2025 was a defining year for go-to-market intelligence. The gap between companies using AI-powered GTM tools and those still running manual prospecting workflows widened dramatically — and the performance delta between these two groups is now too large to ignore. As we head into 2026, here is our assessment of what changed, what it means, and where the market is heading.
Trend 1: AI Moved from Experiment to Infrastructure
In 2024, most B2B companies were still treating AI-powered sales tools as experiments — pilots run by forward-thinking RevOps teams with uncertain executive sponsorship. In 2025, that changed. According to data from our customer base and publicly available surveys, the percentage of mid-market B2B companies with an AI scoring model embedded in their primary CRM workflow grew from roughly 18% in early 2024 to over 40% by the end of 2025.
This is not just a technology adoption story. It reflects a fundamental shift in how revenue leaders think about their stack. AI-powered prioritization is no longer a competitive differentiator for early adopters — it is becoming table stakes for any team that wants to operate at peak efficiency. The companies that haven't made this transition are increasingly aware of it, and 2026 is likely to see an acceleration of the adoption curve.
Trend 2: Intent Data Quality Wars
The intent data market consolidated significantly in 2025, with several smaller vendors either shutting down or being absorbed into larger platforms. The survivors are differentiated primarily by signal quality — specifically, the freshness, specificity, and behavioral fidelity of the signals they can provide.
Buyers have become much more sophisticated about what questions to ask: How recent is the signal? What is the source, and can you show me the methodology? How do you handle company name disambiguation at scale? What is your false positive rate for a given intent topic? These are not questions that revenue teams were asking at scale two years ago. They are now standard evaluation criteria for any serious intent data RFP.
The result is good for buyers: intent data quality across the industry has improved materially in 2025, driven by competitive pressure and more demanding procurement standards. The challenge is that higher-quality data has also become more expensive — making the ROI conversation more important than ever, and raising the stakes for platforms that can demonstrate clear pipeline impact rather than just impressive data coverage statistics.
Trend 3: RevOps Moved to the Center of GTM Strategy
Revenue Operations emerged as the organizational function with the highest leverage on GTM performance in 2025. As the tools available to RevOps teams improved — specifically in areas like AI scoring, pipeline analytics, and workflow automation — the function's influence expanded beyond its traditional territory of CRM administration and reporting.
The best RevOps leaders in 2025 are functioning as strategic architects: designing the signal flows, automation rules, and data models that determine how every member of the revenue team spends their time. This is a fundamentally different role than "the person who manages Salesforce fields," and it requires a different skill set — one that is increasingly scarce and highly compensated.
Trend 4: The Personalization Arms Race
As AI tools made it easier to generate personalized outreach at scale, the bar for what counts as "personalized" rose dramatically. In early 2024, referencing a company's recent funding round in a cold email felt like genuine personalization. By late 2025, buyers had seen enough AI-generated "I noticed your company recently raised Series B funding" emails to become immune to that approach.
The teams winning at personalization in 2025 are those who can reference genuinely specific behavioral signals — the kind that the prospect is unlikely to have seen referenced in another email. "We noticed you've been evaluating Salesforce competitors based on your team's recent activity" is not yet a cliché. The window before it becomes one may be shorter than you think.
What to Expect in 2026
Based on the trends we are tracking, here are our predictions for the GTM intelligence market heading into 2026:
- AI-generated outreach will require new verification layers. As LLM-generated emails proliferate, buyers will increasingly use tools that flag AI-generated content. The advantage will shift back to signal quality — because if you have the right signal, you don't need AI to tell you what to say.
- CRM data quality will become a boardroom issue. Companies are starting to recognize that their AI models are only as good as the data they train on, and the CRM records at the foundation of that data are riddled with decay. Expect significant investment in data cleansing infrastructure in 2026.
- Intent data will move further up the funnel. The most sophisticated users of intent data in 2025 are already using it to inform product roadmap decisions, not just sales outreach. Expect this trend to accelerate as the data gets better and the tools for analyzing it improve.
2025 established the foundation. 2026 is where the serious competitive separation begins.