The future of AI in B2B is finally coming into focus, and not every prediction this year hinges on it. This report lays out six predictions for 2025, spanning how companies hire for entry-level roles, who owns customer experience, where analytics investment should go, the real limits of generative AI, the shifting role of inside sales, and how modern search can grow revenue from long-tail products.
(For the year ahead, see our predictions for 2026.)
Prediction 1: Entry-level roles morph into apprenticeships
KPMG US chief executive Paul Knopp described a brewing crisis in accounting, with firms facing a shortage of new accountants as college grows more expensive and finance graduates find lucrative roles elsewhere. He told the Financial Times he now supports four years of undergraduate study plus an apprenticeship that replaces the traditional fifth year. We’re seeing the same dynamic in the changing shape of B2B eCommerce hiring. Grade inflation makes it harder to identify top performers from a transcript, even as customer expectations keep rising.
Businesses can’t lower their standards accordingly. In fact, the standards are going up, not down, because customer expectations are going up, not down.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
Converting an entry-level job into an apprenticeship gives a company time to evaluate skills and fit before a full-time commitment, pairing a candidate with a proven employee in real scenarios that matter. One industrial manufacturing executive finds apprentices close to home by building relationships with local high schools and colleges, speaking to classes a few days a year, and hiring marketing interns from those schools, which also earns the company priority on projects that used to go to competitors.
Prediction 2: Customer experience becomes a hot potato
Across dozens of Master B2B events, nearly every executive calls improving customer experience a top-three priority. The paradox is that when asked who owns it, the answers are consistently inconsistent. Some name the CEO, who in a multibillion-dollar company is not weighing in on website functionality. Others say the customer owns the experience, which usually means no one inside the company does.
The fix borrows from the software playbook: hire a senior product manager to own customer experience, responsible for understanding customer needs and working across teams to prioritize, spec, and build the functionality. The role is common in software and some B2C companies, so the talent pool is deep, and recent Forum job postings suggest demand is growing in B2B. The hard part is convincing today’s assorted owners that a senior product manager is the way to turn their ideas into reality.
We make the fuller case for a dedicated customer experience owner in our maturity research.
Prediction 3: A renewed emphasis on analytics
When Master B2B asked more than 100 B2B executives about their strategic priorities for the next 6 to 12 months, offering more than a dozen choices, analytics and reporting was selected most often by a wide margin. That follows last year’s call that ROI cases would move from incremental to existential, as companies favor channels with the lowest cost to serve and the least friction for buyers.
A Harvard Business Review framework groups analytics into three types: descriptive, where humans make the decisions; predictive, where machines surface likely outcomes and humans choose the path; and prescriptive, where machines manage autonomously. Given the investment pouring into AI, it is tempting to jump straight to prescriptive. The foundation comes first. Without solid descriptive and predictive analytics, the broader organization will not be ready to use prescriptive solutions generated through AI. We see 2025 as the year B2B companies shore up that foundation and make sure they are telling the right stories through data.
Prediction 4: Generative AI becomes a 70% solution
Almost every executive roundtable ends on AI. After two years of the hype cycle, from amazement to enthusiasm to disappointment to exhaustion, the picture is clearer. In 2025, generative AI will get teams roughly 70% of the way to solving a problem, not all the way there.
Need product descriptions at scale? GenAI gets you most of the way but still needs human review. Search ads across thousands of variations? It helps, though trained people and existing software still govern the process. A customer service chatbot that answers in your brand voice with deep product knowledge? Close to 70% when done well, and that is a big if. Seventy percent is meaningful enough to justify the investment without pretending the first generation of tools fully replaces the work teams do today. A business case that acknowledges the remaining gap is also one a CFO is more likely to approve.
Prediction 5: AI-enabled commerce starts taking share from inside sales
Nine years ago, Andy Hoar’s research report “Death of a B2B Salesman” argued that well-trained inside sales and customer service reps could close deals once reserved for outside sales. Generative AI extends continue to reshape inside sales. eCommerce sites already handle easy reorders and subscriptions, and AI chatbots are starting to field a meaningful share of routine questions that once arrived as calls or emails.
As Andy described on a recent Friday 15 podcast, a chatbot can answer a question on the site and offer to book the transaction. If the buyer says yes, the order never touches inside sales, outside sales, or customer service. AI will not answer everything, and buyers making larger purchases still want a person. The open question is whether that person needs to be an expensive outside rep, or whether inside sales or customer service can handle it.
We expect to free up time from the inside sales team and change their focus to higher value tasks … more consultative selling and technical advisory.
Brian Beck, Master B2B
Prediction 6: Better search supercharges long-tail product sales
Long-tail products are the 80% to 95% of SKUs that make up only a small share of total revenue. Across a recent roundtable series, practitioners kept returning to advanced search as the way to grow that revenue. A midsized HVAC distributor described the tension of carrying hundreds of thousands of SKUs, where putting everything on the site can get in the way of finding anything.
We need to find a way of balancing having everything on the site with getting people to the products that they want.
Midsized HVAC distributor executive
Practitioners suggested several fixes for the clutter that comes from surfacing long-tail products: show them only through targeted faceted search, return them only for specific search terms rather than all of them, or build dedicated landing pages so they surface in key queries. We expect 2025 to highlight next-generation search, guided selling, and a deeper understanding of intent that let sellers present a wider range of core and adjacent products to buyers at the right time.
This connects to unlocking long-tail growth, where the same dynamics play out.