 20 credits overnight - same subscription price, but customers burn through credits twice as fast and hit overage charges much sooner. And yet vendors are surprised when buyers push back at renewal or walk away. Some customers actively avoid using AI features even when free credits are included because they're afraid they'll get locked into something unpredictable. You built fear into your product. That is a procurement disaster.
The Actual Problem Isn't the Pricing Model
Here's my actual take: pricing is the symptom. The disease is that vendors still think they're in the business of managing a sales process, when buyers have decided they're doing their own process and the vendor either fits into it or doesn't.
Enterprise buyers are not buying software anymore. They are buying what their organization can become. That's a fundamental change in the question being asked. "What does your software do" has been replaced with "what does our company look like if this works." Most vendor sales teams are not equipped to answer the second question. They're trained on features, on positioning, on handling objections about competitors. They are not trained to sit down and work through what an operational model looks like post-implementation, with numbers.
Buyers expect evidence, not promises. They want working examples early in the process, demonstrations that mirror their real-world environment, and transparent discussions of performance boundaries rather than glossy narrative-focused decks. And when they don't get those things, they now have the tools to go find them themselves - or to surface the gaps faster than ever before.
The gap between what is promised in the sales cycle and what is delivered in production is where enterprise AI budgets go to disappear. Buyers have seen enough implementations go sideways that they're not taking claims at face value. According to the ISG 2025 State of Enterprise AI Adoption Report, only about 31% of prioritized AI use cases reach full production, and even fewer achieve the ROI and growth impact buyers expect. If you're a CPO who's seen two or three AI implementations underperform, you're going into the next vendor conversation as a skeptic. And that skeptic has AI-powered research tools and a much larger buying committee.
What "Not Ready" Actually Looks Like
It's worth being specific about what vendor unreadiness looks like in practice, because it isn't always obvious from the outside. It doesn't look like a company that's failing. It looks like a company that's still hitting quota through existing relationships, still putting up reasonable numbers, and quietly losing ground in deal cycles they don't even know they're losing.
Enterprise sales has moved from persuasion-heavy to validation-heavy. It has shifted from storytelling to technical credibility. And increasingly, it requires cross-functional orchestration long before a contract is signed. The vendor who still leads with a polished deck and a case study from a different industry is failing the validation test. They just don't know it because the buyer goes quiet instead of explaining why.
Vendors are under pressure to claim AI capabilities, whether or not they are production-ready. Without a neutral third party to guide the evaluation, organizations risk mistaking hype for strategy. Buyers know this. They've started building evaluation processes specifically designed to catch vendors overclaiming. Which means vendors who overclaim don't just lose the deal - they get filtered out earlier, and more permanently, because they failed a trust test.
I spent part of last week building a benchmarking spreadsheet for how we evaluate software renewals. Nobody asked me to do it. It ended up being 14 rows of criteria and I tested it against three of our current vendors. Two of them would have failed on transparency around pricing changes. Helen walked by and said it looked thorough. I've been thinking about whether she meant it. She's been at this company for years and she doesn't say things she doesn't mean, but she also doesn't give much away. Harold apparently told her once that her poker face was her best career asset. So I don't know.
The Investor-Side Pressure Is Real and It's About to Get Worse
There's a second-order issue that I think is being underreported. Vendors aren't just dealing with smarter buyers. They're dealing with smarter buyers at the same time that the funding environment has changed and growth-at-all-costs is no longer the operating mode.
Last year, innovation budgets still made up a quarter of LLM spending; this has now dropped to just 7%. Enterprises are increasingly paying for AI models and apps via centralized IT and business unit budgets, reflecting the growing sentiment that gen AI is no longer experimental but essential to business operations. This matters for vendors because it means the purchase is no longer coming out of a discretionary innovation budget where ROI expectations are fuzzy. It's coming out of a real budget line, competing against real operational spending, and it needs to perform like an operational investment.
Procurement faces a critical challenge: workloads are projected to increase by 10% in 2025, while budgets grow just 1% - creating a 9% efficiency gap. Buyers are being asked to do more with money that is not growing proportionally. That is not a buyer who wants to pay a 20% AI surcharge on software they've been using for three years. That is a buyer actively looking for reasons to consolidate, replace, or renegotiate. We've written about this investor pressure on the software market before - if you want context on what's happening at the macro level, the picture is not getting more comfortable for incumbent vendors.
The Vendors Who Are Actually Adapting
This isn't entirely a story about vendors failing. Some are adjusting, and it's worth noting what adjustment actually looks like because it's not just a messaging change.
The primary reason buyers prefer AI-native vendors is their faster innovation rate. The second reason is the recognition that companies built around AI from the ground up deliver fundamentally better products with superior outcomes compared to incumbents retrofitting AI into existing solutions. That's a structural advantage that a rebrand and a feature release can't close. An AI-native vendor is built to answer the questions buyers are actually asking now. Legacy vendors bolting AI onto a 2017 architecture are not.
AI has not made enterprise software easier to sell. If anything, it has made selling more exacting and more evidence-driven. The vendors who are adapting have figured this out and changed what they put in front of buyers. Less narrative. More benchmarks. More pilot programs with real success criteria tied to real business metrics. They've changed who shows up to deals - bringing in technical people earlier, before the contract stage, rather than parachuting them in during implementation when it's too late to matter.
This connects to something broader we've been tracking - the gap between what AI agents promise and what SaaS stacks can actually deliver. The vendors who are building for agents rather than human seats are playing a different game entirely, and the buying process is starting to reflect that.
What This Means If You're Running a Business
My read on this, and I'll be direct about it: the next two years are going to be brutal for vendors who haven't updated their go-to-market motion. Not because the market is shrinking - the procurement software market alone is projected to grow from $8.03 billion in 2024 to $18.28 billion by 2032 - but because the buyers in that growing market are playing by different rules now. More sophisticated. More skeptical. More likely to end a deal cycle before the vendor even knows they're being evaluated.
If you're on the buying side, the shift is in your favor right now. Companies are continuing to aggressively invest in software but are being really smart about it as we enter a consolidation and replacement cycle. Use that. Run harder evaluation processes. Start renewals earlier. Ask vendors for pilot terms tied to real outcomes before you commit. We ran a software audit internally and it got uncomfortable fast - but uncomfortable in ways that saved money and exposed vendors who had been coasting on contract inertia.
If you're on the vendor side, I think the honest version of this is: the buyers who are using AI to research and evaluate you can already see the gap between what you claim and what you deliver. McKinsey's September 2025 analysis of 150 global software vendors found that 68% of incumbent vendors still rely on flat-fee metrics, while only 2% have adopted successful outcome-based pricing. Two percent. That is not a market that has adapted. That is a market in denial.
Cal stopped by my desk around lunch and said something about how every disruption is also an opportunity and that he was thinking about pivoting his whole personal brand around optimism as a strategy. His car is still in the shop. I genuinely like Cal. But I don't think optimism-as-strategy is what the software industry needs right now. It needs vendors who are willing to look at what buyers are actually doing, rather than what the vendor's pipeline data suggests they should be doing.
The pipeline data is always the last thing to show the problem. By the time it shows up there, the buyers have already moved.
The headline on this story is that AI is changing how companies buy software and vendors are not ready. I've seen enough of the data now to say: that's not overstated. If anything, the gap between where buyers are and where most vendors think buyers are is bigger than the coverage suggests. And it's moving fast. The vendors sitting on their current playbooks aren't going to get a warning. They're going to get a quiet run of deals that close slower, renew at lower rates, and eventually don't close at all - and by the time that pattern is obvious, the buyers will have already found someone who was actually ready for them.