AI-Powered B2B Data: The Competitive Advantage B2B Companies Can’t Ignore in 2026

20 May 2026

In the world of B2B marketing, identifying high-interest prospects early in the decision-making process can be crucial to a whole campaign’s success. Traditional lead scoring and firmographics are no longer sufficient — modern-day teams are turning to intent data to gain real-time insights into buyer intents.

Intent data B2B is a powerful and actionable insight that B2B companies need essentially, so that to focus their sales and marketing efforts on the customers with the greatest potential and value.

Digital B2B intent signals generated by online searches and interactions form an extensive behavioural data base that enables B2B buyers to be located and their stage in the buying cycle to be determined.

• Intent data helps identify companies actively researching solutions
• 92% of buyers shortlist vendors before contacting sales teams
• Buyers complete around 83% of their buying journey digitally before speaking to a vendor directly

To make effective use of such insights, it is necessary to filter out information about intents relevant to your business, identify suitable prospects who are most likely to be interested in your product or service, help sales and marketing teams prioritise customers, and develop customised engagement programmes to boost conversion rates from their efforts.

Types of intent data

There are three main types of intent data:

1. First-party intent data is collected directly from your own digital sources (e.g., website visits, downloads).

First-party intent data allows you to analyse the behaviour and journey of potential customers across your own website, landing pages and within advertising campaigns, helping to identify priority customers and emerging needs among both new and existing customers

2. Second-party intent data comes from partners or publishers who track the behaviour of their own audience.
3. Third-party intent data is aggregated from a large number of sources on the open internet, often using cookies, IP addresses and other tracking methods.

Using tagged topics and keywords, intent data analyses the behaviour of prospects and their online journey across a carefully curated selection of industry-specific B2B websites and social media platforms. This provides insights that are typically unavailable, as the data is collected from third-party websites using third-party data accessed via IP addresses.

First-party data provides deep insights into the behaviour of visitors already in your funnel, whilst third-party data broadens your reach by identifying potential buyers at the earliest stages of research.

Standard and custom intent data

For many years, Expandi has been tracking intent data in multiple languages from millions of websites covering a wide range of relevant B2B topics. Clients can immediately tap into this extensive pool of insights. However, if a company’s solution is focused on specific industries or is largely tailored to niche requirements, it is necessary to either create custom keyword lists or integrate standard lists.

Our value proposition

Thanks to our expertise in intent data, you will be able to:

• detect in-market accounts earlier
• prioritise high-intent prospects
• accelerate ABM and B2B demand generation data

How to choose the right intent data provider

Buyer intent data is a powerful tool. It drives ABM, shortens sales cycles, boosts ROI and delivers real, measurable growth. However, its potential depends on the provider’s platform.

Kompass+Expandi is the European leader in intent signal analysis enriched with B2B data, offering broader media coverage and insights in local languages.

• Our focus: medium and large enterprises, sales teams, SaaS and product-oriented companies, companies dealing with the corporate technology, cybersecurity and IT solutions sectors, and ABM-focused companies
• Our strengths: high-precision signals, survey-based data, competitive analytics, large contact database, detailed segmentation, ABM integration, CRM integration, real-time alerts.

Key points to note:

1. Country and media coverage: Wider coverage provides a better understanding of user behaviour. Not all content consumed by B2B decision-makers is published in English or on English-language websites. You can use account intent data in various languages to penetrate new markets and discover them for yourself.

Kompass is a top provider of B2B data solutions, including intent data and business signals.

We are currently finalising the international launch of our new solution, specifically tailored for key accounts and created to revolutionise B2B prospecting processes through automated lead generation based on business signals and intent data, with instant generation of prospect profiles via data enrichment using EasyBiz and its AI Sales Assistant.

2. GDPR compliance: Regulatory offices are promoting laws that ensure a higher level of privacy protection, which must be complied with.

We partner with a range of user identification companies, publishers and display advertising platforms to build audiences that are not based on cookies, but synchronised with a unique universal identifier. This complies with GDPR requirements and guarantees data transparency and privacy.

3. Keyword configuration and taxonomy relevance: Every business is unique. That is why creating a customisable list of keywords specific to your organisation allows you to track the most relevant data on user intents, leading to better results. This is particularly relevant when a company sells industry-specific or niche solutions.

We support a hybrid configuration. Users can define their own keywords, which will be added to the standard ones. This data is unique to you and is not sold to competitors. The configuration of custom keywords can be completed in less than 4 weeks.

4. Integration with other services

Our platform is fully integrated with your corporate customer database and technographic data, as well as with the Account-Based Advertising platform, enabling you to run B2B demand generation campaigns and digital advertising targeted at prospects with specific intents.

To sum it up

Amidst the information noise, intent data helps B2B teams build their intent data marketing and sales strategies around what their potential customers are actually doing — rather than just who they are.

Intent data has become essential for modern B2B marketing and sales teams, and European companies definitely need intent signals beyond US-centric platforms.

This is where key account tilored solutions by Kompass+Expandi come in, automating the handling of intent data and combining commercial data with real signals from open sources.

This hybrid approach improves the accuracy and timeliness of B2B targeting.

By combining high-quality data, smart tools and well-designed processes, you can turn customer intent into revenue more quickly and effectively.