Most healthcare commercial teams have spent two years thinking about AI as something to put into the product. Very few have looked at what AI is doing to the top of their funnel.
The data on that is now unambiguous, and it is worse than most executives assume.
What buyers are actually doing
G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B decision makers across North America, EMEA and APAC in March 2026. The headline: 51% now start their software research with AI chatbots more often than with Google — up from 29% eleven months earlier. Seventy-one percent use AI chatbots for software research at some point in the process.
The finding that matters commercially is further down.
of B2B buyers chose a different vendor than they had originally planned, based on guidance from an AI chatbot. A third purchased from a vendor they had not previously been aware of at all.
Source: G2 AI Search Insight Report, 1,076 B2B decision makers, March 2026
Two things are happening in that number simultaneously, and they point in opposite directions depending on where you sit.
If you are the incumbent — the known name, the one already on the mental shortlist — AI is displacing you at a rate no channel has managed before. Sixty-nine percent is not erosion. It is reassignment.
If you are the challenger, the same statistic is the best distribution opportunity to appear in a decade. A third of buyers purchased from a vendor they had never heard of, which is an outcome the traditional healthcare sales motion — relationships, conferences, reference calls, analyst reports — is structurally designed to prevent.
G2 also found that AI chatbots now rank as the single largest influence on which vendors make a buyer's shortlist, and that 85% of buyers view a vendor more favorably when it is named in an AI recommendation. The mechanism is not just discovery. It is endorsement.
Why healthcare B2B is more exposed than most categories
Three features of healthcare buying make this sharper here than in general software.
The category question comes before the vendor question. A hospital COO with a surgical cancellation problem does not begin by searching a vendor name. They begin by asking what kinds of solutions exist. That framing — "what companies help hospitals reduce surgical cancellations" — is exactly the query shape generative systems handle best, and exactly the moment a shortlist gets formed. If you are not in the category answer, you are not in the evaluation, and no amount of later sales effort recovers a seat you were never offered.
Buying committees are large and mostly invisible to you. A health system purchase involves clinical, financial, IT, compliance and operational stakeholders. You may have a strong relationship with one of them. The other seven are researching independently, and increasingly that research starts with an assistant rather than a search engine or a peer call. You have no visibility into those sessions and no opportunity to correct what is said in them.
The cycles are long enough that shortlist formation is decisive. When a decision takes nine to eighteen months, the set of vendors under consideration is fixed early and rarely reopened. Category-level visibility is not a lead-generation tactic in that environment. It is the gate.
Missing from the category answer is not a marketing problem. It is a pipeline that never forms.
The queries that decide it
These are the shapes that matter, and they are worth reading as an executive rather than as a marketer. Every one of them produces a named list, and every one of them is currently being answered about your category whether or not you are in the answer.
- Companies that help hospitals reduce surgical cancellations
- Best technology for hospital charge capture
- AI solutions for prior authorization
- Perioperative patient engagement companies
- Healthcare supply chain optimization consulting firms
- What should I look for when evaluating a revenue cycle automation vendor
That last shape — the evaluation-criteria question — deserves particular attention. When a model answers it, it is defining the frame the buyer will use to compare you against competitors. If the criteria it names happen to be your competitors' strengths, you will be evaluated on their terms in every subsequent conversation, and you will never see why.
Where the answers come from in healthcare B2B
The source landscape here differs from the provider side, and it differs from generic B2B too.
Review and comparison platforms carry disproportionate weight — G2's own research found that nearly 45% of buyers named review-site citations as the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI-generated response. Alongside those sit analyst coverage, healthcare trade press, association publications, conference materials, case studies with named health systems, and peer-reviewed or clinically-validated evidence where the category involves clinical claims.
Your own website matters, but less than you would like, and mostly for a specific purpose: giving the model clear, structured, unambiguous material about what you do, who you serve and what you have demonstrably achieved. Marketing copy that describes a transformation journey without naming a problem, a buyer and an outcome gives a retrieval system almost nothing to work with.
There is a related failure worth naming. Companies that have deliberately positioned themselves as category-creating — inventing a term for what they do — frequently find they are invisible in generative answers, because buyers ask about the problem in ordinary language and the company has optimized for a phrase nobody types. The model has no bridge between the two.
What to do
Measure the category, not the brand. The instinct is to ask what AI says about your company. That is worth knowing, but it is the wrong first question. The commercially decisive one is what AI says when your company is not mentioned — the unbranded category and evaluation queries where shortlists actually form. Brand queries mostly tell you whether the description is accurate. Category queries tell you whether you exist.
Then compare against a named competitive set, because a presence figure without competitors is a number with no meaning. And run it properly — multiple runs across the four major platforms, scored consistently — because a single screenshot of a favorable answer is a coincidence you cannot build a strategy on.
The market is early enough that the exercise usually surprises people. We regularly see companies with strong brand recognition and weak category presence, and smaller competitors who happen to have clean, well-structured, widely-cited material appearing in answers far above their market position. That asymmetry will not last indefinitely. It is available now.
Related
Find out whether you are in the category answer
A Share of Discovery assessment measures your presence across the category and evaluation questions your buyers are actually asking — scored against your real competitive set.