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I am entrepreneur aspiring to grow and climb to the next PEAK with 25+ years experience…
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Godard Abel shared thisOne stat stopped me this week: 10,259 new AI products were added to G2 this year — including 2,856 in July alone! 📈 In my 25+ years of entrepreneurship, I've never seen a market grow this fast on this many fronts at once — new products, new categories, new companies, every single month. This is what a real market looks like when it's scaling at a rapid pace. As of July 2026, we observed the following on G2: ▪️ 111 AI categories on G2, up 152% year-over-year ▪️ 30,274 AI products listed across those categories — up 630% YoY ▪️ 265,194 reviews of AI products — up 61% YoY ▪️ 10,259 new AI products added this fiscal year, 2,856 in July alone But speed and scale can also create noise. When everything claims to be "AI-powered," the claim loses meaning for software buyers and sellers alike. So, this week, we launched two new designations on G2 — 𝗔𝗜 𝗘𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱 and 𝗔𝗜 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶f𝗶𝗲𝗱 — so "AI-powered" claims actually mean something. ✅ If you're a buyer evaluating AI tools: the newest, most-reviewed options are already on G2. ✅ If you're building AI and you're not listed yet: your buyers are already here without you. More details on all of this AI momentum in our G2 marketplace at the link in comments.
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Godard Abel shared thisForbes just reported on G2's approach to AI token spend. We've been building this transparently internally for months, and it felt right to share with others as we all learn and evolve our approach. Our 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found that 80% of software buyers now give their technical teams a dedicated token or LLM budget. We’re doing this at G2 too, but for 𝘢𝘭𝘭 teams. We’ve spent $1.27 million on 970 billion tokens year-to-date. But overall spend isn’t what we’re focused on. We started the year prioritizing 100% AI access and adoption for all G2ers, and have now shifted into increased AI fluency and efficiency. Getting more out of every token has become one of our top company priorities this year and we have a dedicated OKR around it. I check my own efficiency numbers most days. I even recently made one of my most-used automations 40% more efficient! Along the way, I've learned that sometimes the "expensive" LLM model is the efficient one, because a model that gets the work done right the first time can save more than a cheaper one that needs three tries and a human cleanup after. Efficiency is all about outcomes per dollar. How's your team measuring efficiency vs. total AI spend? I’ll be sharing more about our approach as we continue to learn.
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Godard Abel shared this📣 G2 is hiring a Privacy Manager & Data Protection Officer! This is an incredible opportunity to own G2's privacy program end to end and help us reach our next PEAK 🏔️🔒 We welcome strong candidates and referrals. 🙏Godard Abel shared thisWe're hiring for a talented and entrepreneurial Privacy Manager & Data Protection Officer to advance G2 to the next level. You’ll own our privacy program end to end, turning privacy regulations into clear guidance that speeds the business, not slows it. Are you a privacy expert with a builder’s mindset? Please apply here: https://lnkd.in/g6BjdtsU
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Godard Abel shared thisProud to see G2 named to the Inc. Magazine 5000 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America for the eighth year in a row! 🚀 Eight years of growth isn't based on any one person’s contributions. It's a credit to the team we’ve built — one that keeps choosing to innovate, earn trust, and deliver for our customers. That’s two of our PEAK values (Performance and Entrepreneurship) showing up, year after year, and I don’t take that for granted. Thank you to the entire G2 team, our customers, and our partners for being part of this journey. I’m energized thinking about where this team will take G2 over the next eight years — especially as AI reshapes how buyers find and trust software.
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Godard Abel reposted thisGodard Abel reposted thisEvery growth marketer I know has the same three tabs open: the CRM, the intent dashboard, and their favorite AI chatbot to help them make sense of the data. But that’s still too many tools, and it’s still too fragmented. We built the G2 MCP so you can pull live buyer intent data straight into Claude, in plain language, without leaving the conversation. Ask for your most engaged accounts sorted by who's viewing competitor profiles, and it's there. No login, no export, no digging. Competitor comparison signals are the highest-urgency trigger in the buying cycle. The moment a prospect views you against a rival, the clock starts, and most teams don't hear about it until it's too late. I recorded a short demo showing how it works ⬇️ What's slowing your team down most right now: finding the signal, or acting on it fast enough?
