---
title: "PLG for the Agent Era, Part 1: Your Next Customer Might Be an Agent"
description: "73% of B2B buyers use AI for vendor research, and 69% ended up choosing a different vendor than they originally planned. The agent is shaping who wins before the buyer ever visits your website."
date: 2026-05-27
author: Kat Laszlo
canonical: https://tansohq.com/blog/agents-choosing-software
---

# PLG for the Agent Era, Part 1: Your Next Customer Might Be an Agent

By [Kat Laszlo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinalaszlo/) · May 27, 2026

73% of B2B buyers use AI for vendor research. 69% ended up choosing a different vendor than they originally planned. The agent is shaping who wins before the buyer ever visits your website.

---

And yet the buying experience itself (signup, onboarding, checkout, account management) hasn't changed at all. It's still built for a human clicking through a browser.

So what does it need to look like when the human is buying through an agent?

---

## Where we are today

The shift so far has been in research. You ask an agent something like "best usage-based billing platform for a SaaS with under 100 customers?" and you get a synthesized comparison with pros, cons, and pricing. 55% of buyers are already using AI to compare vendors this way, with the agent pulling from docs, community discussions, and review sites.

But once the research is done, the experience reverts to what it's always been. You click through to vendor sites, sign up for a trial or book a demo, and pay with a credit card on a pricing page. 47% build business cases with AI before engaging a vendor, but the engagement itself is still human-to-human.

Even limited to research, agents are already changing outcomes. 69% of buyers end up with a different vendor than they planned. The agent doesn't just speed up research, it changes who gets selected.

And there are signs this is moving beyond discovery into other parts of the funnel:

---

## The human behind the agent

The funnel doesn't change when an agent is involved, because the human still has the same goals. What changes is that there's now an intermediary that needs your product's information delivered programmatically so it can evaluate, onboard, and manage on the human's behalf.

The buyer's criteria don't necessarily change, but what constitutes a delightful, simple, well-designed experience does. A human needs a clean signup page. An agent needs a `POST /signup` that returns an API key. Same goal, completely different interface.

---

## What's next

If you run a B2B SaaS with self-serve signup, this series is for you. Each part goes deeper into the funnel and includes something you can run on your own product.

How agents find and evaluate your product, what they look for, and how to measure whether you're showing up. Comes with a scanner you can run on your own site.

What agent-ready onboarding, auth, purchasing, and account management actually require, plus an open-source skill to make your self-serve flow agent-accessible.

*[Kat Laszlo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinalaszlo/) is co-founder of Tanso. This post also appears on [katrinalaszlo.com](https://katrinalaszlo.com/blog/agent-self-serve).*

### Want to price with confidence?

Book a quick call and we'll walk you through it.