FirstMark partnered with Georgian Partners to conduct a global study, the results of which were analyzed by NewtonX to become Wave 2 of the “AI, Applied” benchmark report—a first-of-its-kind research initiative tracking how growth-stage B2B companies are adopting and scaling AI.

The key takeaway? Talent—not cost—is now the #1 barrier to AI scale. While early AI efforts focused on tooling and experimentation, the latest findings show that companies are hitting an execution wall without the right technical teams in place. Some additional insights gleaned from the research include:

• Vibe Coding a Top 3 R&D Use Case in Production. Automated coding and debugging (aka Vibe Coding) is now the #3 overall use case with 37% of R&D Respondents reporting it in production. A further 40% of R&D Respondents are piloting an automated coding use case.
• LLM penetration increased significantly in the past 6 months. OpenAI models continue to dominate the market and increased its use in production systems +10 pts between November 2024 and June 2025 to 85%. Google Gemini (+17 pts) and Anthropic Claude (+14 pts) also saw significant usage gains and closed the gap versus OpenAI modestly in a short period of time. OpenAI’s 01-mini enters the market at 35% while DeepSeek remains at 18% as reasoning models have entered the market in the last 6 months.
• Internal Productivity Gains (26%) and the Creation of Competitive Advantage (20%) remain the top motivators for AI initiatives in the B2B world. Cost Savings and Revenue are a distant 3rd and 4th at 11% each.
• Third-party software providers are rapidly deploying AI features in support of Go-to-market teams. Production level use of AI gains for GTM teams is driven by a +14 pt increase in Advanced AI feature availability in third party GTM software, now up to 36% overall.
• B2B companies are slowly advancing in their AI maturity but face challenges moving to the highest maturity levels. Using our proprietary Crawl, Walk, Run AI maturity segmentation, we see modest maturity gains in the market with a nine point shift from Walkers (40% of market) to Joggers (30% of market). Runners and Crawlers remain unchanged at 11% and 18% respectively wave over wave.

Click here to download and read the full report

At FirstMark, we’re proud to partner with Georgian to help define what great AI execution looks like as we all navigate this transformational platform shift together.