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Godard Abel shared thisExcited to share new G2 research: 82% of B2B decision makers sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the past 2 years & 61% currently use or plan to use AI agents as part of the buying process. These are just two findings from our 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, which explores how AI is rapidly changing the way software is bought and sold — based on a June 2026 survey of 1,000+ B2B software buyers globally. Using G2’s AI Custom Research offering, we also surveyed 50+ B2B software marketers & GTM leaders to hear what changes they’re seeing. A few more findings that stood out to me: ▪️70% of software buyers say the pace of tech innovation is pushing them toward shorter contracts ▪️80% say their organization provides developers/technical teams with a dedicated token or LLM usage budget ▪️47% would allow an agent to conduct research and make recommendations while humans retain all final decision-making authority ▪️9% are comfortable letting AI agents execute purchases within approved guardrails, and just 2% would allow purchases without pre-approval The opportunity for software brands is clear, and it requires adapting to both humans and machines simultaneously. That means being recommended by AI answer engines (AEO is no longer optional), making it easy for agents to evaluate you, and arming human buyers with everything they need to clear security reviews, justify costs, and get internal sign-off. In the age of AI, whether you're selling to a human or an agent, the thing that closes the deal is trust. Full report linked below. Would love to hear how your GTM motion is evolving for the AI buying era. ⬇️
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Godard Abel shared thisThe core of what I value most about G2's Board is that our members aren't watching the AI shift from the sidelines. They're funding it, building inside it, and in some cases, running the companies being transformed by it. So when they have something to say about where B2B software is headed, I listen. We asked a few of them to share what they're seeing and their answers stuck with me. Arun Mathew, Partner at Accel, said AEO has gone from a boardroom concept to the dominant way buyers discover and evaluate software today. Jules Maltz, General Partner at IVP, called G2 the primary tool software companies need for their AI visibility strategy. Tom Eggemeier, CEO of Zendesk, shared that prioritizing G2 helped Zendesk grow citation share by 33%, and that the data now shapes Zendesk's product roadmap, not just its marketing. I'm grateful to all three, and to our full board, for their continued support as we work to be the most trusted B2B software marketplace in the age of AI.
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Godard Abel shared thisRecently, I joined Brandee Sanders⚡️ at the Hard Skill Exchange Agent-to-Agent GTM Summit. During our chat, Brandee and I discussed how trust, intent, and reputation have to become machine readable, as buying moves from search to answers, and now from answers to agents. One framing I kept coming back to: 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀. Humans want shiny, fast, visual content with quotes and videos. Agents are the opposite. They're the straight-A student in the room who wants to read the full book, no pictures, just well-structured text they can crawl in milliseconds. You can't write for one and ignore the other anymore. That shift is already showing up in the numbers. 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in an answer engine like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, up sharply from a year ago. 71% use an LLM in their buying journey. The engines are actively reshaping who makes the shortlist: a third of buyers told us they chose a vendor they wouldn't have considered without an AI prompt. 𝗦𝗼 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗼𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁? The same way you've always earned trust, just translated for machines. 🤝🏼 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 more, not less, since AI has made fake content easier than ever to produce. 🗣️ 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 more, since the engines are explicitly trying to avoid training on AI slop. 🤖 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 in a completely new way: markdown, light HTML, content that an agent can ingest in milliseconds rather than content built for scrolling. The destination for that trust is changing too. Software review platforms are evolving from places humans visit to research vendors into data layers that agents query directly. That's the bet we're making at G2, and I think every category will have its version of this. Helping buyers and sellers reach that next PEAK, now with agents in the room, is exactly why we built it. The full recording of my conversation with Brandee, and recordings from other sessions, linked below in the comments. 🔗 ⤵️
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Godard Abel shared thisA review you collect today can shape an AI answer as soon as next week, and this new data proves it. G2 growth advisor Kevin Indig tracked 2,514 products on G2 against AI citations from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Apple, and Google. The median time from a review burst to first citation lift was only four days. That's faster than most companies can publish a blog post. A quarter of products moved within a single day. AI systems are built to pull from structured, trusted review data — and they pull it often. This speed isn't a fluke. It's a structural advantage that most software companies haven't woken up to yet. The companies that start compounding reviews now will build an AI visibility advantage that's going to be very hard to close later. This isn't about gaming the system — it's about showing up where buyers are already looking for answers. Helping software companies reach their next PEAK means being visible where buyers are already looking. The review velocity data makes the path pretty clear. To dig into the full data on how review velocity drives AI citations, read Kevin Indig's analysis, linked in the comments.
