Why rising demo requests might mean curiosity about AI, not real buying intent — and what that shift means for sales and marketing.
A Number I Used to Actually Like Looking At
There's this one number on our dashboard, and for the longest time it was kind of my favorite thing to check. Lately though, every time it ticks up I just get suspicious instead of happy about it.
Demo requests.
On paper, they're up. Objectively, more people are booking time with us than they were a year ago. If you'd shown me this chart back then, I'd have assumed we were doing something right — better positioning, better content, maybe the product finally clicked for people. That's usually what a rising demo number means.
Except when I actually started sitting in on more of these calls myself, a pattern kept showing up that didn't fit the old story.
Not Everyone Booking a Demo Wants to Buy
A meaningful chunk of the people booking demos aren't evaluating us against a competitor, and they're not trying to solve a problem they're currently stuck on. They're evaluating AI, generally, as a category. They want to see what a tool like ours can actually do in practice — not because they have a budget approved or a project waiting, but because they're curious what's possible right now.
That's a genuinely different kind of visitor than the one this metric was built to measure.
Why This Metric Used to Mean Something
For most of the history of B2B software, a demo request was a fairly reliable signal. Someone doesn't usually block 30 minutes on their calendar unless they've got a real problem and they're seriously checking if you're the fix. The intent was baked into the action. Booking a demo meant something.
I don't think that's true anymore, at least not uniformly. AI has made "let's see what this thing can do" a socially normal, low-effort thing to do, even without a problem attached to it. People are exploring the category the way they might scroll through a new app's feature list — not because they need it today, but because it's interesting and it's moving fast and they don't want to fall behind on understanding it.
Two Audiences Hiding in One Number
None of that's really a bad thing, to be clear. Curiosity is probably part of how a market like this ends up growing in the first place. But it does mean that one number on the dashboard is secretly counting two totally different groups of people now, and mashing them together into a single line just makes everything harder to act on, not easier.
If your sales team is qualifying every demo the same way they qualified them two years ago, they're probably burning real hours on conversations that were never going to convert — not because the person was a bad fit, but because they were never actually shopping. And if your marketing team is optimizing content and campaigns purely to push that top-line demo number up, you might be getting really good at attracting curiosity traffic while your actual buying-intent traffic stays flat or even shrinks as a share of the total.
What We're Actually Trying
I don't have a clean fix for this yet. A few things we're trying:
We've started asking a soft qualifying question before the call even gets booked — something closer to "what are you hoping to walk away with" rather than the usual company-size and role fields. It's not perfect, but it at least gives the rep a hint about which conversation they're walking into.
We're also looking at this as its own funnel stage rather than noise to filter out. If curiosity traffic really is becoming a permanent category, it might deserve its own content, its own follow-up sequence, and its own definition of success — instead of trying to force it through the same pipeline built for people who already know they want to buy.
And honestly, we're just tracking it more explicitly now. Even a rough split between "exploring AI" and "solving a specific problem" on our intake form has already made our demo numbers a lot more legible month over month.
Is Anyone Else Seeing This?
I'm curious whether this is showing up for other people running demos or free trials right now, or if it's more specific to certain categories of tooling. Is anyone else seeing a rising share of visitors who are here for the category and not the specific problem you solve? And if so, has anything actually worked for separating the two before they hit a sales call?
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