Tim Sanders - G2 - Crossing The Agentic AI Chasm
Our Guest: Tim Sanders is the Chief Innovation Officer at G2 and a fellow at Harvard’s Digital Data Design Institute. Tim leads G2’s research on AI adoption and the market for AI agents. His latest discussion focuses on G2’s 2026 AI Agents Report, “Crossing the Agentic Chasm,” based on a survey of 1,019 B2B decision-makers and 2,500+ AI Agent Builder reviews.
Episode Topics:
- Why 66% of organizations now have agents in limited or scaled production
- Agent builder platforms (42%) vs ready-made agents (27%) and what that mix means for traditional SaaS vendors
- Why 56% of buyers expect agents to moderately reduce new SaaS purchases by 2030
- The “harness”: how SaaS moves from database + business logic to skills, connectors, and context engineering
- Why vibe coding is not the real threat to enterprise software
- The shift to pay-as-you-go pricing and what it means for gross margins, ARR, and ARPA
- How consumption pricing lowers buying friction and weakens vendor loyalty
- The Distrust Tax: why oversight and rework can consume more than a quarter of expected agent gains
- Why the Distrust Tax is recurring, not a one-time implementation cost
- How human oversight grows with company size, and the mid-market speed advantage
- Ant Financial’s 3-1-0 loan model and budgeting for acceptable failure rates
- How buyers verify vendor claims, and why evaluation is becoming the longest stage of software buying
- Why “agent evaluator” may be a job with a real future
- Selling pragmatic, measurable gains (like an 11% improvement in book-to-cash) instead of 10x promises
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