Every year, the State of B2B eCommerce survey gives us a chance to check whether the conversations we have with practitioners every day line up with the numbers. This year they did, on one theme above all: AI has moved from something executives talk about to something they are spending real money on. At the same time, the fundamentals that determine whether that spending pays off, clean data and a credible way to prove ROI, have not changed.
Here is what practitioners told us across eight areas.
AI has moved from aspiration to action
The clearest shift this year is that AI investment is now concrete rather than aspirational. 81% of practitioners say they are actively spending on AI in the next 12 months, up from 68% in 2025, and 15% report they have already embedded AI into their core eCommerce operations. AI tools and technologies ranked as the number one technology investment priority for 2026 at 55%, ahead of site search and PIM, the foundational investments that usually top this list.
Looking out three to five years, 82% of practitioners expect AI and machine learning for the customer experience to have the most significant impact on B2B commerce, and 37% expect buyers to start purchasing directly through AI chatbots. A meaningful share even expect AI agents to eventually take a place on the org chart as functional contributors in their own right.
For the first time in the survey’s history, the intelligence layer is attracting more investment attention than the transactional platform underneath it. The commerce platform itself ranked fifth among priorities at 31%. Many organizations have already made their core platform investments and are now looking to AI to extract more value from what they already have.
eCommerce performance is improving across the board
The investments made in prior years are starting to show up in the numbers. Comparing 2025 to 2024, conversion rates increased at 60% of organizations, up from 49% the year before. Total orders per customer rose at 55%, average order value improved at 53%, and profitability per online order grew at 45%. The share of sales coming from repeat customers increased at 55% of organizations.
This is exactly the kind of data digital leaders need when they make the case for continued investment. As we heard during the CFO panel at the Master B2B Mindshare Summit, tying your eCommerce narrative directly to business outcome metrics, especially profit, is the most effective way to build and sustain executive support. The growth is almost certainly not evenly distributed, though. The gap between digital leaders and laggards looks to be widening, and the window for slower-moving organizations to close it is shrinking.
Budgets are growing and cuts are rare
B2B eCommerce budgets continue to grow despite economic uncertainty. Half of organizations say their technology investment is increasing or significantly increasing in the next budget year, slightly above last year’s 47%. More telling is the drop in companies pulling back: only 6% report decreasing investment, down from 13% in 2025, and the share reporting a significant increase doubled year over year from 6% to 12%.
Historically, eCommerce budgets were among the first things cut when short-term pressures hit. The fact that organizations are holding or growing digital investment even amid tariff uncertainty suggests eCommerce has crossed a threshold for many companies. It is much harder to cut a budget when the performance data shows digital is measurably working.
Bad data is still the biggest barrier
For the second year in a row, practitioners named data cleanliness and hygiene as their single biggest barrier to growth. It was again the only barrier where not one respondent said it was “not a barrier at all.” When we asked practitioners at Summit roundtables to grade the quality of their own product data, most gave it a B or C.
This matters more now because of where AI sits in the priority list. The most digitally mature organizations we work with follow a clear sequence: clean the data, build the product content foundation, then layer AI on top. Investing in AI before fixing data quality tends to produce underwhelming results, which in turn makes the next round of investment harder to justify.
I’d almost rather have no data than to have to deal with fixing very messy data. — Brian Beck, Co-Founder, Master B2B
Migrating to digital remains the defining challenge
Even with all the attention on AI, the oldest problem is still the biggest one. Migrating the business from offline-centric to digital-centric topped the list of challenges for the second consecutive year, cited by 56% of respondents. Managing product, inventory, and customer data followed at 46%, and improving the customer experience at 42%.
What has changed is the added complexity. This year 21% of practitioners cited deciding what AI-related investments to make as a top challenge, layered on top of the perennial 37% who still struggle to get leadership and cross-functional buy-in for digital. That combination is harder when digital experience at the top is thin: only 14% of practitioners say their most senior leader has extensive digital experience, down sharply from 24% in 2025.
The more challenging work has not changed: demonstrating that digital channels definitively grow revenue, expand customer relationships, and reduce cost to serve. — 2026 State of B2B eCommerce Report
If your CEO came up through sales or finance, the job is to translate digital outcomes into the language they care about: margin, customer retention, and competitive position. Build that case first and the AI conversation becomes much more productive.
Proving ROI is still the hardest part of the job
Despite the improving results, demonstrating the return on digital investment remains difficult. This year, aligning business priorities with technology capabilities became the most commonly cited purchasing challenge at 52%, surpassing budget constraints at 47%, which had topped the list at 59% the year before. Even when organizations have money to spend, they struggle to agree on what they are trying to accomplish.
The proof problem runs deep. Nearly 40% of practitioners cite limited executive buy-in on digital-centric KPIs such as conversion rate and average order value as a top barrier to proving value. Traditional B2B businesses measure success through gross margin, sales rep productivity, and account retention, and those metrics do not easily capture what digital contributes. About 35% also say they lack access to reconciled omnichannel data, so they cannot credibly connect digital engagement to downstream revenue.
The organizations winning the internal investment conversation are the ones that built a measurement framework translating digital activity into outcomes the CFO and CEO already care about. The simplest first step is one many practitioners have never taken: ask your CFO directly how they measure digital success.
The 2026 State of B2B eCommerce Report was produced by Master B2B in partnership with Coveo and SAP, based on a survey of B2B eCommerce practitioners fielded in February 2026.