The Future 100: B2B Trends & Insights 2026

In the volatile B2B environment, the greatest threat to growth isn't another company – it's customer indecision.

As complexity and uncertainty rise in B2B, buyers become paralyzed, stalling deals and slowing momentum. To succeed, you must move beyond simply selling and start engineering confidence. In this new era, confidence is the currency of every B2B decision.

VML's top 10 trends in B2B from our "Future 100: 2026" report provides clear insights and practical strategies you need to build a connected B2B brand. Learn how to systematically establish reliability, reduce perceived risk, and ensure every decision feels defensible for your buyers. Our B2B vertical cut helps you overcome critical disrupting forces and turn them into a competitive edge.

Top trends in B2B from our Future 100 report include:

#03: Truth literacy

As AI-generated content proliferates, trust becomes your most valuable asset. This trend highlights the imperative for impeccable data governance and transparent practices. Building truth literacy is essential for maintaining credibility and ensuring buyer confidence in a skeptical world.

#12: Synthetic generation

A new class of AI collaborators and employees is moving from the lab to the workplace. This trend unlocks the power of synthetic audiences, allowing you to understand and target complex buyer groups with unprecedented precision, a crucial tool for creating impactful B2B marketing.

#68: Acommerce

The future of B2B commerce is here. Agentic commerce (Acommerce) heralds a future where AI agents act as sophisticated shopping assistants, making intelligent recommendations and even autonomous purchases, accelerating the path from discovery to a confident decision for your customers.

Download our 2026 Future 100 B2B vertical cut here:

The single biggest challenge is customer indecision, driven by market volatility and information overload. Our report shows how to overcome this by building a brand that engineers confidence and provides absolute clarity for buyers.

AI is a transformative force. It will redefine how you engage customers through Generative realities and AI storyworlds, automate workflows with Synthetic generation, and reshape the purchasing process with Acommerce. The Future 100 provides a strategic roadmap for leveraging these technologies.

A Connected B2B Brand is one that systematically builds confidence by establishing reliability, trustworthiness, and future-readiness. It reduces risk and removes friction, making critical decisions feel clear and defensible for buyers, which is essential for driving growth in today's market.

Watch our Future 100 video

Welcome to the 12th edition of “The Future 100” – VML’s unparalleled research report examining key global trends. This report features our latest projections, interviews with top industry experts, exclusive statistics and global consumer insights for 2026 from a proprietary 16-country survey.

At a Glance

71%

Believe AI is making it impossible to understand what is true in the world

At a Glance

73%

Agree that in the future humans and digital entities will live and work together

At a Glance

89%

Want more control over their data and who can access it

About The Future 100 report:

After another year marked by economic upheaval, polarizing political currents and environmental setbacks, 2026 will be a year for building resilience, courageous creativity and redrawing the boundaries of what’s possible. From the personal to the planetary, from human engineering to geoengineering the climate itself, a new class of creators and collaborators is multiplying potential in ways we are just beginning to imagine.

Helping to shape these worlds are AI tools that democratize world building and new economic models for building empires. As both creativity and AI go global, voices from Buenos Aires to Busan are challenging Western dominance and creating tools that reflect their own cultures.

Amidst this “metamorphic” current, the desire for human connection remains unmistakable. In the year ahead, human impulse will shape brand strategies, influencing the top marketing trends in 2026, and draw people back to immersive, high-impact experiences that demonstrate the value of authenticity and unlock infinite possibilities.