Your Buyers Are Using AI Before They Talk to Sales — Are You in the Results?

AI search is changing b2b buyer behavior

• A CFO at a $2B PE firm needs a new portfolio monitoring solution.

• An analyst at a $4 bil private credit shop needs a better way to manage their loan docs

• A CIO at a $600 mil Nordic family office needs a new portfolio management system.

• A deal team partner at a $250 mil VC needs a better way to manage their deal pipeline.

 Instead of calling vendors or asking for referrals, each of them opens ChatGPT and asks what the best solutions are for their respective problems.

Thirty seconds later, each buyer has reviewed four firms that came up in ChatGPT's response. Two months later, one of those vendors closes a $75K deal. The other firms not cited in the AI search? They never knew about the prospect. This isn't hypothetical. This is happening right now.

The Invisible Shift in Investment Buyer Behavior

The data is clear: 90% of B2B buyers now use generative AI during their buying process, according to Forrester's 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey. Investment professionals are particularly prone to AI-first research. They're analytical by training, time-starved, and allergic to wasting 30 minutes on discovery calls with vendors who might not be relevant. When CFOs, investment teams, and IR folks are looking for fund administration platforms, investor portals, and deal management systems, vendors face a stark reality: the evaluation is complete before you know it started.

Here's what changed: Buyers don't contact sellers until 61% through their buying journey, and in most  cases, they ultimately purchase from one of the vendors on their Day One shortlist. If you're not in the three or four names that AI surfaces when a fund COO asks "How can I improve my LP reporting time?” you've already lost.

Andreessen Horowitz calls this shift "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)" -  a new paradigm where visibility means showing up directly in the AI-generated answer itself, rather than ranking high on a search results page. It's no longer about click-through rates - it's about reference rates: how often your brand gets cited by AI models. For invest-tech vendors, this changes everything. Traditional SEO got you to the top of Google. GEO determines whether Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity mentions you at all.

Why Your Content Isn't Showing Up

Generic expertise doesn't get cited.

Marketing agencies write "5 Ways to Improve Client Reporting" because that's what SEO playbooks recommend. But when a fund CFO asks, "What's the best way to handle quarterly waterfall calculations for funds with multiple fee tiers and catch-up provisions?", AI cites content written by someone who understands GP/LP waterfalls, preferred returns, and catch-up provisions, not surface-level content about "streamlining fund administration."

You're answering questions nobody's asking.

Vendor content focuses on product positioning: "Why LPs Need a Comprehensive Portfolio Management System," but buyers ask tactical questions:

• "How do emerging managers handle capital call notices for their SPVs?”

• "What's the typical implementation timeline for migrating from Excel to purpose-built fund accounting software?"

• "What family office software solutions can support direct investments?"

  
  

The domain expertise gap is now measurable.

AI models detect when content uses terminology correctly and reward those that do with a citation. When a fund administrator asks about "handling side letter provisions in investor reporting," content that conflates side letters with subscription agreements won't get cited.  The models are smarter than that.

What Actually Works: Optimizing for Domain Expertise

Will your content pass the domain expert test? If a fund CFO reads your article and thinks "these guys don’t know the difference between private equity and private credit," AI picks up those gaps. When you write with genuine domain fluency, using terminology naturally, addressing practical challenges, acknowledging what works and what doesn’t on a specific topic, both humans and AI recognize it.

This approach aligns with what we've called compound marketing: building a consistent presence that compounds over time. But in the AI era, that compounding happens in a new layer - not just in buyers' minds, but in the model's memory. Every piece of substantive content you create becomes training data that influences future AI recommendations.

What You Should Be Asking Yourself

When a fund CFO or investment analyst asks an AI tool about solutions in your category, does your company appear in the response? If you don't know the answer, you have a problem. If the answer is no, you have a bigger problem.

The investment domain expertise that seemed like table stakes for credibility? It's now the difference between being in the AI-generated shortlist and being invisible to your buyers.

The Private Capital and Investment technology firms who understand this, who create content reflecting genuine investment domain expertise rather than generic B2B marketing, will dominate this AI-first buying cycle.

The question is: will you be one of them?

If you'd like to see how how your firm (and your competitors) are showing up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity and Gemini, drop me a line at: andre@quadsight.com