Companies spend considerable time and money trying to influence what potential customers think about them. They develop messages, publish perspectives and put their experts in front of the right audiences.
What happens to those ideas after buyers encounter them is much harder to see. A potential customer asks AI to summarize a company’s research. A colleague forwards an article to their team. An executive references a company's perspective during a closed-door meeting to choose a new vendor.
Our just-released 2026 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, based on a survey of more than 1,100 business executives across seven countries, offers a closer look at how buyers are using companies' thinking to inform their decisions and what companies can do to earn their confidence and, ultimately, their business.
AI Is Changing How Buyers Use Your Thinking
Buyers are increasingly turning to AI to research markets, explore potential solutions and evaluate vendors. They're also asking it to help them make sense of companies' own thinking. During vendor evaluation, 84% of B2B decision-makers used AI to summarize thought leadership.
That makes the substance of what companies publish more important, not less. Among B2B decision-makers, 82% say thought leadership is becoming more valuable as AI becomes a common source of business answers. Buyers value original research, data, and perspectives they can’t find elsewhere, along with the context, nuance, and human judgment that AI-generated answers may lack.
AI can summarize an argument, but the company still has to make one worth considering. Original research, firsthand expertise, and a clear understanding of buyers' challenges give people something they can't get from a generic AI answer.
Buyers Are Carrying Thought Leadership into Private Conversations
Buyers also bring companies' thinking into conversations with colleagues, often through channels the original publisher can't see.
Among B2B decision-makers who shared thought leadership, 89% did so through private channels, including email, direct messages, work chats and meetings, compared with 67% who shared it through social media or other public channels. A company's perspective can travel well beyond its original audience as colleagues share it in conversations the company may never know about.
What makes that thinking worth sharing? Seventy-three percent cited useful data, research or evidence, while 57% pointed to its relevance to a decision or discussion already underway. They're passing along material that helps them explain a problem, support an argument or consider a different approach.
Most of those private exchanges won't appear in a company's engagement metrics. That should prompt communicators and marketers to reconsider what successful thought leadership looks like. Public shares and comments tell only part of the story. Brand-lift research can help assess changes in buyers' perceptions, while qualitative feedback from buyers and sales teams can offer insight into how a company's ideas are influencing decisions.
Buying Groups Are Using Thought Leadership to Evaluate Vendors
The true measure of thought leadership isn't just what a company says. It's what other people do with its ideas. And buying groups are using those ideas to make consequential decisions.
Seventy-six percent of B2B decision-makers say thought leadership shared or discussed within their buying group helped assess whether a vendor understood their organization's needs and priorities. More than half (52%) say it helped their buying group decide which vendor to select.
Weak thought leadership can hurt a company’s prospects. Fifty-nine percent of final decision-makers say poor or absent thought leadership contributed to a vendor being removed from consideration.
Buyers are using companies' published thinking as evidence when assessing potential vendors, so understanding their business matters. Asked which aspect of thought leadership does the most to increase their trust in a company, 56% of B2B decision-makers said demonstrating a clear understanding of their challenges, priorities and constraints, compared with 14% who said demonstrating the strength of its products or services.
For communicators and marketers, that raises the standard for the thought leadership companies produce. A company’s thought leadership needs to contribute an original perspective, supported by evidence buyers can use to evaluate potential vendors and make recommendations to colleagues.
The way B2B buyers research vendors is changing, but the fundamental challenge for companies remains the same: earning the confidence of people who have a choice about whom to trust. What a company publishes may be part of the case buyers make for choosing it, or the reason they look elsewhere.
To explore the findings in more detail, read the full 2026 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report.
Annie Dunleavy, EVP, U.S. Head of Content Strategy.