The Marketing Operations Strategist - What you need to know from Scott Brinker's new State of Martech report

Hey! 👋

Hope you’re doing well!

Scott Brinker (editor of the chiefmartec blog) and Frans Riemersma (founder of MartechTribe) just released their annual State of Martech report — and if you're in marketing ops, it's worth more than just a skim. This year’s edition is a front-row seat to how rapidly AI is reshaping the martech landscape (and what it means for our stacks, workflows, and roles).

This year’s edition focused on:

• The changes in the martech landscape

• AI in martech

• Platform centers

• Custom software + the hypertail*

• Sentiment trends

*”For years, we’ve described the distribution of commercial software in the Marketing Technology Landscape as a ‘long tail’ — a few very large and popular platforms in the head, a few hundred category leaders in the torso, and a long, long, loooong tail of startups and more specialized niche products. However, as we described in our Martech for 2025 report back in December, this commercial long tail of martech software bleeds into a rapidly expanding hypertail of custom-built software. These include IT-built apps, but also citizen developer built apps by marketing ops professionals and marketing power users.”

Hear key insights and my thoughts after a quick word from our sponsors:

Let’s talk through some of the highlights from the report:

🪴 The martech landscape keeps growing…but not in the way you might think 🤔

• The number of tools hit 15,384 (!!!), a 9% YoY increase and a 100x jump since 2011. That includes everything from established platforms to brand-new AI-native tools.

  • My take: We’ll talk about AI in a second, but MCPs are the hottest tech on the market right now — and for those who are less technical, MCP = Model Context Protocol. Basically, it’s the way that an AI tool like ChatGPT can connect into a tool like Zapier so you can leverage AI to interact with all of Zapier’s existing integrations. More on that in a second.

• AI was the biggest driver of growth in 2024, but this year’s growth is happening across every category, and consolidation is also a factor — the research team behind this report removed 1,211 products, 84% of which simply ceased operation. 😬

  • My take: I definitely see this trend reflected in the tech news I read, for example: Drift was acquired by Salesloft.

• CDPs in particular are consolidating fast — you may have heard of ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle being acquired. Some were acquired happily (and made sense strategically), others not so much. CDPs are getting squeezed out of the center layer — often replaced by warehouses or engagement platforms.

  • My take: This squeeze is even more likely when there is downward pressure on budgets. It’s hard to get buy in for a CDP when you already have Snowflake, a CRM, a MAP, and so on.

🤖 AI is here, and it’s starting to reshape our martech stacks

• 87.5% of marketers now use AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

  • My take: Adoption was ultra fast, and I’m sure it will continue to grow as the models get more data and improve.

• But AI agents (that run semi-autonomous workflows without human intervention) are still early-stage, mostly used by innovators and early adopters.

  • My take: That being said, look at the progress in this area as well — Zapier has already rolled out a few Agents, and I continue to see the word Agent thrown around with other tools too.

• A growing number of companies are building custom AI tools on top of their cloud data layers (especially in enterprise), while others are deploying commercial AI tools that plug in directly.

  • My take: Typically, this is how we start to see the propagation of new tech — enterprise will start to tinker, then vendors will provide plug-and-play functionality that smaller vendors can afford to use.

🧱 The stack is shifting…again

• In B2B, CRMs remain the core system for most teams. 42% still center their stack around CRMs.

  • My take: For pure B2B, this makes sense to me and aligns with what I see out there in the wild.

• In B2C and hybrid orgs, the center of the stack is shifting rapidly to cloud data warehouses and MAPs/CEPs (customer engagement platforms), pushing CDPs to the background. CDPs? Only 8% of B2C and 21% of hybrid B2B/B2C companies now say they’re the “center” of their stack — a major decline from 2024.

  • My take: I see this a lot in PLG/B2B2C orgs as well — at previous PLG (product led-growth) companies, we’ve used Snowflake as more of a center-of-the-universe than CRM.

📈 Martech stack sizes are growing again (against all odds 🫠🤣😭)

• According to Zylo’s SaaS data, the average company now uses 275 tools*, up from 269 last year.

  • My take: This is a reversal into growth after a bunch of consolidation last year. Which is good for us in marketing ops, but also could be a challenge…will our teams grow to manage these new AI tools?

• Enterprises (10,000+ employees) are using an average of 660 tools*. Even SMBs are managing 150+.

  • My take: That’s a lot of tools, so we will need to use AI as much as we can to help manage the workload internally. A great example is using an AI Agent to manage easy-to-resolve internal support tickets by using existing documentation. Look across your stack to identify areas where AI can help you flatten the number of tools you’re using. A great example of this is Clay: you can use AI prompting, data enrichment, and other tools all in one platform, vs. Zoominfo + Ringlead + xyz other data sources all stitched together through haphazard integrations.

* this is the entire company tech stack, not just martech…but it is directionally insightful.

