TAYLORSVILLE, Utah — The B2B buyer is spending less time waiting for a salesperson to explain a product and more time figuring things out independently.

That change is really forcing marketers to reconsider what their content is truly supposed to accomplish and how to bring good results.                                 

Adil Lazar, a digital marketing entrepreneur from Utah, is highlighting a number of changes that he thinks will characterize B2B content marketing in 2026. These include the increasing impact of AI-assisted research, the return of real subject-matter expertise, and a stronger focus on content that aids consumers in making decisions rather than just generating clicks.

The way company buyers investigate possible vendors has already changed. According to a March Gartner poll, 45% of B2B buyers reported using AI in a recent purchase, and 67% of them preferred a rep-free shopping experience. According to Forrester, generative AI is changing how business-to-business consumers find and assess goods and services.

For Lazar, those numbers point to one practical conclusion: content has to do more work before a sales conversation ever happens.

“Your content might be having a sales conversation with someone you have never met in your life,” he elaborated. “If a buyer is researching a problem at 10 p.m., comparing providers, or asking an AI tool what they should look for, your website has to give them something super useful. Nobody is going to wait for a salesperson to answer every basic question.”

That doesn’t mean producing more articles.

In fact, Lazar sees content volume becoming less crucial as businesses become surrounded by an increasing amount of machine-assisted material. The 2026 B2B Content & Marketing Trends research from the Content Marketing Institute similarly points toward strategy, first-party data, personalization, thought leadership, and experiences instead of content volume alone as important differentiators for high-performing teams.  

The first recommendation from Lazar for B2B marketers is to make buyers question the starting point rather than keywords. 

A prospect evaluating a service rarely thinks in terms of a company’s preferred keyword strategy. They want to know what a solution does, whether it will work for their specific circumstances, how much it costs, what can go wrong, how it stacks up against alternatives, and what previous customers have experienced.

Those questions can become the foundation for a much more useful content program.

“Start with the inquiries that your sales team consistently receives,” Lazar advised. “Those inquiries reveal the areas of doubt. This is where quality content can be truly beneficial.

He also expects firsthand expertise to become more valuable, especially as generic AI-generated material becomes more convenient to produce.

For B2B companies, that could mean turning internal knowledge into practical guides, documenting customer experiences, explaining complicated processes, publishing informed opinions, as well as addressing the questions competitors avoid.

According to Adil Lazar, a business does not have to publish regularly to establish itself as a reliable source. It must have something worthwhile to convey. 

As AI is included in research, this distinction becomes even more crucial. The information available about a business can affect how it is portrayed before a prospect ever visits its website, as buyers use AI tools to compare options, summarize marketplaces, or comprehend foreign subjects.

For Lazar, this means that information consistency and content quality are more important than SEO. They contribute to a business’s online reputation.

The third trend he expects to matter in 2026 is the closer relationship between content and the sales process. 

Rather than creating a single stream of “marketing content” and leaving sales teams with a separate collection of presentations and brochures, Lazar sees an opportunity to build content around actual stages of the buying process: problem definition, early education, implementation questions, objection handling, vendor comparison, and post-purchase support.

That approach also makes performance much more convenient to evaluate. 

A piece of content that attracts thousands of visitors but never helps a qualified buyer might be less valuable than a highly specific, helpful guide that generates a handful of serious conversations. 

“Traffic is easy to celebrate,” Adil Lazar said. “The harder question is whether the content helped somebody move forward.”

Lazar’s viewpoint is in line with the general trend of B2B marketing in 2026, which calls for more intentional usage of content as part of the purchasing process and fewer generic publishing initiatives.

His advice for businesses attempting to adapt is simple: speak with consumers, document what the company truly knows, provide honest answers to challenging questions, and create a content library that remains valuable after the original publication date.

According to him, “The best B2B content doesn’t feel like marketing; it feels like someone finally gave you the information you needed to make a decision.”

About Adil Lazar

Adil Lazar is a digital marketing strategist and entrepreneur from Utah who specializes in SEO, content marketing, website creation, local SEO, and AI-focused search tactics. Lazar focuses on effective digital tactics to increase awareness, share knowledge, and drive measurable business growth through his work with companies and Utah Boost.