Forrester set 2027 B2B Summit dates in Phoenix, GTM teams now have to plan for AI search

Forrester has already put the next North America B2B Summit on operators’ calendars: May 2, 4, 2027 in Phoenix, according to the event page. That seems like a marketing planning footnote until the fine print of Forrester’s messaging lands where RevOps and GTM ops actually live, in discovery, measurement, and cross-functional workflow design for an AI-shaped buying journey.

Forrester is using the Summit platform to argue that buyer autonomy is increasing and sellers are being discovered later, or not at all. In its January 2026 agenda announcement for the 2026 Summit, Forrester said more than 90% of business buyers already use or plan to use generative AI to support purchase decisions. Demand Gen Report’s May 2026 coverage of Forrester’s “GTM singularity” research adds that practices such as marketing-qualified lead obsession, gated content, mass emailing, and siloed teams are becoming harder to justify as AI shifts how buyers research and shortlist.

Forrester’s events calendar is turning into a GTM operating schedule

Forrester is running its B2B programming as a sequence across regions. Its B2B events page lists B2B Forum EMEA in London on Sept. 28, 29, 2026, B2B Summit North America in Phoenix on May 2, 4, 2027, and Forrester Forum Singapore on Aug. 19, 2027. For teams that use conferences as forcing functions, that cadence matters, setting timing for internal milestones such as content cleanup, measurement updates, and sales enablement refreshes tied to changing buyer behavior.

The 2027 B2B Summit North America page positions the event for “marketing, product, customer and revenue leaders” and frames the work as “ideas into action,” with emphasis on AI-driven buyer autonomy, proving marketing impact, strengthening customer relationships, and cross-functional alignment. The registration flow requires login and does not show pricing on the public page, but the operational signal is clear: Forrester is pushing the conversation away from campaign tactics and toward how GTM teams run as a system.

The “visibility vacuum” is becoming an ops problem, not a brand problem

In Forrester’s January 2026 release outlining the 2026 Summit agenda, one keynote topic was labeled “The Visibility Vacuum,” focused on how AI-driven search and AI agents are reshaping buying behavior. That is a warning to teams still equating demand generation with forms completed, because AI-mediated research can change how buyers discover and evaluate vendors.

Demand Gen Report, citing Forrester’s “GTM singularity” research, describes Forrester’s critique of familiar B2B patterns: impersonal mass outreach, gated content, and siloed teams. The practical implication for operators is that content operations and web governance become part of revenue infrastructure. If buyers and their AI tools need answers earlier, the constraint becomes the ability to publish, maintain, and measure high-utility information at scale, across product lines and regions, without breaking compliance rules.

ARC is really a blueprint for RevOps, data, and workflow redesign

Forrester’s research framing, as reported by Demand Gen Report, is ARC: Augmented, Resilient, Collaborative. Stripped of the slogan, that is an operating model change. “Augmented” implies connecting AI tools and agents to specific GTM initiatives and designing content that can serve both humans and machines. “Resilient” attacks annual planning cycles, arguing that buyer behavior is shifting faster than most plans get refreshed. “Collaborative” is a demand for a shared view of the prospect and customer, which typically means data model decisions, field definitions, and accountability rules across marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops.

Forrester’s own 2027 event description leans into the same cross-functional premise, calling out the need to unify marketing, sales, product, and customer success under one GTM vision. For enterprises running multiple CRM instances, multiple product lines, or separate regional stacks, that is less a keynote theme than a roadmap of integration tickets and governance decisions that have to be closed before “AI in the workflow” is anything other than a pilot.

Where this lands in 2026 planning and 2027 vendor roadmaps

Questions to put into GTM ops backlogs before the next refresh

• Discovery measurement: What will count as being “found” in an AI-driven search world, and where will that data live (web analytics, Search Console, CRM, or a separate content intelligence tool)?
• Ungated content governance: Which product, legal, and security rules block publishing the information buyers and AI tools need, and what is the approval workflow to change them without slowing releases to a crawl?
• Shared customer view: Which fields, definitions, and ownership rules must be standardized across marketing, sales, product, and customer success so AI assistants don’t amplify bad data?
• Planning cadence: If GTM plans are updated “annually at most,” as described in Demand Gen Report’s Forrester summary, what would a quarterly refresh look like in budgets, targets, and enablement content?