A B2B buyer costs roughly $5 per click, $50 to become a lead, $500 to speak to, and $2,000+ to meet in person. That is not just a media plan. It is the price of attention.
Same target account. Same buying committee. Often, the same named buyer and the same budget. Yet the commercial value of reaching them changes dramatically depending on the quality of interaction you can command. That spread is not random. It is the hierarchy we build businesses on.
Face-to-face sits at the top because it is in person, spoken, real-time and unrecorded, commanding the undivided attention of both parties. Everything beneath it is a thinner slice of the same thing. A video call loses a little signal, an audio call a little more, down through messaging and email to social and the website at the base. Attention is the whole product, and our industry only meaningfully monetises the top of the pyramid.
Today, AI is doing something strange. It attacks from the bottom up and splits the hierarchy into three bands.
At the automated base of web, social, and email, humans are retreating. Your website has a chatbot answering visitors. Your social is scheduled, increasingly written, and sometimes even liked by a model. Your email is drafted by one and increasingly read by one too, machine-to-machine, with no humans in front of the screens.
In the middle: instant messaging, audio and video calls, is the new battleground. The online meeting you used to attend, you now send a notetaker to, and so does everyone else, until the summary is the only thing that survives the meeting. Synthetic voice and video mean familiar faces and known voices are no longer reliable signals on their own.
And yet the middle has not collapsed. Gartner’s latest B2B buyer research captures the contradiction: 45% of buyers used GenAI in a recent purchase, 67% prefer a sales rep-free buying experience, and 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service journey. But 69% still want to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep.
Buyers want autonomy, but they still need confidence. The middle is no longer just about information being transferred. AI can do that. It is where uncertainty is reduced, risk is challenged, assumptions are tested, and a buyer decides whether the thing they have read, watched, or been told can actually be trusted.
At the top: IRL. The one thing the machine cannot do.
The value of face-to-face was never the information. It was the signal. Being present in person is a costly, unfakeable act of commitment. When everything beneath it can be automated or faked, the unfakeable thing becomes the scarce thing, and scarcity is pricing power.
Face-to-face does three jobs better than anything else: building trust from a standing start, solving complex problems, and reaching a solution at the speed that only undivided attention allows.
But this does not mean every event wins.
AI does not protect mediocre face-to-face. It exposes it. A generic room, a weak audience, poor curation, thin content, irrelevant networking and accidental meetings do not become more valuable simply because they happen in real life. If anything, the bar rises.
When face-to-face becomes the scarce layer of B2B interaction, the premium shifts to events that can assemble the right people, create trust quickly, curate meaningful conversations, surface real buying intent and help complex buying groups move forward.
The product has never been floor space. It is not even attendance anymore. It is intent-verified, high-quality attention in a room where interaction is difficult to fake, automate or ignore.
AI can write the email. It can summarise the call. It can draft the follow-up. But it still cannot shake your hand. The handshake is once again crowned the most valuable, most defensible, most expensive thing we sell.
By Dr. Barış Onay
