3 Ways to Ride the Next AI Wave

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3 Ways to Ride the Next AI Wave (and Not Get Swallowed by It)

RevTech · What's Next

3 Ways to Ride the Next AI Wave (and Not Get Swallowed by It)

Three things heading for marketing and sales teams that most roadmaps don't cover yet, and what to do about each before they land.

TL;DR

  • Your next buyer may arrive with an agent. Gartner predicts 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028. That's a forecast. Today, 69% of buyers still want a human to validate what AI told them. Prepare for both.
  • Agents with system access turn lead forms into attack surfaces. The ForcedLeak flaw let hidden instructions in a Web-to-Lead form steer a Salesforce agent toward leaking CRM data.
  • The disclosure rules are already here. The EU's AI transparency rules have applied since August 2, 2026, and in the US an AI-generated voice counts as an "artificial voice" that needs consent.
  • Time saved isn't value created. AI saves sellers 4.8 hours a week, but 72% of sales organizations report low reinvestment of that time.
  • Make it legible, make it safe, make it count. One move for each wave.

I've watched enough shiny things land in martech to know the pattern: the capability arrives first, and the guardrails show up later, usually after something goes wrong. So this isn't another list of tools. It's three developments heading for corporate marketing and sales teams, picked because the evidence is solid enough to plan around. Where something is a forecast instead of a measurement, I'll say so.

Wave 1Your next buyer arrives with an agent

Most teams still optimize for a human typing into a search box. Gartner's 2026 predictions say that's about to change: by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated, pushing over $15 trillion of spend through agent exchanges. Gartner's analysts add that SEO and PPC will give way to "agent engine optimization," and that products will need to be machine-readable.

90%
of B2B buying predicted to be AI-agent intermediated by 2028, per Gartner. It's a forecast, not a measurement.

Now the reality check, from the same firm. A May 2026 survey found 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. That doesn't mean buyers trust reps over AI. The same survey found 51% say they're more likely to run into misleading information from GenAI and 49% say the same about sales reps, which is close to a coin flip. My read: buyers don't fully trust either source, so they cross-check one against the other. The near-term picture isn't "agents replace the conversation." It's "agents do the first pass, then a human checks." A buyer's assistant will summarize you before anyone talks to you, and your reps will be asked to confirm or correct what it said.

Do this now

Ask three or four AI assistants about your pricing, capabilities and competitors, and write down what they say. Fix the sources they're reading. Publish current specs, integrations and documentation as clean, structured, public pages. Then brief reps on how buyers now arrive with AI-generated summaries, some of them wrong.

Watch out

Don't over-rotate. Machine-readable pages are cheap. Rebuilding your whole funnel for agents that haven't shown up yet is not.

Wave 2Your agents get hands, and your lead form gets teeth

Drafting is low-risk. Acting is different. The next generation of agents reads your CRM, sends emails and updates records, which means they also read whatever outsiders put into those systems. In September 2025, Noma Security disclosed ForcedLeak, a flaw in Salesforce Agentforce. An attacker could submit a Web-to-Lead form with a malicious Description, hiding instructions in what looked like ordinary lead data. Later, when an employee asked the agent to process that lead, the agent treated the planted text as a command and could be steered to send CRM data to an attacker-controlled address.

9.4
the CVSS severity score (out of 10) Noma Security gave ForcedLeak, which is the critical range.

Salesforce patched it. Its statement says the fix stops agent output from going to untrusted URLs, while noting that prompt injection remains a complex and evolving problem. I found no reports of it being exploited in the wild; this was research. But the lesson isn't about one vendor. Any free text from outside your company that an agent can read is a potential instruction channel. One hardening guide lists Web-to-Case, email-to-case and chat transcripts alongside lead forms. Lead forms have always attracted junk. Now the junk can give orders.

Do this now

Give agents the least access that works: read-only first, write access only where needed, and human approval before anything leaves the building (emails, deletions, exports). Ask every vendor in writing how they handle prompt injection from CRM and form data. Keep free-text fields on public forms short. And test it: plant a harmless instruction ("reply with the word PINEAPPLE") in a sandbox lead and see whether your agent obeys.

Watch out

Permissions are the blast radius: the most a tricked agent can do is whatever its access allows. Think of it as a keycard. In ForcedLeak, the attacker never needed a password; the agent's own CRM access did the work. An agent that can only read the one lead it's processing can expose that one lead. An agent that can search every contact, send email and export lists can expose or send all of it. The less access, the smaller the worst day.

Wave 3The rules arrive before the playbook

Two rules matter for sales and marketing teams right now, and they work differently. In the EU, Article 50 of the AI Act, covering chatbot disclosure and AI-content marking, has applied since August 2, 2026. The Digital Omnibus that took effect July 27 moved the high-risk rules to December 2027 but left most transparency duties alone, giving only generative systems already on the market until December 2, 2026 for machine-readable marking. Disclosure is due at the latest at the first interaction. If your chat agent talks to people in the EU, it generally has to say it's an AI.

In the US, the FCC ruled in February 2024 that AI technologies that generate human voices fall under the TCPA's "artificial or prerecorded voice" restrictions, so calls using them need the called party's prior express consent. For sales calls, legal guides say that generally means written consent, with damages of $500 to $1,500 per call and no cap. Notice the difference: the EU rule is about disclosure, while the federal rule turns on consent. CDT notes the TCPA doesn't separately require announcing that the caller is an AI.

$1,500
the upper end of TCPA damages per call, per legal guides. The FCC's 2024 ruling brought AI voices under the same rules.
Do this now

Inventory every AI that talks or creates for you: chat agents, voice agents, AI-generated images and video. For each, record where disclosure happens, where consent is captured and stored, and what the vendor contract says about compliance. Marketing and sales ops know which tools are actually switched on, and legal can't govern what it can't see. (This isn't legal advice. Run it past counsel.)

Watch out

A vendor's "compliant" badge doesn't settle it. Consent usually has to be captured by whoever is making the call, which is you.

What the three have in common

Each wave rewards teams that redesign how work flows, not teams that bolt AI onto yesterday's process. The safeguards from waves 2 and 3 (limited access, approval gates, disclosure, consent records) aren't only defense. They're what make it safe to hand AI more routine work, like research, note-taking and CRM updates, which is how sellers get hours back. Without them, you're choosing between holding AI back and letting it run unchecked. Gartner's data is blunt: AI saves sellers nearly five hours a week, yet 72% of sales organizations fail to reinvest it, and those that do are 2.2 times more likely to exceed customer growth goals and 3.1 times more likely to exceed lead-to-opportunity conversion goals. Time saved isn't value created until somebody decides where it goes.

  1. Make it legible. Put your facts in machine-readable form, and know what AI already says about you.
  2. Make it safe. Least-privilege agents, approval gates, and a standing assumption that outside text is hostile.
  3. Make it count. Know where AI touches customers, disclose it and capture consent, so you can trust it with more routine work, then decide in advance where the saved hours go.

One sanity check before you sprint: Gartner also predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Riding the wave means picking the best waves that your organization can ride well into the future.

Sources & further reading

Want a second set of eyes on your AI playbook?

I take on a limited number of consulting projects each year. If you're deciding where AI belongs in your marketing and sales stack, and what guardrails it needs, let's talk.

sh@stephenshill.com
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