Information Friction

For two decades, reducing information friction was the job: better content, better search, an FAQ, a chatbot. AI assistants ended the scarcity. A buyer who can't find your pricing asks ChatGPT and gets a number, current or not, yours or not. Vendors that still gate basic facts don't create sales conversations anymore; they create third-party answers.

Meanwhile, spending more on information-side fixes yields less each year, because for most buyers information was already no longer the bottleneck. Salespeak production data across 70+ B2B deployments: AI agents asked 4,646 questions flagged as poorly answered, and 100% had nothing in the vendor's knowledge base. The buyers got answers anyway, from somewhere else.

Classic information-friction points:

• Gated pricing
• Integration lists buried in docs
• Security certifications absent from the site
• No "who is this for" statement
• Comparison questions with no vendor answer

Each unanswered question no longer stalls the buyer; it routes the conversation to an ungoverned source and returns an answer the vendor never sees.

A company notices 67 prospects asking about SOC 2 in one month. The information exists internally but not publicly: pure information friction. Publishing a real compliance page raised conversion 23% the following month, both because the answer became available and because it arrived instantly from the vendor itself.

• Treating all friction as information friction, then wondering why complete content doesn't lift conversion.
• Gating facts to force conversations, which now forces third-party answers instead.
• Measuring content completeness instead of answer availability where buyers actually ask, including AI assistants.