Forrester published a number in January that every seller should sit with for a moment. According to The State Of Business Buying, 2026, the typical B2B purchase decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers. Twenty-two people, roughly, before a contract gets signed. And 94% of buyers working in groups of six or more say the size is a genuine advantage, not a headache: more perspectives, more shared effort, an easier time securing budget.

Here is the part that should worry sellers more than the headcount. Forrester also found that generative AI search tools, the “answer engines” buyers now start with, often deliver incomplete or unreliable information. Buyers know this. So they compensate by seeking validation from trusted human sources before they trust what the machine told them.

Sit with that for a second. The information is everywhere. The judgement is scarce. And judgement, in a room of twenty-two, is not a solo act. It has to travel between a CFO who wants risk reduced, a department head who wants the thing to actually work, and a procurement lead who joined the process on day one and will still be there arguing about terms on the last day. Someone has to move between those twenty-two people and make sure what they each believe is roughly the same true thing.

That someone used to be optional. Now it is the job.

I spent years interviewing buyers for my doctoral research, long before genAI search existed, and one complaint came up more than any other: nobody told me what the other stakeholders in my own company were being told. Marketing had one story. Procurement had another. The rep repeated whichever story was in front of them that week. Multiply that by twenty-two people and an AI tool that occasionally makes things up with total confidence, and you get exactly the fragmentation buyers are now paying good analysts to describe in a report.

I think about this the way I used to think about a pass in a professional kitchen. A brigade doesn’t fail because someone lacks ingredients. It fails because the tomatoes arrived from three different stations at three different levels of ripeness and nobody caught it before the pass. Mise en place exists precisely so that by the time a dish reaches the pass, everything has already been checked, sequenced, and reconciled. The chef running the pass isn’t cooking. He’s the last line of coherence between a dozen hands and one plate.

That is the role open to sellers right now, and most haven’t claimed it. Not fountain of information. Broker of it. The rep who knows that the CFO read a different vendor comparison than the ops lead, who can say plainly “that number you saw is out of date, here’s what changed”, who treats their job as reconciling twenty-two partial views into one coherent picture rather than adding a twenty-third. That is a different skill set than product knowledge. It is closer to what I call, in The Buyer’s Balance: What your customers want to share with you (Owl Press, 2025), finding equilibrium rather than chasing a win. You cannot broker information for a group you have not taken the trouble to actually understand, stakeholder by stakeholder, contradiction by contradiction.

It also explains why “rep-free” and “knowledge broker” are not opposites, whatever the trend pieces imply. Buyers do not want less judgement in the process. They want less noise. A genAI tool can hand them a summary at 2am. It cannot tell them that the summary conflicts with what their own CFO was told last week, or that the case study everyone is citing is three product versions out of date. Only a person paying close attention to the specific group in front of them can do that.

So here is the practical test for any CRO reading this. Ask your best reps a simple question: for your top three open opportunities, can you name every internal stakeholder in the buying group and what each one currently believes to be true? Not what they need. What they believe, right now, possibly incorrectly. If your team cannot answer that, they are not brokering anything. They are one more voice added to a room that already has twenty-two too many.

The size of the buying group was never really the story. What each of those twenty-two people currently believes, and whether anyone in the room is reconciling it, is.