Aug 27, 2026 | 6 minute read
AI has compressed software buying, but mostly in the discovery stage. For commerce software evaluations, buyers expect to get hands-on with the product, and see for themselves how it solves their problems.
written by Bryan House
Contrary to popular belief, AI has not made B2B software easier to buy. It has made software easier to find. Yet, evaluation (the stage after the shortlist and before the signature) has become the longest, most contested part of the buying journey. According to G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report: The Evaluation Maze, evaluation now consumes roughly 40% of the total buying cycle, more than any other stage.
That’s truly good news if you give buyers a chance to get hands-on with a proof-of-value (PoV) before they buy your product. In fact, I’d argue that the more prospects get to test your commerce software (or any software for that matter) against their own pain points and constraints, the longer your customer relationship will last.
For most of the last two decades, "shortening the buying journey" meant getting in front of the buyer earlier and staying in front of them longer. AI collapsing the first half of the funnel into something closer to a single query.
All of this data describes a faster shortlist. What happens after the shortlist is where the most interesting part of the story starts, especially for those who excel at solving problems and relationship-building.
The single best way to validate an AI search result is to make good on the promises you’re making with a PoV. The problem is that most vendors’ purchasing processes are built to maximize their own outcomes, not address the customer’s problems to be solved in the evaluation process.
I’ve seen this happen throughout my career, in the form of:
All of these plays are about optimizing a vendor’s own sales workflow, with the hope that a solution to the customer’s problem demonstrates itself along the way. Working in open source software at Acquia completely upended my view of this approach. No prospective customer required vendor permission to download Drupal and try it out. They just downloaded the software and tried it. Turns out, that’s how everyone wants to buy software in 2026. While AI is great for compressing the search for options, the PoV is still king for deciding whether a vendor can be trusted to solve a buyer’s problems.
For any software provider, how you act in the evaluation phase matters most. That’s where human judgement comes into the picture to battle-test what’s required to do the job, how well features align with requirements, and whether the vendor can adapt when they don’t.
Intelligence is pattern-matching against rules — comparing vendors on price, feature checklists, and review scores. AI is very good at intelligence, and it's why discovery collapsed from weeks to minutes or hours.
Judgment is about hands-on access to the solution. There are too many horror stories of deals closed on the back of a slick PowerPoint that ultimately went belly-up because the product didn’t do what the sales team said it did. The scars are real and buying teams don’t make this mistake anymore.
Instead, buyers are now judging whether a vendor's specific claims hold up against their environment, edge cases, and risk tolerance. Judgment requires contact with the product, and interaction with the people who build it. Forrester found more than 60% of business buyers report using some form of trial before purchase — from limited pilots to paid sandbox environments — and that share rises to 78% for purchases over $10 million. And G2's Digital Markets research found 50% of buyers cite a trial as the decisive factor in their purchase decision, compared to 35% influenced primarily by a sales pitch.
Put the discovery-stage data and the evaluation-stage data side by side and it’s easier to see what buyers expect.
Closing the deal requires the buyer to evaluate a commerce product against something close to their real environment, quickly, without a six-month SOW-governed implementation standing between the trial and the truth. Fortunately, that’s where we’re focused here at Elastic Path, and it’s been a key factor in our success.
Because AI shortened the discovery stage, not the trust stage. G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found evaluation is now the longest part of the buying cycle, driven by rising internal resistance to AI-influenced decisions and increased CFO scrutiny on approved purchases.
No. TrustRadius found 94% of buyers fact-check AI-generated research at least some of the time, and Gartner found 69% specifically consult a sales rep to validate what an AI tool told them. AI informs the shortlist; humans and hands-on product experiences still govern the decision.
A decisive one. Forrester found more than 60% of buyers use some form of trial or PoV before purchasing, rising to 78% for deals over $10 million, and G2 found 50% of buyers cite the trial itself as the deciding factor.
Both, but most are over-invested in the first and under-invested in the second. Being discoverable by an AI answer engine gets you on the shortlist. Winning the deal still depends on whether a buyer can validate your product against their real environment, which is an evaluation-stage problem.
Because a composable, API-first platform lets a buyer stand up a real, narrow proof of a specific PoV quickly — which is what today's evaluation-heavy buyers are asking for — rather than forcing a long implementation before the trust question can even be tested.
Schedule a demo to see how Elastic Path delivers unified commerce for leading global brands.