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Power Your Growth
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By Sumner Vanderhoof, CEO and Co-Founder, Propensity
Being named a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the second consecutive year is an exciting milestone for Propensity. It's recognition of the work our team has put into building a platform that makes sophisticated B2B ABM more accessible, intelligent, and effective.
But as proud as I am of this achievement, what excites me most isn't where we've been recognized. It's where we're going next.
As I shared in our recent announcement:
“Being named a Challenger for the second year in a row is meaningful validation, but we’re even more excited about where Account-Based Marketing is going next. The future isn’t more disconnected tools or isolated AI features. It’s intelligent systems that can understand buyers, coordinate action across channels and continuously improve how companies go to market.”
That belief has become central to how we're thinking about the future of Propensity and the future of ABM.
Account-based marketing changed the way B2B companies approach growth. It helped marketers move beyond broad lead generation toward more targeted, relevant engagement with the accounts that matter most. But the technology supporting ABM hasn't always kept pace with the way modern revenue teams need to operate. Too often, marketers are still stitching together data, audiences, intent signals, advertising platforms, campaign tools, and CRM systems just to execute a single coordinated program.
Marketing identifies the opportunity. Another system manages the campaign. Sales receives a signal, often without the context needed to act. And the insights gained along the way don't always make it back into the next campaign. Even with all the advances in AI, many organizations are simply layering new automation onto the same fragmented processes.
I don't believe that's the future.
The next evolution of ABM isn't about adding more tools or automating isolated tasks. It's about connecting the entire go-to-market process.
At Propensity, we're working toward a vision we call Autonomous ABM.
The idea is straightforward: What if marketing and sales could operate around one connected, intelligent go-to-market process, with AI moving opportunities from identification through engagement and ultimately into the sales pipeline? A recursive system where each campaign becomes smarter and smarter.
Imagine a platform that can identify accounts showing buying intent, uncover the right contacts and buying groups, develop relevant campaigns, coordinate execution across channels, evaluate engagement, and help sales understand when and how to act.
Not as a collection of disconnected tools, but as one continuously coordinated process.
That's the direction we're building toward.
Over the past year, we've worked toward this vision. Propensity now supports AI-powered campaign creation using natural-language prompts to generate audiences, buying groups, messaging, creative assets, channel plans, and recommended next actions.
We've expanded contact-level intent, introduced AI-driven reporting and journey analytics, launched website personalization, and enabled secure connectivity with external AI agents through our MCP server. Each advancement helps eliminate another manual step or disconnected workflow.
But the bigger opportunity isn't any individual feature. It's what becomes possible when those capabilities work together.
Autonomous ABM isn't about removing marketers or salespeople from the equation. It's about removing the operational friction that prevents them from doing their best work.
Marketing teams should spend more time developing strategy and understanding customers, not manually moving data between systems. Sales teams should spend more time having meaningful conversations, not deciphering disconnected engagement signals.
AI should make those teams more effective together.
There's another concept that I believe will fundamentally change how B2B organizations approach growth: recursive learning loops
For years, marketing technology has focused on helping teams execute campaigns faster, but speed alone doesn't necessarily make marketing more effective. You can automate a campaign, launch it across multiple channels, measure the results, and still find yourself starting almost from scratch the next time. What if every campaign actually made the next one better?
That's the promise of recursive learning loops.
Imagine launching a campaign where the system doesn't just track impressions, clicks, and conversions. It also understands which accounts engaged, which contacts became more active, which messages resonated, and which opportunities ultimately progressed through sales. Now imagine those insights informing the next audience, the next campaign, the next channel decision, and the next sales action. The system becomes smarter through experience.
Instead of running campaigns as isolated events, marketing becomes a continuous cycle of intelligence, execution, measurement, and improvement.
This is a critical part of our long-term vision for Propensity. We're building toward a world where engagement data, sales feedback, and revenue outcomes can continuously inform what happens next. The goal isn't simply to execute more campaigns. It's to make every campaign more effective than the last.
One of the things I'm most encouraged by in this year's Gartner research is the recognition of Propensity's integration capabilities.
Gartner identified integrations with MarTech and SalesTech ecosystems as Propensity's strongest critical capability. The research also identified account retention as our most suitable use case.
To me, these findings reinforce an important principle: effective go-to-market execution doesn't happen within a single department or at a single stage of the customer journey. It requires connected systems, shared intelligence, and coordinated action. Marketing and sales have talked about alignment for decades. But alignment is difficult when teams operate from different data, different signals, and different definitions of success.
I believe AI creates an opportunity to move beyond alignment toward true operational coordination.
When both teams can understand what's happening within an account, see how individual buyers are engaging, and act on shared intelligence, the entire revenue process becomes more connected. That matters for acquiring new customers, but it's just as important for retaining and growing existing relationships.
Ultimately, the value of AI-powered orchestration should be measured in business outcomes: less manual work, faster campaign execution, stronger sales engagement, better customer experiences, and a more predictable path to revenue.
That's the standard we want to build toward.
There's something fitting about being recognized as a Challenger for the second consecutive year.
Propensity has always approached this market with a willingness to challenge assumptions. We've challenged the idea that sophisticated ABM needs to be complicated or expensive. We've challenged the notion that account-level intelligence is enough when buying decisions are made by people. And now, we're challenging the idea that ABM should operate as a collection of disconnected campaigns and technologies.
As I said in our announcement:
“We believe ABM is only the beginning. Our vision is to connect intelligence, audiences, AI and channels so teams can orchestrate the entire customer journey from one platform.”
That's what makes this moment exciting.
We're proud of the recognition. We're grateful to our customers, partners, and team for helping us get here. And we're energized by the opportunity ahead.
The future of B2B marketing isn't just automated.
It's autonomous, connected, and continuously improving.
And we're just getting started.
Explore the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant
Propensity has been named a Challenger in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the second consecutive year.
Download the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms
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