Intent data became an important part of the ABM playbook because it helped Marketing and Sales figure out which target accounts might be moving into a buying window. It could also surface companies you weren’t actively watching yet, giving you a way to expand beyond the accounts already sitting in your database.
At the time, that was a pretty compelling value proposition. If you were spending heavily on ABM, paid media and outbound, knowing where to concentrate that effort could easily justify an expensive platform.What has changed is what happens after you get the signal. Buyers know the game now. They know that downloading something, visiting a pricing page or showing interest around a topic can trigger a BDR call or a string of sales emails, and they have gotten very good at ignoring outreach that feels generic or predictable.
That puts a lot more pressure on the quality of the signal.
Knowing that somebody inside an account is researching a topic may tell you something is happening, but it still may not tell you enough to earn a response. Sales increasingly needs context: who is likely involved, what may actually be changing inside the business, why that matters now and what gives you a credible reason to reach out.
Over time, the economics started getting harder to justify. These were expensive systems, buyers were getting harder to reach from a generic account-level signal, and many of the same signals were increasingly available elsewhere. Companies naturally started asking a tougher question: what are we actually getting for the money?
And all of that was already happening before AI really entered the picture. Now AI adds another layer of pressure by making many of the signals, research tasks and account insights that once helped justify an expensive intent platform much faster and cheaper to produce.
Have these platforms changed enough to keep earning what they cost?
To their credit, the major intent platforms clearly see where the market is going, adding person-level intelligence, broader buying signals and AI to turn those signals into something Sales can act on.
Demandbase introduced Person-Based Intent in September 2026, addressing one of the obvious limitations of account-level intent: knowing that an account is showing activity without necessarily knowing who inside the account may be behind it. It has also added Recommended Actions designed to tell sellers who to contact, why the recommendation matters and what they should do next.
6sense is moving in much the same direction, although its Recommended Leads feature is narrower. It starts with an account that clicked an ad and surfaces one or two persona-matched contacts for follow-up.
More broadly, both 6sense and Demandbase are expanding beyond traditional research intent and incorporating signals such as leadership changes, hiring activity, funding, technology changes and other business events.
So the platforms are clearly evolving in the right direction.
The question is whether these newer capabilities are mature enough, differentiated enough and useful enough to justify what companies are paying for them.
Intent data still has value, but we should probably be more careful about what we call intent.
Someone at an account researching a topic doesn’t necessarily mean the company is entering a buying cycle. They could be doing competitive research, educating themselves, working on an internal project or simply trying to understand an issue.
What matters more is whether something has actually changed inside the business that could create a reason to buy.
I wrote about this recently in Your ICP Tells You Who. Alpha Signals Can Tell You When. The idea behind Alpha Signals is to look for observable changes inside a company that may indicate the problem you solve is beginning to emerge, sometimes before anyone at the company starts researching your category at all.
A new executive coming in with a mandate, an acquisition, expansion into a new market, a change in hiring patterns or a shift in strategy can all become meaningful signals if your customer history tells you those conditions tend to precede the problems that eventually cause companies to buy.
That becomes especially powerful when you really understand the Jobs to Be Done behind the purchase. If you’ve talked to customers and understand what was changing inside their businesses before they bought, you can start looking for combinations of those same conditions elsewhere.
Jonathan Spier, founder of GetRev, made a similar argument in a recent SaaS Backwards podcast episode. His view is that traditional intent has become increasingly commoditized because so many companies have access to the same signals and end up pursuing the same buyers at roughly the same time.
His approach is to stack multiple signals that are specific to the problem you’re trying to identify.
A hiring pattern by itself may not mean much. Neither does a technology change, a new executive or an expansion. But when several relevant conditions appear together, they can create a much stronger hypothesis that a particular problem is emerging inside the account.
The major intent platforms clearly see this shift too. 6sense and Demandbase are both moving toward the same broader idea of combining signals to create more context around why an account may matter now.
So the distinction isn’t that the large platforms are standing still while newer systems move ahead. They aren’t.
The more interesting question is whether you need the entire intent, advertising and orchestration stack to get that intelligence.
For Sales, particularly a Challenger-oriented salesperson, that distinction matters. The goal isn’t simply to prove that an account is already shopping. It’s to develop a credible hypothesis that something has changed inside the business that may make the problem you solve more important now.
That gives the rep something much more useful than an intent score: an observation, a hypothesis and a legitimate reason to start a conversation.
If your renewal is coming up, I wouldn’t start by asking whether the platform has good data or interesting features.
I’d start with a much simpler question:
What does this platform materially improve that we can tie to pipeline?
If turning the platform off would materially hurt advertising efficiency, remove intelligence Sales depends on, eliminate important workflows or reduce pipeline, then you probably have a strong case for keeping it.
But if the answer is mostly that you would lose some account scores, intent alerts and research that could increasingly be recreated elsewhere, then the renewal deserves a much harder look.
I don’t think intent platforms are going away. In fact, 6sense, Demandbase and others appear to be evolving quickly toward broader signal intelligence, better contact-level insight and more AI-driven interpretation.
But that also means the standard for justifying the investment should be getting higher.
The question is no longer simply, “Do we have intent data?”
It’s whether the platform helps Marketing and Sales identify the right accounts at the right time, understand what may be changing inside those businesses and turn that intelligence into more qualified pipeline.
If it does, keep paying for it.
If it doesn’t, there are increasingly more focused ways to get much of that intelligence without buying the entire platform.