All of us, reading these stats:

🛠️ Rise of the "Hypertail"

• The report introduces the idea of a “Hypertail” — the explosion of custom, AI-generated, citizen-developed tools. A tool like HubSpot would fit at the head, a tool like ON24 would fit in the torso, and a tool like Metadata might fit in the tail — but the millions of custom-built martech (many now created by AI) fit into the hypertail.

  • My take: I think we will first see this on the tiny scale, like little old me setting up AI-powered Clay tables and Zapier Agents…but I don’t think small companies have the budget to create home-grown tools at the level anyone would be excited about. I expect to see enterprise companies investing in homegrown tools IF they can successfully use tools like Cursor to help build and maintain them long-term. If that is not that case, I stand by my previous statements…for most orgs, self-built and self-maintained tools are EXPENSIVE and often die on the vine/shortly after launch for that reason, especially in a testy economy.

• These aren’t just new logos on a martech map…they’re behind-the-scenes workflows built via prompts from end users, not products from developers.

  • My take: Say it again with me — 👏 I 👏 need 👏 to 👏 learn 👏 how 👏 to 👏 effectively 👏 use 👏 AI 👏 tools 👏 and 👏 prompts 👏 

• If you’ve used a GPT or Claude agent to summarize call notes or clean up a list, congrats — you’re already part of the Hypertail. 😎

  • My take: This the cool part to me, the accessibility of it all — if you want to learn how to prompt, just go sign up for free product and learn quickly. This is very different from the heavily-gated past of online product universities, where only paid customers could learn the tool.

🤔 Sentiment trends

• Overall, martech satisfaction is trending up — smaller vendors tend to score higher, and younger companies are outpacing older ones in ratings.

  • My take: Ok so hear me out…there are a lot of vendors who have been sitting on stale legacy tech, still raising prices every year…as assisted development accelerates, I expect to see a lot of rip-and-replaces of old-school vendors in the next few years.

🧠 So…what does it all mean for you?

This isn’t just another year of incremental updates. Martech is entering a new era where AI isn’t just a feature — it’s becoming the driver. I know I’ve been beating a dead horse a bit here, but I think this proves that we all need to become AI literate ASAP.

If you’re in marketing or revenue operations, this report should make you think hard about:

• ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ How you can learn AI tools and capabilities ASAP (either hands-on by getting a free ChatGPT user, or via tools like datacamp.com where you can take little courses — or both)

• ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ How you can use AI and automation together to help take work off of your plate (and off of your stakeholder’s plates)

• ⭐ ⭐ What you want the center of your martech universe to be (probably not CDP, could be Snowflake or CRM…either way, you need a way to plug AI into it in a secure way)

• ⭐ If each tool in your stack is a winner or a loser. Do they fit your need, are they innovating? If not, they could be a candidate for consolidation or replacement with a custom or AI-powered tool.

I think this is all very exciting — one of the most common complaints I hear about martech is that the legacy vendors are resting on their laurels, and I think AI is going to force the issue: innovate or die. 🏴‍☠️

📖 By the way, I only hit the major notes in this quick analysis…check out the full report here, it’s huge and full of even more insights!

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

Lately, I’m working to tether product data and GTM data together so we can have a 360 view of our customers. I’m also working to automate some sales activities, so we can have as lean yet highly productive team. My goal is to automate as much as I can that isn’t relationship-building/the human aspect — I don’t want to automate things like comments because those help build relationships…but I do want to automate things like setting up demo instances for sales calls. I’ll share more as I finish up more of my design and builds. 🤓

ALSO, has anyone else finished You (on Netflix)?! I can’t believe it’s over, and it was pretty good season…hard to believe anyone could produce a better performance than Love, though.

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

SO I picked Beehiiv for 2 reasons:

1. The email builder is straightforward to use.

2. They have superior SEO to other vendors.

Have these things worked out? For the most part, yes — the builder has some quirks here and there, and it could struggle if I tried to create a really sophisticated template. But for me, speed-to-draft-and-send is key…I have little time to get thoughts down on paper. I can’t spend time fiddling with a glitchy or overly complex builder.

In terms of SEO, yes as well — I have no idea how they’re doing this, but my newsletter continues to rank pretty high on key searches, with little to no intervention from me.

I am not as familiar with Substack and Convertkit….don’t kill me, but I don’t love the style of Substack. Something about it just feels old and clunky. For Convertkit, it is quite pricey…it makes sense if you have a bunch of digital products to sell and need to send a bench of nurtures, but if you aren’t doing that, it isn’t very cost effective.

If you’re considering which tool you want to use, most offer a free trial — check it out and see if you like the build and deploy flows. I tried Convertkit because I thought maybe it would made sense as I grow, but I found that the builder really slowed me down. I suspect that most of the big-name Convertkit users hire contractors or even a team of email editors and buy customer HTML templates.

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara