Forrester: The Hard AI Decision Now Is What to Ignore

Forrester Principal Analyst Christina Schmitt argues the central AI question for B2B organizations has flipped: “the hardest AI decision is no longer what to build — it’s what to ignore.” She describes companies accumulating “growing portfolios of pilots, competing priorities, fragmented ownership, and persistent uncertainty about where AI will create measurable business impact,” often greenlighting initiatives because they’re technically feasible rather than because anyone has proven the business value. The organizations actually making progress, in her analysis, aren’t the ones with the most advanced technical capability — they’re the ones with governance, clear ownership, and operational readiness, because “strong knowledge foundations are critical for building AI-powered capabilities that can scale.” Schmitt draws one sharp distinction worth budgeting around: buyer-facing AI demands a much higher performance bar than internal-facing AI, since customers notice failures immediately and lost trust is hard to rebuild, while internal tools have more room to be imperfect while they mature.

A prioritization framework published two weeks earlier gives Schmitt’s argument a concrete decision rule. Highspot CRO Stuart Gammon, citing Gartner research that 66% of sales leaders report low trust in AI-generated insights inside their own organizations and 36% point to misalignment among revenue leadership as a cause of GTM execution failures, argued companies should build proprietary AI only where it creates genuine competitive differentiation and buy mature, purpose-built tools for everything else — while insisting on unified data access, governed permissioning, and continuous learning from actual revenue outcomes regardless of which path they choose. Read next to each other, the two pieces describe the same discipline from different angles: Gammon’s build-versus-buy framework is one concrete mechanism for doing the pruning Schmitt says B2B organizations aren’t doing yet.

Her closing line is the one worth keeping on a whiteboard: “digital commerce winners won’t be the organizations with the longest list of AI pilots — they’ll be the organizations that know exactly which ones to scale.”