AI is no longer just something marketers bolt onto the stack to make legacy processes faster

According to Scott Brinker’s latest chiefmartec analysis, we’re now entering a very different era one where buyers are quietly arming themselves with AI agents that upend the entire marketing and sales dynamic

And yes… that includes AI “cold calling” sellers

Scott cites a striking stat:

90.3% of participants in their AI & Data in Marketing study say they’re using AI agents somewhere in their martech stack.

Now, his readership skews tech-savvy, so we shouldn’t treat that number as gospel

But it confirms the direction of travel: AI agents in marketing are real, they’re active, and they’re already reshaping workflows

The surprising part?
Most of this early AI adoption is simply automating traditional, legacy marketing playbooks

Faster, yes. Smarter? Not really

Because the real disruption isn’t inside the martech stack at all

It’s happening on the buyer’s side

Scott describes what he calls “the Great Rewiring of the Buyer’s Journey.” Marketers are losing the visibility and control they once relied on, because buyers now use LLMs and AI agents as their first point of engagement, not brand channels

You’ve probably heard the phrase already:
AEO is the new SEO.
SEO was about being found on Google
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), is about being surfaced by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini

And as Scott puts it, marketers trying to optimise for this shift are “chasing a bullet train with a bicycle.”

His 2026 Martech research reinforces the gap:

• 63% of marketing teams recognise buyer behaviour is shifting to AI-driven search

• But only 14% have actually instrumented for it

In other words: everyone sees the wave coming, but almost nobody has built the surfboard

And here’s where things get fascinating
Scott argues that buyer-side AI agents are evolving so quickly that sellers are about to face something they've never encountered before:

AI-initiated inbound calls from the buyer side

While B2B sales teams have been busy deploying AI SDRs to spam buyers with “outbound efficiency,” the buyer’s AI agent is flipping the script

Buyers will soon be able to sit back, relax and let their AI negotiate, ask questions, or even pre-qualify vendors for them

For buyers: pure efficiency
For sellers: an unpredictable surge of inbound AI-generated conversations they can’t ignore

Because if you hang up?
Your competitor’s AI won’t

Scott also raises the big question hovering over the industry:
Will we trust agent-to-agent buying and selling?
We’re not there yet

Trust still requires human oversight

And if we believe that the most human company wins and that buying still needs human judgement then the only winning strategy is to build a brand that feels human, relatable, and accessible

That means having a deliberate, mature social strategy and methodology 
Not automation
Not spam
Not chatbots
But human presence at scale

Conclusion
The shift Scott Brinker highlights isn’t about marketers using better tools, it’s about buyers gaining superpowers

AI is moving from “information engine” to “action engine,” and buyers are already ahead of most brands

If sellers want to stay relevant, they need to stop clinging to legacy funnels and start showing up where trust is built: on social, through people, with humanity

Because in a world where AI does the cold calling, the real differentiator will be the one thing AI can’t replicate you