Godard Abel commented on a post
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Ryan Barretto love your 6,877 happy Sprout Social, Inc. customer reviews on G2 powering your leadership in Social Media Management ❤️ -> https://www.g2.com/products/sprout-social/reviews
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Godard Abel reacted on thisGodard Abel reacted on thisI was fortunate to interview Bijou B. for 45 minutes. I could've talked to her (or simply listened) for 45 more. Your chance is coming soon. Bijou is G2's AI Principal Analyst, which gives her a front-row seat to what buyers actually write about vendors and what the AI engines pull from it. I asked her what vendors misunderstand about how customer reviews show up in AI answers. She didn't mess around with any short-term point of view. "I don't want to win the answer today. I want to win the answer tomorrow. What might people be searching for where I show up in that answer a year from now, two years from now, three years from now?" That's just one of many wise quotes from Bijou that I probably won't have room for in the report we'll soon publish. Before G2, Bijou worked in public-sector AI procurement, where trust failures carry consequences. She has a sharp read on the review economy. Her framing: your own content is an evaluation, a review is a validation, and the two do different jobs. One gives a buyer the specs you measure yourself against. The other tells them what actually happened when someone tried it. The answer engines are reading both. Bijou will present "The Customer Is the Answer" at Spotlight Summit (Sept. 16). Limited space remains. You don't want to miss it. #SpotlightSummit2026 https://lnkd.in/gvNr52FE
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Godard Abel reacted on thisThe best proof point in software? What your customers say about you. Sprout Social just earned #1 rankings across Social Media Management, Analytics, Listening Tools and Social Customer Service in the G2 Fall 2026 Grid Reports—for the 10th year in a row. To every customer who left a review: thank you. You're the reason we keep pushing.Godard Abel reacted on this10 years. Multiple #1 rankings. Still raising the bar. For the 10th year in a row, Sprout Social has earned G2 recognition. We’re named #1 in Social Media Management, Analytics, Listening Tools and Social Customer Service. Products from the Sprout platform were named in over 400 reports and earned 250 badges in the G2 Fall 2026 Grid Reports. Thank you to all of our customers! Your feedback drives everything we build.
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Godard Abel liked thisGodard Abel liked thisTechstars ranked #1 on TIME and Statista's list of America's Best Incubators & Accelerators for 2026 out of 80 programs. The people who decided it were the founders themselves. 85% of the score came from more than 2,000 alumni who went through these programs between 2020 and 2025. They rated what they actually received and answered one question that carries the most weight: would you recommend it. Andres Barreto, Managing Director at Techstars, breaks down how the ranking was built and what it takes to earn that answer on the Techstars blog. Read the full breakdown in the comments. 👇
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Godard Abel reacted on thisGodard Abel reacted on thisIn the agentic era, the buyer you most need to win over is often an agent, and agents decide on trust. G2 is building that trust layer: grounding agent decisions in real usage, real outcomes, and real outputs, and putting it where agents already work, through MCP integrations and peer-validated AI Blueprints. For two years, the AI-and-buying debate has been about discovery: will an agent find you. The bigger shift is that the agent never leaves. It stays for the whole lifecycle, from onboarding to daily use to renewal. It's a new middleman, and it doesn't read your website, sit through your QBR, or answer your CSM's check-in. And an agent is only as good as what it's pointed at. Weak signal in, weak recommendation out. We've spent more than a decade solving this at G2. Now we're rebuilding it for the agentic era. G2 sits between the buyer's question and the agent's answer. Our signal is first-party, built on real usage and real outcomes, from over 6M verified reviews and 200M annual software buyers. That's evidence an agent can act on: not a brochure to interpret, but verified truth it can trust. So we're doing two things to put that signal where decisions get made. First, infrastructure. In the agent era, your distribution channel isn't your interface. It's the agent. Our MCP integrations let Claude, ChatGPT, HubSpot, and Gong query G2's verified buyer signal directly, plus Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks connectors. 350+ customers and 100+ weekly active users already pull G2 intent and reviews into their own workflows. Second, workflows. Most AI implementation advice is vendor-authored, a nudge toward whatever the vendor sells. We applied the G2 framework instead: peer-validated AI Blueprints, built by practitioners who've done the work, each with an install prompt you can run in your own environment. The same idea that made reviews the default for software buying, trusted, verified, earned, now applied to how teams build with AI. If you're a software vendor, the question isn't whether you're visible to buyers anymore. It's whether you're discoverable and trusted by the agent making the call. Every platform shift rewrites distribution. Search did it once. Agents are doing it again, and this channel doesn't browse. It decides. Trust is the new channel. We've spent a decade building it, and now we're putting it where the agents are.
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Godard Abel reacted on thisYou can now access G2 buyer intent data and market intelligence through your favorite AI interface. Get your team and your agents started on G2 MCP - Let us know feedback and suggestions.Godard Abel reacted on thisEvery growth marketer I know has the same three tabs open: the CRM, the intent dashboard, and their favorite AI chatbot to help them make sense of the data. But that’s still too many tools, and it’s still too fragmented. We built the G2 MCP so you can pull live buyer intent data straight into Claude, in plain language, without leaving the conversation. Ask for your most engaged accounts sorted by who's viewing competitor profiles, and it's there. No login, no export, no digging. Competitor comparison signals are the highest-urgency trigger in the buying cycle. The moment a prospect views you against a rival, the clock starts, and most teams don't hear about it until it's too late. I recorded a short demo showing how it works ⬇️ What's slowing your team down most right now: finding the signal, or acting on it fast enough?
