Posted to News on 15th Sep 2026, 16:09
AI is already deciding who looks credible in industrial technology
An engineer researching a new supplier rarely starts with a phone call anymore. Gartner found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free purchasing experience, and Forrester's 2026 State of Business Buying reports that generative AI searches are increasingly where research starts, not where it ends up.
That shift cuts deeper in industrial technology than in most sectors. Buyers are asking AI tools to summarise suppliers before a rep is ever in the room - and those tools answer from whatever they can find: scattered documentation, inconsistent product naming across divisions, support pages that haven't been touched in years.
Remarkable set out to measure this properly. Remarkable's new '20 Companies Shaping UK Industrial Technology Technical Authority Index 2026' ranks 20 companies shaping UK industrial technology against ten measures of digital maturity and AI visibility - from machine-readable documentation to citation authority to whether an AI assistant will actually vouch for a company's technical claims.
The early findings are stark. Tektronix leads the index at 4.7 out of 5; several familiar names sit well below it. As the report itself puts it: "few industrial technology companies have a technical reputation an AI tool will vouch for."
For anyone selling into industrial or manufacturing buyers, it's a chance to see - with independent, observable evidence - where your business sits against the companies it's now actually being judged alongside, not by competitors, but by the AI tools doing first-pass research on their behalf.
Get the full ranking: Technical Authority Index 2026
