Direct answer — Who won Forrester’s 2026 B2B Summit awards?
Forrester’s 2026 B2B awards span two programs. The Return On Integration (ROI) Honors went to Amazon Ads, Rockwell Automation, and ServiceNow for cross-functional alignment across marketing, sales, customer success, and product. The Programs Of The Year Awards recognized companies including IBM, Autodesk, Nasdaq Governance Solutions, and Verizon Business for functional excellence. Winners were chosen for measurable, AI-enabled alignment and will present at B2B Summit North America in Phoenix, April 26–29.
Forrester has announced the winners of its 2026 B2B Return On Integration (ROI) Honors and B2B Programs Of The Year Awards, recognizing Amazon Ads, Rockwell Automation, and ServiceNow for achieving cross-functional alignment across marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams. The winners will present at B2B Summit North America in Phoenix, April 26–29.
This year’s Summit theme — “GTM Singularity” — reflects Forrester’s position that traditional B2B go-to-market strategies are collapsing. With over 90% of business buyers already using or planning to use generative AI to support purchase decisions, the research firm argues that most buying decisions are now shaped well before sellers enter the discussion.
The ROI Honors Winners
The three B2B ROI Honorees were selected for demonstrating measurable alignment across the B2B growth engine — not just marketing or sales in isolation, but the full stack of functions that drive customer experience and revenue.
Amazon Ads earned recognition for aligning its advertising platform capabilities with customer success outcomes. Rockwell Automation was honored for integrating product, marketing, and sales functions around industrial automation buyers. ServiceNow stood out for reimagining its partner marketing through AI-enabled self-service that accelerated campaign launches and improved marketing development fund attribution.
ServiceNow’s Marc Monday, group vice president of Americas channels and partnerships, summarized their approach: partners needed speed, simplicity, and visibility — not another tool. By enabling self-service partner marketing powered by AI, they achieved more efficient use of market development funds with clearer attribution from opportunity to revenue.
Programs Of The Year Winners
Forrester’s B2B POY Awards recognized seven additional companies for functional excellence:
- IBM (B2B Marketing Executives) — Pivoted from activity-centric to audience-centric go-to-market planning, realigning investment and execution to drive stronger revenue contribution
- Autodesk (Content Strategy and Operations) — Transformed fragmented content creation into a centralized, AI-powered content center of excellence
- Nasdaq Governance Solutions — Launched an AI solutions suite for board management, aligning product, marketing, sales, and partners around a single campaign
- Verizon Business — Replaced reactive NPS surveys with an AI-driven Customer Experience Index that predicts sentiment without requiring customer input
What This Signals for Mid-Market B2B Teams
The common thread across every winner is functional alignment — marketing, sales, product, and customer success operating as a connected growth engine rather than isolated departments. That’s not new advice, but the AI dimension is. ServiceNow used AI to make partner self-service viable at scale. Verizon used AI to replace survey-based feedback with predictive sentiment analysis. IBM restructured marketing planning around audiences, not channels.
For mid-market B2B teams without enterprise budgets, the takeaway isn’t to replicate these programs wholesale. It’s that the gap between companies that treat go-to-market as a cross-functional system versus those that run marketing, sales, and product independently is widening. AI agents in revenue operations are accelerating that gap. McKinsey’s 2026 report puts a number on it: the 6% of teams that have achieved high AI maturity are reporting 22% efficiency gains, while the rest are stuck in pilot mode. These award patterns reinforce Forrester’s GTM singularity keynote argument that unified marketing-sales-CS-product alignment is now a revenue prerequisite, not a maturity goal.
PRO TIP
Forrester’s B2B Summit sessions will be available post-event. If you’re working on sales-marketing alignment or revenue operations, the ROI Honors panel discussion (featuring all three winners) is worth tracking. Follow #ForrB2BSummit for live coverage April 26–29.
Meanwhile, on the sales side, Salesforce’s State of Sales report shows that 87% of sales teams now use AI — further evidence that the winners are the ones who’ve embedded AI into their operating model, not just their tool stack.
For more on aligning marketing and sales operations, see our guide to RevOps best practices.
