Generative AI provides succinct product comparisons for B2B buyers, including pricing; vendors who choose to omit pricing information risk never even being considered for the short list
A few months back, a session at a conference on generative AI caught my attention. The speaker was demonstrating how buyers were using the tool to compare and contrast products they were interested in buying.
While marketing strives to put their best foot forward – highlighting why they are different and detailing their unique value, features and benefits – generative AI did the opposite. With a few prompts, it had compiled a matrix-style list of products for a side-by-side comparison. And it included pricing.
This has the potential to completely upend the marketing process because its changing human behavior. Generative AI completely neutralizes nearly everything marketing does to point out how they are better, faster or cheaper. It lays it all out, all of the advantages and disadvantages, including costs, in plain language.
It’s not just theory anymore, but reality
This isn’t theoretical pontificating either. Constantine von Hoffman illustrated this anecdote in a recent piece for Martech titled, AI tools are rewriting the B2B buying process in real time:
“TrustInsight.AI co-founder and chief data scientist Chris Penn provided a clear example of this shift.
When a SaaS vendor raised prices, he asked Gemini Deep Research to identify five alternative providers, ranked by price and fit.”
He quotes Penn summarizing the process:
“In 15 minutes, it gave me a list of five new vendors, all of which had price decreases compared to the vendor I was working with, and I switched to a vendor off the list.”
And then nails the impact for the incumbent vendor:
“The original vendor never knew why they’d lost the business.”
And then quote Penn again to describe the effects for all vendors everywhere:
“If I said I want a new CRM, and the cost has to be $30 a month per user per seat or less, and you don’t have pricing on your website, guess what? You don’t make the list anymore.”
In other words, vendors who choose to omit or obscure pricing information risk never even being considered for the short list – and they’ll never know it.
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Buyers want price transparency
The desire to know what a product costs is a very logical question to ask when you begin searching for solutions. Surveys, like one from TrustRadius conducted in April 2025, note that the number one request from prospective buyers of B2B technology is pricing.
Vendors have been aware of it too. Search trends have shown that “pricing” is one of the most searched for terms with respect to a product. Many rushed to add a pricing page to their websites. These pages have the word pricing in the URL and description, but they don’t actually list the price.
That’s a bait and switch. The expectation of a reasonable person landing on a page for “pricing” is that it will inform them as to the price, and then it doesn’t. This is just another reason why people don’t trust marketing, or businesses for that matter. Omitting relevant information is every bit as manipulative as a lie or a half-truth.
Accelerating existing sales trends
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