Recap from the Forrester B2B Summit: Where GTM is headed right now

We just got back from Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix. Three days on the floor, a lot of booth conversations, and a few things that kept coming up no matter who we talked to.

Here’s what was actually top of mind.

1. Tool overkill is the real execution killer

Everyone at Forrester knows AI for GTM is non-negotiable at this point. That conversation is over. The new one – and it came up constantly – is about what happens when you’ve bought into every promising solution on the market and somehow ended up with less clarity than before.

The sheer volume of tools, big promises and very little guidance on how to actually use them, is holding teams back more than the absence of AI ever did. Most tools add tasks, not clarity. Thousands of stranded insights sitting in platforms nobody opens aren’t helping anyone execute better.

The vendors in the room are starting to hear it. The appetite for consolidation, for platforms that actually reduce cognitive load rather than add to it, was one of the loudest undercurrents of the conference. There’s a lot of room for improvement here – and the teams that figure it out first will have a real structural advantage.

2. Native AI is having a moment

If tool overload was the frustration, native AI was the aspiration.

People are tired of decade-old platforms that bolted AI on later and are now struggling to reconcile legacy UI with genuinely agentic workflows. The seams show. The workarounds multiply. And GTM teams – who don’t have time to babysit software – are noticing.

The appetite for platforms built AI-first from the ground up has never been louder. Not AI as a feature. Not AI as a tab you click into. AI as the foundation the whole workflow is built on, so that every interaction gets smarter, every update happens automatically, and the team’s energy goes toward selling – not managing the tools that are supposed to help them sell.

Needless to say: music to our ears.

3. Human skills are still the headline

Even with AI dominating every session, the conversations that drew the most energy were about empathy, creativity, and judgment. That’s not a coincidence.

Where AI is working well, it’s making humans more effective – handling the operational weight so people can focus on the things that actually require a human: reading the room, building trust, making the call that no model would make. Where it isn’t working well, it’s busy trying to mimic those things instead. And teams can feel the difference.

The best GTM motion isn’t humans with better dashboards, and it isn’t agents replacing reps. It’s agents doing the work that shouldn’t require a human, so the humans can do the work that only they can.

We had a lot of fun in Phoenix

Great conversations, good energy, and a clear sense that the market is sharpening its thinking – moving past the hype and toward the harder, more honest questions about what actually works in production.