Generative AI provides succinct product comparisons for B2B buyers, including pricing; vendors who choose to omit pricing information risk never even being considered for the short list
A few months back, a session at a conference on generative AI caught my attention. The speaker was demonstrating how buyers were using the tool to compare and contrast products they were interested in buying.
While marketing strives to put their best foot forward – highlighting why they are different and detailing their unique value, features and benefits – generative AI did the opposite. With a few prompts, it had compiled a matrix-style list of products for a side-by-side comparison. And it included pricing.
This has the potential to completely upend the marketing process because it’s changing human behavior. Generative AI neutralizes nearly everything marketing does to point out how they are better, faster or cheaper. It lays it all out, all of the advantages and disadvantages, including costs, in plain language.
It’s not just theory anymore, but reality
This isn’t theoretical pontificating either. Constantine von Hoffman illustrated this anecdote in a recent piece for Martech titled, AI tools are rewriting the B2B buying process in real time:
“TrustInsight.AI co-founder and chief data scientist Chris Penn provided a clear example of this shift.
When a SaaS vendor raised prices, he asked Gemini Deep Research to identify five alternative providers, ranked by price and fit.”
He quotes Penn summarizing the process:
“In 15 minutes, it gave me a list of five new vendors, all of which had price decreases compared to the vendor I was working with, and I switched to a vendor off the list.”
And nails the impact for the incumbent vendor:
“The original vendor never knew why they’d lost the business.”
And then quotes Penn again to describe the effects for all vendors everywhere:
“If I said I want a new CRM, and the cost has to be $30 a month per user per seat or less, and you don’t have pricing on your website, guess what? You don’t make the list anymore.”
In other words, vendors who choose to omit or obscure pricing information risk never even being considered for the short list – and they’ll never know it.
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Buyers want price transparency
The desire to know what a product costs is a very logical question to ask when you begin searching for solutions. Surveys, like one from TrustRadius conducted in April 2025, note that the number one request from prospective buyers of B2B technology is pricing.
Vendors have been aware of it too. Search trends have shown that “pricing” is one of the most searched for terms with respect to a product. Many rushed to add a pricing page to their websites. These pages have the word pricing in the URL and description, but they don’t actually list the price.
That’s a bait and switch. The expectation of a reasonable person landing on a page for “pricing” is that it will inform them as to the price, and then it doesn’t. This is just another reason why people don’t trust marketing, or businesses for that matter. Omitting relevant information is every bit as manipulative as a lie or a half-truth.
Accelerating existing sales trends
Most of them require you to contact sales to get a price. That means setting up an appointment and enduring endless discovery questions.
The purpose of the discovery used to be to understand a prospective customer’s needs, but that’s not what happens anymore. These have evolved into a process designed to extract as much information as they can to find leverage to close a deal.
Nobody wants to endure that anymore. People will do anything to avoid a conversation with sales. A survey by Gartner found 61% of B2B buyers do not want to talk to a salesperson. And the notion that buyers two-thirds of the way through their buying process by the time they talk to sales has been in play for B2B for ~15+ years.
So generative AI isn’t just changing behavior, it’s building on and accelerating trends that have already been in play for a long time. For sure, Chris Penn is an early adopter, but generative AI is so easy to use, and presents such a simple comparison that it’s a good bet it’s going to play a key role in most procurements going forward.
Benefits and drawbacks of providing transparent pricing
This is going to be a hard change for vendors to adopt. Pricing information has been a secret that’s been woven into corporate culture. Some of the old arguments for keeping it hidden may have made financial sense previously, but they may not outweigh the benefits anymore.
Here’s how I see the potential benefits of providing transparent pricing as generative AI gets increasingly adopted:
- Potential benefits of price transparency:
- Inclusion in AI-generated buyer short lists;
- Better qualified leads – matched to your pricing;
- An opportunity to earn trust from prospects; and
- For now, first movers will stand out as unique.
Everything has benefits and drawbacks. That’s the nature of business – organizing and deploying finite resources for maximum effect. Here are some of the potential drawbacks of price transparency in the era of generative AI.
- Potential drawbacks of price transparency:
- Better informed competition;
- Risk of pricing battles in the market; and
- Negotiation leverage for buyers during deals.
I don’t think there’s any way around it. My recommendation to vendors is to price their products fairly and, at the bare minimum, at least provide a price range. If you do not, you risk never even making it into the consideration set.
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