The hype around artificial intelligence may be heading toward the “trough of disillusionment,” as Gartner calls it, but the technology continues to advance in important and disruptive ways, especially for martech. This is the summarized version of the “Martech for 2025” report by martech leader Scott Brinker and marketing technologist. Frans Riemersmareleased today.
“AI is reshaping marketing and martech,” they write. “And while we’re not prone to hyperbole, we believe marketers and marketing operations managers will face significant real-world changes with this technology in 2025.”
These changes go well beyond current use cases like content generation, personalization, and knowledge management. It’s impossible to predict what all future use cases will be, because AI’s ability to create “instant software” means it will be tailored to specific business needs.
Here is hypertail martech
These new solutions, “hypertails” according to the report, will be built not only by IT professionals and marketers, but also by AI agents. This means radical changes in the martech stack.
Dig Deeper: 7 strategies to get the most out of your martech stack
“This could be the tipping point where the number of commercial applications in the tech stack peaks and future stack growth – which overall could be exponential – comes from custom software, a cornucopia custom applications, agents and automations. »
Source: Martech AI 2025
Radical changes are already underway among martech providers, changes that shake up the paradigm of how new companies compete with established companies.
Existing martech giants like Adobe, HubSpot, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAS have aggressively integrated new AI capabilities into their products, leveraging both generative and traditional machine learning. This has sparked a new battleground, reminiscent of the age-old struggle between startups and incumbents.
However, a significant portion of AI-native startups do not directly challenge these incumbents. Instead, they innovate at the edge, developing small, standalone tools that automate or improve specific marketing tasks within existing platform ecosystems. These tools, powered by generative AI engines from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and others, offer complementary solutions rather than direct competition.
Would you be willing to do some DIY?
One company, financial technology giant Klarna, went so far as to abandon two major vendors in favor of DIY software. It replaces Salesforce and Workday with its own custom CRM and HCM applications using AI and composable cloud services.
Although this may be an extreme measure, as the report points out, “the fact that [it] is even conceivable, speaks to both the economic improvement of personalized development and the perceived business advantage of more personalized digital operations in the AI era.
The other thing that makes this possible is the ability to scale AI using a company’s proprietary data and context-specific logic. Manufacturing is mainly done in three ways:
Train your own model, refine an existing model and/or use retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
RAG, the most common method, searches data from internal databases and feeds it into prompts given to the LLM engine. The answer is generated using this data as input, which increases the generic knowledge of the LLM. This has the advantage of providing additional guardrails for the LLM, as the RAG can verify or manipulate the output of the LLM.
Two other key points from the report:
The importance of data strategy: Strong data strategies are fundamental to successful AI implementation. Cloud data warehouses are becoming essential for aggregating and orchestrating data. “The phrase we’ve been using for a long time… you don’t have an AI strategy if you don’t have a data strategy.”
Composability is key: Martech stacks should have modular and interconnected components for flexibility and adaptability. “With a composable approach, we can take the best parts and pieces and build from there. You can put together a stack that fits your business needs and the needs of your customers.
Dig Deeper: Composability is here, says MessageGears
The report paints a picture of martech where the only constant is change. This will depend on changing customer needs, but advances in AI should give marketers the tools to keep up with and sometimes get ahead of these changes. The full report can be downloaded here (registration required).
Finally, to give an idea of all the changes AI is bringing to martech, Brinker and Riemersma have made a genAI-only version of their popular martech landscape.
