AI is everywhere these days. Your team is probably using it. So are your competitors. Most importantly, your leads are using it more and more. And the more they get used to interacting with modern, AI-enabled websites, the harder it’s going to be for legacy websites to keep up.
While the AI space is certainly growing fast, the good news is that B2B websites are not generally the earliest adopters. Most sites are still operating out of the traditional playbook, leaving a huge opportunity for marketers ready to make the leap into a new era.
The Current State of B2B Websites
So what are the components of a standard B2B website today? First and foremost, it’s an ever-growing pile of content. Blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos, landing pages, testimonials — sites keep getting bigger and making it harder for leads to find the thing they’re actually looking for.
That also leads to ‘menu bloat‘, where the various use cases, verticals, products and more lead to an unwieldy behemoth pinned to the top of the page. When you see one of these colossal navigation bars, you can understand those visitors who get lost and bounce early in their journey. People shouldn’t need a PhD to navigate your website.
Personalization is certainly a facet of more sophisticated sites, but its implementation is inconsistent at best and counterproductive at worst. It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds managing the countless permutations and if/then statements involved, and often impossible to actually tell what visitors are seeing and using.
Finally, there are chatbots. These are nearly ubiquitous on B2B websites, though there are many different types. Some let you talk to sales, some to support, some include a simple Q&A functionality, and some have even begun to adopt AI elements.
When you combine all the standard components of a B2B website, a picture starts to emerge of something messy, complicated, and visually busy. Thankfully, change is coming.
The Future is Now
Most of you have probably engaged with conversational AI assistants at this point. The experience can be daunting at first, then quickly begins to feel revolutionary. But our experiences with these tools almost always come in general, one-size-fits-all contexts (think ChatGPT or Google Gemini) rather than specifically tailored to a single subject.
This is where the true potential lies for AI in B2B websites: Creating a virtual assistant for your website specifically tailored to your content, your audiences, and your goals. And with the rapid advances in conversational AI over the last year, it’s now possible to do just that on any website, no matter how long it’s been since it had a refresh.
To illustrate this, let’s explore Navu’s own AI-powered Sidebar.
The Navu Sidebar
First of all, the Navu Sidebar is exactly what it sounds like: a sidebar for B2B websites that can be opened and collapsed as visitors see fit. It’s built with OpenAI, but trained specifically on an index of the customer’s website. That means that Navu understands every page, every product, and every persona, exactly as the marketer defines them.
This manifests first and foremost with its conversational AI feature. Visitors can ask any question they like, and Navu will answer it based only on the website itself. This has many benefits, but we’ll focus on two: breadth and focus.
The benefit of breadth is that every possible question is now answerable, without any additional work from the marketer. If you’ve created content about something (even if it’s just a sentence in a blog post from two years ago), Navu knows about it and can use it in an answer. Not only will the Sidebar use your material to provide answers, but it will also cite its sources and link back to the right page based on the query.
The focus component is what separates Navu from more general tools. Users can ask any question they like, but answers are always going to be relevant to your company (and their persona). That means if they ask “what do you do?” it will answer as the company. If they ask “do you have any events near me?” it will give an answer specifically for the visitor based on IP address. But if they ask about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, Navu won’t make something up or pull from the outside internet.
You can even define your own question prompts (or let the AI do it for you). This keeps the Sidebar as a functional companion, rather than a sandbox for your leads to get lost in.
Past and Present
There are a ton more features that we don’t have time to delve into here (you can read all about them here), but what’s particularly cool about the Sidebar is how it replicates and enhances the existing functionality of a traditional website. Paragraph
We’ve already seen how it can leverage all of your content, new and old. And the citations and content recommendations help visitors find the specific content for them without navigating through a mega-menu. But it also elegantly replaces and augments the personalization and chatbot functions of standard B2B websites.
Let’s take personalization for starters. We normally think of conversational AI as anything but personal, acting as a sort of general-information almanac capable of answering any question from any source. But because Navu is built on your site index and sees individual user behaviors, it tailors the answers to those users specifically. So for example if you ask for a case study, Navu will recommend one based on your browsing behavior. Or if you want to know what events are coming up, it will highlight ones in your geographical region. In fact, it will even tell you what it knows about you if you ask!
But what about your chatbots? Many companies have live sales or support staff on call for visitor inquiries, and aren’t interested or ready in replacing them with an AI agent. That’s why we built Navu to handle live chat, with a separate tab to talk to a live representative or to leave a message. Give it a try right now on our own site! (if it’s working hours in California, we’ll answer right away).
What it Means
AI is changing everything, and your B2B website isn’t going to be an exception. But all the work you’ve done to date doesn’t need to go to waste. On the contrary, AI can make it easier than ever to leverage your content and give your leads the best experience possible during their buyer journey.
Instead of a cluttered, busy website filled with mega-menus, chatbots, content recommendations, personalized blocks and whatever else, we see a future where sites have a single companion powered by AI. It’s a better, cleaner experience for users, and infinitely easier for marketers to maintain.
Got questions? You know where to ask them.
