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The Unseen Forces Redefining Analyst Relations and Buyer Influence

I have written several articles on how the analyst relations (AR) industry is undergoing a fundamental shift driven by AI, including How Industry Analyst Relations Is Evolving in the New Age of AI and The New Role of Analyst Relations in the AI-Driven Buyer Journey. Last week, I attended an in-person conference, KCG Connects 2026, to gain better insights into this change and its implications for my clients. What stood out most is this: the industry is no longer as unified a market, with the top three firms dominating influence and activity. It has now split into a market for Gartner and one for all other firms. This change has several implications for how you should best manage and leverage the ROI on your analyst relations program.

As a fractional AR leader, my role is to help companies navigate this divide. The forces redefining analyst relations are not theoretical. They are already shaping how influence works in real buying cycles. Staying current isn’t optional anymore. It’s how you stay competitive. Here are the key takeaways I learned from attending this event.

How Industry Analyst Relations Is Evolving in the New Age of AI

What marketers, product leaders, and technology companies need to know about the shifting industry analyst relations landscape.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working in the Analyst Relations (AR) profession. Over that time, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with analysts at many firms, across a wide range of industries, technologies, and engagements. I’ve worked with large global analyst organizations, boutique research firms, and highly specialized independent experts. Each relationship has offered a different perspective on how companies communicate value, how markets develop, and how buyers ultimately make decisions.

Across those two decades, the AR discipline has steadily evolved. New technologies emerged. Industries transformed. Entire categories of enterprise software appeared where none existed before. Yet even with those shifts, the core purpose of analyst relations remained fairly consistent.

Today, however, we are living through one of the most far-reaching periods of change I can recall in my career.

The driving force behind it is artificial intelligence.

Marketing Disruption in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Today, marketing disruption driven by artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. It is visible in daily workflows, team structures, and performance expectations. Entire marketing functions that once required weeks of coordination now happen in hours. AI has compressed time, reduced friction, and redefined what effective marketing looks like.

The Edge Awakens: Why the Future of AI Won’t Live in the Cloud

For years, enterprises treated the cloud as the ultimate destination for computing. Centralized infrastructure promised scale, accessibility, and predictable cost. Data lakes grew endlessly, and AI models flourished in vast clusters of remote compute power. The future of AI may now bring the end of the cloud’s golden era.

The push to put everything on the cloud worked – until the laws of physics and economics caught up. Latency, bandwidth, privacy, and energy are now real constraints. Every byte that crosses a network consumes time, power, and money. As AI models grow larger and more complex, the cost of moving data often outweighs the value of processing it.

This is where the next chapter in the Future of AI begins. Intelligence is migrating from distant data centers to the physical world, bringing data closer to its source. The cloud was the foundation, but the Edge is becoming the next frontier.

Will AI Shatter the Old Walls Between Software and Hardware?

I’ve spent many years in high-tech leadership, having worked in several product marketing and analyst relations roles. I’ve overseen rebranding campaigns, new product launches, and messaging strategies, working with many teams focused on delivering products that bridge multiple architectures and deployment strategies. My experience has been primarily from a perspective of enterprise software. This includes understanding buyer personas, value propositions, and how to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership. More recently, I’ve begun working in the hardware and chip development industry, in the area of AI semiconductor design. Interestingly, I see more parallels today between the software and hardware industries – a convergence I attribute to the increasing influence of AI.

Now the direction is to orchestrate AI capabilities across hardware and software platforms. This shift is an “agentic” transformation. This wasn’t always the case. In September 2024, Salesforce was an early pioneer in taking a software approach to building agents. One of their Dreamforce 2024 tracks, Build Innovative ISV Apps with Agentforce, discussed how “ISV partners can build Agents and actions for Agentforce using Apex, flows, and prompt templates.”

I don’t recall any conversations about taking an agentic strategy to hardware back in 2024, but I might have missed it! My focus at that time was on closely monitoring the field service management vertical of the enterprise software stack.

The New Role of Analyst Relations in the AI-Driven Buyer Journey

Marketing has transformed many times over the past two decades. The rise of websites reshaped commerce. SEO altered how companies attract buyers. Now, artificial intelligence is driving another major disruption – possibly the largest yet. The constant theme is clear: how to best invest resources to elevate brand awareness and customer engagement. The methods keep evolving, and the rules shift every few years.

At the Product Marketing Alliance Analyst Relations Summit on August 21, 2025, this shift was on full display. I attended the track titled “If GenAI can’t find you, neither can your buyers: The new role of AR in an AI-driven, buyer-led world.” The session was hosted by Rick Nash, CEO of Spotlight, and James Cadwallader, CEO of Profound. Together, they addressed how LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and Anthropic are incorporating industry analyst content and other third-party sources to shape AI-generated outputs. The message was clear: the role of analyst relations (AR) is entering a new era of importance within the AI-Driven Buyer Journey.

Those interested in watching the entire presentation can do so by registering to attend the Analyst Relations Summit. Once you have registered and created a profile, you should then be able to access the recordings.

Marketing With Agentic AI—What You Need To Know

The pace of AI development is astonishing—especially in marketing—where Agentic AI is taking root faster than almost anywhere else. These observations became crystal clear after I attended last week’s HSE Agentic AI Summit, hosted by Julia Nimchinski (shout out for a great conference!). Tech companies are already replacing entire functions with AI agents. These aren’t just tools. They’re early signs of a shift toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).