Three falsifiable CPQ predictions for 2027

Every autumn the CPQ market fills up with trend pieces that cannot be wrong. "AI will transform quoting." "Buyers expect more." Fine, but how would you ever know if it did not happen? So here are three predictions with a test attached to each, so you can hold us to them. We will come back to them in a year and say which ones held.

Why make predictions you can be proven wrong about?

Because an opinion you cannot check is just marketing. The three below follow from what we have written about this autumn: the glass floor that has kept CPQ out of the mid-market, buyers' move to self-service, and the four stages a manufacturer goes through on the way to an online configurator. If the evidence is right, these should happen. If they do not, something in the argument is wrong, and we would rather find out in public.

Prediction 1: will mid-sized manufacturers adopt CPQ in numbers in 2027?

Yes. AI-native architectures collapse both sides of the glass floor at once: the effort (model building in tens of hours, upkeep in hours per month) and, as a consequence, the entry price, which no longer needs to assume ten seats and a dedicated administrator. At the same time, buyer expectations raise the cost of doing nothing: Gartner's 2026 survey found 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, up from 61% the year before.

A capability that becomes far more accessible and more commercially urgent at the same time does not spread slowly. CRM's history shows how fast a category standard flips once the price list stops assuming you are big. Analysts expect the CPQ market to keep growing (one forecast, from Custom Market Insights, puts it at about 16.5% a year to 2035), and in our assessment more of that growth will come from below the old floor, where few analysts have been looking.

Test: supported if at least 25 documented mid-market manufacturers in the industries on our maturity map launch buyer-facing configurators between 1 January and 31 December 2027.

Prediction 2: how fast does an online configurator reset its category?

Within about 18 months. This is the automotive precedent replaying downstream. Once one player answers "what does it cost, configured my way?" at a quarter to ten on a Tuesday evening, every competitor's request-a-quote form becomes a visible deficiency. Category expectations are set by the best available experience, not the average one. In most of the industries we track, we think that window is measured in quarters, not years.

Test: supported if, in at least three of the industries on our CPQ maturity map, a category leader launches a credible buyer-facing configurator and at least two direct competitors respond within 18 months.

Prediction 3: will the configurator move to the marketing budget?

Yes, by 2028. When quote volume becomes the metric, ownership follows. Cost per configured quote will become a number marketing leaders track next to cost per lead, and the configurator will compete for budget not with ERP modules but with advertising.

Test: supported if at least ten documented manufacturers assign ownership of buyer-facing configuration to marketing, digital commerce or revenue operations, or publicly track configured-quote conversion as a commercial KPI, by 31 December 2028.

What are we not predicting?

Three things, to be clear about the edges of the argument.

We are not predicting the end of traditional CPQ. A multi-country programme with deep engineering rules, ERP integration and hundreds of sellers still needs a mature platform, and Tacton is what we implement for exactly that. The shift we describe happens next to those programmes and below them, not instead of them.

We are not predicting the end of the sales rep. Buyers who configure on their own still want a person to check their thinking before they sign. Gartner found in May 2026 that 69% of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate what AI tools have told them. The rep's job moves from producing documents to judgment, which is a promotion, not a redundancy.

And we are not predicting that every industry moves at once. Some of the industries on our map show no buyer-facing movement yet, and the ones that move first will be the ones where a single company decides not to wait. That is the whole point of prediction 2.

What would prove all three wrong?

All three rest on the same forces: buyer preference for self-service, the economics of AI-native configuration, and a vendor ecosystem that keeps lowering the entry price. Here is the uncomfortable symmetry: every one of those forces pushes in the same direction. Waiting is a bet that all three reverse at once.

If you want to place yourself before the predictions play out, start with the four stages in our CPQ maturity model. If you want to see what a buyer-facing configurator feels like today, try today's demo.

Full disclosure: cpq.se is a Tacton reseller and implementation partner for small and mid-sized manufacturers, and a CPQ advisor to enterprise organisations. We work with sailsrep.ai as a reasoning layer on top of Tacton CPQ, and I also work at sailsrep.ai. We have an interest in these predictions coming true, which is exactly why each one comes with a test.

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