The martech chart is crazy, and marketers are feeling the pressure more than ever

Scott Brinker's marketing technology chart showing the evolving martech landscape passed 14,000 vendors this year. Most of the products on that list do similar things. They collect data, display it on a dashboard, send automated communications, and perhaps have a chatbot attached to help users create stuff.

Over my years working with martech, I have seen the majority of companies running multiple tools.

They'll have Monetate, VWO, Dynamic Yield, Adobe Target, or Optimizely for on-site personalisation.

They'll have Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Bloomreach, Iterable, Insider, MoEngage, Customer.io, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Adobe Campaign for emails and SMS. They may send push through those tools also, or have something dedicated to it like Airship, Attentive, XtremePush, or have built it themselves internally.

Larger companies will have Segment for streaming data to these platforms or into their data warehouses, which are typically BigQuery or Snowflake nowadays, perhaps Databricks too.

IT owns the data warehouse, marketing teams own the activation layer.

Data science might have built a couple of propensity models on top of the data warehouse, and sync them into the platforms above using a reverse ETL tool such as Hightouch or Rudderstack.

But fundamentally the marketer still experiences what they've been experiencing for years. Lots of data, having to manually figure out what the data means, having to manually build segments (or if the platform has 'AI', that 'AI' will create some rule-based segments), having to build workflows (or use the platform's AI to build them), and finally having to build the deliverable (or using an LLM to do so).

There are so many inefficiencies here. So many steps where things could go wrong. And so many missed opportunities. How do you know if you've got the right trigger? How do you know if you've missed a valuable micro-segment? How do you have time to create content for the A/B tests you want to run?

The point I'm trying to make is that AI is here, but no-one has correctly implemented it into their CRM or marketing automation platforms in a way that reduces load on the marketers, operates autonomously (doesn't just run once to build static things), or provides substantial uplift.

I want to break that mould.

I'll know I'm building the right thing when an agent can take action that drives revenue, and the marketer didn't even have to tell it to.