A well-reviewed laptop got marked down this week for a reason that had nothing to do with the laptop. The Framework Laptop 13 Pro earned praise for its processor performance, its build quality, and its keyboard, and then lost points for price — with the review attributing the cost directly to high RAM prices. If you have been pricing a machine recently and wondering why the numbers look worse than they did a year ago, that is the explanation, and it is not going to reverse quickly.

Forrester has released the full conference agenda for its B2B Forum EMEA 2026, set for 28–29 September 2026 in London. The event’s theme, “Hello, GTM Singularity,” centers on a claim that’s hard to dismiss: Forrester puts the share of business buyers now using generative AI or conversational search during the buying process at roughly nine in ten. That shift is reshaping how B2B organizations approach discovery, evaluation, and purchase across marketing, sales, product, and customer success functions.

Hardware asset management — knowing what physical devices the organization owns, where they are, who has them, what software is installed on them, and when they need to be refreshed or retired — is foundational to almost every other IT function. Security teams need accurate asset inventory to understand their attack surface. Support teams need device configuration data to resolve issues efficiently. Finance teams need asset records for depreciation and insurance. Procurement teams need lifecycle data to plan refresh cycles.

Corporate laptop procurement has not kept pace with the changes in how knowledge workers use their devices. The procurement criteria that dominated enterprise laptop purchasing for the past fifteen years — Windows compatibility, Intel processor, specific RAM and storage tiers, corporate image support — are still driving purchasing decisions in organizations where the actual requirements have shifted materially. The mismatch produces laptops that are enterprise-manageable but mediocre for the work employees actually do.

Enterprise software procurement moves at a pace that the software it is trying to purchase has long since left behind. The average procurement cycle for a mid-market enterprise software purchase — from initial vendor identification to signed contract — runs between four and nine months. The software category the procurement team is evaluating will have shipped multiple major releases during that period. The requirements documentation that anchored the evaluation will have drifted from what the business actually needs. The vendor selected may have been acquired.