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Godard Abel reacted on thisGodard Abel reacted on thisWe’ve been showcasing what you can do with the G2 MCP, and the biggest reaction isn’t to the AI. It’s realizing how much useful data is already sitting in your G2 profiles. Years of verified reviews, buyer intent, and competitive signals can now feed into Claude, ChatGPT, HubSpot, Gong, AirOps, and Profound. Here are six ways to get started. Already using the G2 MCP? Tell us what you’re building 🛠️.
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Godard Abel reacted on thisGodard Abel reacted on this✨ Chicago speaker spotlight ✨ Build AI Products as Systems of Trust Alexis Zheng, Chief Product and Technology Officer at G2, will make the case that the next bottleneck in AI adoption isn't data or compute, it's trust.` She's spent over a decade building AI/ML systems at scale at companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Grab, Cruise, HPE, and now leads product and technology at the company that verifies the software world trusts. In Chicago, she'll break down how to how to build trust directly into the product. What you will take away: 🔹 Why trust — not data or compute — is the bottleneck of AI adoption 🔹 How to evaluate the whole system, not just the model, and why benchmarks pass while the product still fails in front of a customer 🔹 What can be verified can be automated — how evals are the key to building AI products of trust 🔹 How trust is even more important when agents — not their humans — are making the decisions in modern enterprise products Get your ticket 👉 https://bit.ly/3SJs3Io #AI #ProductManagement
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Godard Abel reacted on thisGodard Abel reacted on thisAccording to new @G2 research: 61% of buyers use or plan to use AI agents in software purchasing & only 2% would let them execute without pre-approval. As we saw with autonomous vehicles, capability always arrived before trust. The debate was never really about the technology. It was about whether the verification infrastructure existed to support it. The same dynamic is playing out in agentic buying. Agents are already doing real work: building shortlists (51%), evaluating TCO (51%), researching solutions (49%). The research layer is being delegated. The decision gate stays human, and it will stay that way until there's a verified data layer that agents can actually reason over. That's the infrastructure problem agent evals (which we’re building at G2!) are designed to solve, and what our latest research report validates. Full report in comments. What would it take for you to trust an AI agent to execute a software purchase on your behalf, not just recommend solutions?
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Abel Family Endowed Scholarship & Flatirons Society
University of Colorado Boulder
- Present 4 years 1 month
Education
We have endowed a full academic scholarship for underprivileged student at CU and become top CU football and athletics boosters #skobuffs #primetime and enjoy going on campus at time to share entrepreneurial and life lessons learned with CU students.
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Founder’s Circle Member
American Cancer Society's BrightEdge Fund
- Present 4 years 11 months
Health
My wife Stacy and I proud to support Brightedge Managing Director Alice Lin Pomponio who is leading the fund on its mission to fuel life-saving research and provide cancer patients with wide, equitable access to quality healthcare and support services.
BrightEdge is the innovation, impact investment, and venture capital arm of the American Cancer Society (ACS). -
Builder
New Story
- Present 9 years 9 months
Poverty Alleviation
My wife Stacy and I are proud supporters of New Story's missions to build safe homes and thriving communities for disadvantaged families around the world.
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G2 Gives Founder & Pledge 1% Exec Sponsor
G2
- Present 14 years 3 months
Education
Embedding philanthropy as part of G2's core purpose via G2 Gives using 1/1/1 model dedicating at least 1% of founding equity, 1% of employee time to volunteering and 1% of product to supporting philanthropic partners including Girls who Code, New Story Charity, and American Cancer Society
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Co-Chair Discovery Ball
American Cancer Society
- Present 7 years
Health
Co-chair of the ACS Annual Discovery Ball in Chicago which we're also supporting via our G2 Gives and Abel Family Donor Advised Fund
Publications
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G2 Crowd Vision
G2 Crowd
See publicationThe G2 Crowd Vision for changing the game in enterprise technology by providing the first source of trusted ratings and reviews.
Honors & Awards
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Inc 5000 (2015)
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SteelBrick entered as America's #1,200 fastest growing company
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Crain's Chicago Tech 50
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Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Inductee
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Inc 5000 - 6 Years in a Row (2008-2013)
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BigMachines was featured on list of America's Fastest Growing Companies 6 years in a row
Languages
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German
Native or bilingual proficiency
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
Organizations
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Aspen Institute
Henry Crown Fellow
- PresentMember of the 2016 Class of Henry Crown Fellows and the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
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Young Presidents Organization (YPO)
Forum Member
- PresentYPO Golden Gate and YPO Chicago Member
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