The B2B buyer just changed. The seller's stack hasn't.

The way B2B buyers research, evaluate, and decide has moved — and the tools sellers rely on haven't caught up. We're building the platform for the part of the funnel everyone is talking about and no one has built for: the evaluation.

Read the 2026 report

Our mission

Close the gap between how B2B buyers buy and how sellers sell.

B2B buying has been quietly transformed. Buyers no longer want to be sold to. They want to research, evaluate, and decide on their own terms — and they've adopted a new generation of AI platforms to do it.

Roughly 41% of B2B buyers now start vendor research on ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini instead of Google. 68% are responding less to vendor outreach. 46% are filling out fewer forms. And 69% say vendor information is scattered and hard to access at the moment they actually need it. The discovery-call, demo-request, 12-field-form funnel was built around a buyer who agreed to be sold to. That buyer is leaving the building.

The way buyers buy has changed. The way sellers sell hasn't.

Today's B2B buyer expects an experience that feels more like consumer software than enterprise sales. They want answers in the moment, content tailored to their situation, and the ability to bring their team into the conversation when they're ready. They want to evaluate vendors the way they evaluate everything else — independently, with AI help, on their own schedule.

The traditional response — more outbound, more chatbots, more AI SDRs — is automating the parts of the funnel buyers already disengaged from. 79% of B2B companies are now adopting or piloting AI SDRs. Only 5% of marketing leaders find them highly effective. The activity is increasing. The results are not.

The website was built for browsing. The CRM was built to track accounts and pipeline. Nothing was built for the moment buyers actually evaluate you — when they're asking real questions, looping in their team, and deciding whether to engage at all. That moment is where the new B2B funnel is being decided, and where every seller's pipeline now lives or dies.

Our role

SlateCX is the Buyer Engagement Platform — a new layer between marketing automation and CRM, built for how B2B buying actually happens now. Each prospect gets their own Slate: a persistent workspace they can save, share, and return to. A buyer evaluation agent answers their questions, surfaces the right content for their situation, qualifies them as the conversation unfolds, and signals sales the moment real intent shows up.

Every interaction flows back to HubSpot — the questions asked, the assets opened, the stakeholders looped in — so marketing finally has real intent and real attribution, and sales receives a buyer who's already done the work.

Our mission is to close the gap between how B2B buyers want to buy and how sellers are equipped to sell. The buyer changed. We're building what the seller needs next.

What we believe

Three convictions behind the product.

Every decision SlateCX makes about the product comes back to one of three ideas about where B2B is going.

Buyers don't want to be sold to. They want to evaluate.

The 12-field form, the discovery call, the SDR cadence — these are seller-shaped artifacts. The buyer doesn't want any of them. The platform that wins the next decade lets buyers research and evaluate the way they actually want to, and gives sales a warm handoff at the end.

Agents do work. Chatbots answer questions.

There's a real difference between a chatbot and an agent. A chatbot waits. An agent moves first. It pursues goals, sequences milestones, surfaces content, asks the questions that matter, and pivots from education to qualification on its own. Anything less is a search box with a chat skin.

Real intent beats inferred intent every time.

Marketing has spent years building the intent stack from indirect signals — page views, scrolls, time on site. A real conversation tells you more in one exchange than a month of scoring models. The buyer is telling you what they care about. The product should listen, and the data should flow to your CRM intact.

Your prospects are already using AI to evaluate you. Meet them there.

SlateCX is in early access with a small group of enterprise design partners. Request access to see how it works.

Request early access

Callan Schebella

Callan was the Founder and CEO of Inference Solutions which was acquired by Five9 for $173 Million (17X Revenue)
Inference had raised $19M and became the market leading intelligent virtual agent platform prior to its sale in 2020 with well over 1000 enterprise customers.
After the acquisition Callan served as EVP of Product for Five9's Agentic CX Platform where he successfully led the deployment additional AI solutions for agent assistance, speech analytics, knowledge management and custom LLM integration
Five9 IVA studio handles well over 1M conversations minutes per day.

Richard Dumas

Richard has over 20 years of experience managing enterprise marketing programs for customer service solutions.
He served as CMO at Inference Solutions and drove product adoption pre- and post-acquisition by Five9.
After the acquisition, Richard served as VP Product Marketing for Five9's full suite of products and then as VP of GTM for Five9's AI solutions.
Prior to Inference, Richard headed North American marketing for NewVoiceMedia through the acquisition by Vonage.
He has held senior product marketing positions at Nuance Communications and Apple Computer.