69% of Buyers Want a Rep to Check the AI

Here is a number that cuts against the story most sales leaders have been told. In a Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers, 67% said they prefer a sales rep-free experience. In the same survey, 69% said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. Same buyers, same survey, two answers that look like they should not both be true.

Both are in Gartner’s May 20, 2026 releases, and the second one is the one that should change what you do on Monday. The first tells you buyers want to do much of the work without you. The second tells you that when it comes to checking AI-generated insights, most of them say they would rather do it with a rep.

What Gartner actually reported

Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers from August through September 2025. Per its release, “Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights”:

• Buyers reported using an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase.
• 45% said they used GenAI, primarily to gather information on vendors and products.
• 67% prefer a sales rep-free experience, and 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience.
• 51% said they are more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI, while 49% said they are more likely to encounter misleading information from a sales rep.
• Reps remain the most important information source when buyers are researching a business problem or need, identifying a preferred supplier and securing internal support, and finalizing the purchase.

Robert Blaisdell, a VP Analyst in Gartner’s Sales practice, put it this way in the release: “Buyers still turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights” and support decision-making at critical moments in the journey.

A companion Gartner release from the same day, “Gartner Survey Finds Sales Organizations That Provide AI-Enabled Next Best Actions Are 2.6x More Likely to Achieve Commercial Growth”, drew on the same 645 buyers. Compared with GenAI, buyers were:

• 28 percentage points more likely to say a sales rep helped them advance to the next step in the purchase process
• 32 percentage points more likely to say a rep made them feel confident in the purchase decision
• 39 percentage points more likely to say a rep understood their needs
• 21 percentage points more likely to say a rep helped quantify the benefits for their organization

Gartner also reported that buyers who spent more time with supplier reps reported the lowest levels of dysfunction, and that buying groups with low dysfunction were 13x more likely to report high-quality deals.

Our take: the call is where the checking happens

This part is our read, not Gartner’s. If most buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a rep, then for those buyers the call is less about learning what you sell and more about testing what they already believe. That changes what a good call sounds like.

A rep who finds out what the buyer has concluded, tests it, and helps them quantify what it means for their business is doing the job Gartner’s buyers said reps do better than GenAI: understanding needs, building confidence, and quantifying benefits.

Those are coachable behaviors. They are also the behaviors a manager cannot see from a CRM field or a pipeline review. You find out whether a rep asked “what have you already looked at, and what did it tell you?” by hearing the call.

What the 67% number does and does not tell you

It is easy to read “67% prefer a sales rep-free experience” and conclude the rep is on the way out. Read the rest of the release before you do. Gartner reports that 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience, and in the same survey reports that reps remain the most important information source at three points: researching a business problem or need, identifying a preferred supplier and securing internal support, and finalizing the purchase.

Our read: preference and behavior are two different things, and Gartner’s headline numbers are preferences. Buyers can prefer to be left alone and still say they would rather check the answer with a rep. Gartner’s 51% to 49% split on who is more likely to mislead them is the part worth sitting with. Buyers are not treating the rep as the trusted party and the machine as the suspect. They are wary of both.

For a manager, that makes the first few minutes of a call worth coaching. Buyers reported using an average of seven information sources. A rep’s opening move can be to find out which ones, and what the buyer took from them, before saying anything about the offer.

Where this lands on a team that is already behind

The Bridge Group’s AE Models, Motions & Metrics: 2026 Research Report (Matt Bertuzzi, June 22, 2026) shows the other side of the ledger:

• 48% of reps were at quota in 2026, down from 51% in 2024.
• Average ramp is 6.2 months, which the report labels the highest in study history.
• Median AE OTE is $200K, up from $190K in 2024.
• Experience required at hire is 3.7 years, up from 2.7 years in 2022.

Put the two reports side by side and the picture is plain. 69% of buyers say they prefer to validate with a rep. The people holding that role are costing more, taking longer to ramp, and fewer of them are hitting number. We are not claiming one causes the other, because neither report says so. We are saying the moment buyers say they care about most is the moment your coaching has to reach.

What to do this week

1. Add one discovery question to every call and listen for it. “What have you already looked at, and what did it say?” Pull five recent calls and count how many reps asked it. That number is your starting line.
2. Coach the validation moment, not the pitch. When a buyer repeats something an AI tool told them, the rep’s job is to test it against the buyer’s situation. Pick one call where that happened and walk the rep through what they did with it.
3. Make “quantify it” a scored line on your scorecard. Gartner’s buyers credited reps with helping quantify benefits for their organization. If your sales call scorecard has no line for it, add one.
4. Review the stall, not just the loss. If a buyer goes quiet after the call, the validation probably did not land. The pattern behind this is in our piece on the “let me think about it” stall.
5. Stop assuming a tool covers the coaching. We covered the gap between AI spend and rep skill in AI sales tools are everywhere and most are not working. Gartner’s own CSO finding points the same way: organizations that prioritize upskilling sellers on AI are 2.4x more likely to achieve strong revenue growth.

The one-line version

Gartner’s numbers say 69% of buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a rep. Our read: if that moment goes badly, you will not find out from the CRM. You find out from the call.

That is the problem eNZeTi is built for. It is how a sales manager coaches every call without listening to every call, so the validation moment gets coached instead of guessed at.