It's released! The new Martech for 2025 report by Frans Riemersma and myself has shipped. It’s 108 pages of our latest research and analysis of what’s actually happening with marketing technology in the maelstrom of AI madness. No heaps of hype. Just hard data and a hopefully helpful framing of the facts. You can pick up a free copy here: https://lnkd.in/eTqKv3WM The centerpiece of our report is one of the most in-depth studies of gen AI use cases in marketing today. It’s changing quickly, but this is a snapshot of over 50 marketing use cases, with data on which are being used frequently or infrequently — and for which use cases are marketers leveraging embedded AI in existing platforms or turning to new AI tools. Yet there’s more AI happenings beyond commercial SaaS products in the martech landscape. There’s the new model of “service-as-a-software” — a clever play on the SaaS acronym. Instead of paying for seats or compute/storage use, where it’s up to the buyer to wield those tools successfully to achieve the outcomes they’re seeking, a new generation of AI agents are being offered on a cost-per-outcome basis. But the even bigger change we see is the explosion of custom apps being created with explicit — or more revolutionary implicit — software development with AI co-pilots and agents. This is the AI-ification of low-code/no-code capabilities that have been empowering IT, marketing operations professionals, and “citizen developer” power users to build their own specialized apps and automations. And then there's AI agents that will build software programs at the behest of users — without those users even realizing it! The report also includes fascinating interviews with expert leaders from the five sponsors who supported our research over these past five months: Chris O'Neill, CEO of GrowthLoop "End-to-End Marketing on Your Data Cloud with AI" Tejas Manohar, CEO of Hightouch "Why the Next Wave Beyond CDPs is AI Decisioning" Greg Brunk, Head of Product at MetaRouter "A CDP's Best Friend: 'Shifting Left' Data Quality" Sara Faatz, Director, Technology Community Relations at Progress "Lessons of Composability for Marketing Operations" Jonathan (Jon) Moran, Head of Martech Solutions Marketing at SAS "Filling the Gaps in Governance for Generative AI" A few good hours of martech reading awaits you. As does an amazing 2025 ahead! #martech
Albin Paul
2w
Who is going to build these micro apps/agents- VPs, CXOs or IT- because I think no-code/low-code was mis sold to CxOs and IT when their KPIs & KRAs didn't play any incentive in building suxh apps- instead of targeting end users and managers in marketing/sales/cs etc and making their daily job easier or faster. As I said in my last Li post after testing Microsoft CoPilot Studio to build AI agents- "anyone can build an AI agent but not everybody can" borrowing from the famous dialogue from movie Ratatouille"anyone can cook" And the big question to ISVs, GSIs and SIs are where is their institutional knowledge about industry/domain expertise from last 3 decades of IT outsourcing projects are? Is it available to recall for the org to use -because without that knowledge there is no Service-as-a-Software and the same goes for the buyers at any other company- because the new approach is selling outcome rather than software
Has the briefing started?
Nat Guy
2w
👍 Big Ops as greater challenge than Big Data: "Whereas a previous decade wrestled with big data, we believe the mission of this new AI-powered era is to wrangle “big ops” — taming the scale and complexity of all the apps, agents, and automations interacting with this data." - from the report 2 things to look out for, perhaps: 1. More open "let's play nice via open rules of the road" like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangChain open library, etc. So composability via APIs = yes, but also composability one layer up via open protocols and libraries managing those various APIs into workflows, state machines, etc. 2. And maybe?: the most flexible and robust workflows and state machines flexible enough to run all this rapidly changing, complex network of interactions of actors will likely have editable code not too far from the user (maybe filtered via an AI helper, but not far away.) Ie, a million click and drag buttons and input fields via a proprietary graphical user interface probably won't be able to keep pace with a "Hey AI assistant, update this open source python or js workflow and state machine to do something from this brand new service." AI: "Done. Changes committed and pushed to staging."
Nate Dame
2w
What's the difference between: Content - Copy Ideation and Management - Content Ideation ?
Ken Madsen
1w
Well done Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma - A great deal of knowledge & perspectives shared in that very comprehensive session yesterday. You also picked apart content marketing more - e.g. content creation, content automation, content ideation, content optimization etc… the use cases are powerful there. High TVA scores ref: tangible value application - a term brands are using, we might want to weave that into the next report.
John T.
2w
Solid work, Scott Brinker! Congrats to you and the team for an incredibly insightful and balanced report. Any thoughts on how much customers are embracing AI-driven marketing and what brands are doing to make it feel trustworthy and authentic?
You guys were soon on on everything today! Love the data and the vision of the space and specifically the AI agent revolution we are experiencing right now. Love to have you on my podcast if open too guys!
Excellent!
Head of Marketing
2wThe shift in build vs. buy will be interesting to keep an eye on. Instant software is going to make it much easier to build internal tools, already seeing this with low-code, no-code builders being used to replace internal legacy processes and operations. However the big question is going to be - who maintains the instant software, who improves it when 3rd party tools start innovating and providing better software, and should that person be focusing on building these internal tools, or sellable products?