“If the technology stack was an orchestra, which product would be the conductor? » asks Martec Chief Scott Brinker in his first column of the year. To cut to the chase, Brinker thinks AI agents have an important role to play here.
This will certainly be the case for some businesses – and almost by default for businesses that rely on suppliers who have gone the agent route themselves. Not just Salesforce (Agentforce) but also HubSpot (Breeze AI), where Brinker serves as the VP platform ecosystem).
Before looking to the future, it is revealing to look back.
How the martech stack became what it is today
Almost six years ago (March 2019), I met with Brinker to talk about the transition from a single-vendor marketing cloud versus “Frankenstack” to a platform model. Let me break this down.
There was a time in the 1920s when vendors like Oracle and Salesforce essentially told companies that could afford it to leave everything to us. We will endeavor to provide all the services you require. Indeed, the late Mark Hurd, then CEO of Oracle, predicted in 2015 that, by 2027, two vendors would control 80% of the martech market.
“Frankenstack”, on the other hand, was about subscribing to individual point solutions and somehow linking (sorry, integrating) them internally. This was an approach often driven by necessity for companies that couldn’t afford to become an Oracle or Salesforce shop.
The transition that was happening at HubSpot (and even Salesforce) that Brinker and I discussed was the emergence of a platform model. A solution would sit in the center of the stack, but through APIs it would link to point solutions that did things the core platform couldn’t do (or did them better). Hence the development of Salesforce AppExchange and HubSpot App Marketplace.
Essentially, this is where we still are today, although orchestrating and integrating large collections of applications and making sense of the data flows between them remains a challenge. But let’s not neglect iPaaS.
iPaaS as a solution
The Integration Platform as a Service aims to alleviate these challenges by providing cloud-based tools designed to automate the integration and orchestration of martech applications. Take a look at Gartner’s definition:
iPaas is a suite of cloud services enabling the development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within an individual or multiple organization.
One of the leading iPaaS providers, Mulesoft, was acquired by Salesforce in 2018.
In practice, however, iPaaS solutions promised more than they could always deliver. Despite the promise of automation and even the possibility that non-technical teams could use them. However, the invisible complexities of integration and the frequent need to customize out-of-the-box APIs required developer involvement; and developers, we sayoften prefer to work without the chosen iPaaS.
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iPaaS, meet AI
But don’t we now have an obvious competitor to make iPaaS work, or even to manage stack orchestration without iPaaS? Meet your friendly AI agent.
In any case, this is Brinker’s thesis. AI agents are already beginning to orchestrate applications across the stack. As mentioned earlier, big players like Salesforce and HubSpot are now integrating AI agents into their platforms. As Brinker observes, mid-sized providers are following a similar path (Braze and Zeta, for example).
It seems simple enough. But there is also a Wild West of agent development solutions offering businesses the ability to create and customize their own agents for a wide range of purposes. Of course, Google and OpenAI support agent development, but dozens of other, much lesser-known vendors do as well (including low-code and no-code solutions).
Echoes of Frankenstack? Agentstein?
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Out of chaos, find simplicity – but not yet
The potential for AI agents to finally solve stack integration and orchestration challenges is undoubtedly exciting. Just like their ability to design and run marketing campaigns and take over 90% of them (or more) customer support and service activities. (Automating campaign personalization “is increasingly known as ‘AI decisioning,'” Brinker says; this will come as a surprise to Pega, which has been calling it that for years.)
I salute Brinker’s enthusiasm. But he and I have been around the block often enough to know that many developments that promised to fix everything—from marketing automation to CDPs—turned out to be only partial solutions and often added to the complexity of the stack.
The agentification of the Salesforces of this world can be a major development for Salesforce customers. But for many companies, deploying AI agents, whether for onboarding or other purposes, promises to be a long and complex task.
