Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet this past month. I’ve been heads down on research for our State of Martech 2025 report that we’ll be releasing on #MartechDay — May 6 — along with the 2025 marketing technology landscape. And the 2025 Stackie Awards. And a series of zero-fluff interviews with six industry leaders who are sponsoring our event this year.
We’ll unveil it all in a big, free virtual event that you’re invited to.
Trust me, you’re not going to want to miss this. So take a moment right now to register for #MartechDay 2025. It’s free to attend, whether you catch any of the sessions live on May 6 or watch them at your convenience on-demand. You’ll also be the very first to get our full ~100-page report with all our data and analysis.
The tl;dr of our agenda: holy crap, there’s a metric f-ton happening in martech right now.
(That’s a technical term, by the way.)
In all seriousness, in my nearly four decades (!) of working in software and marketing, I’ve never seen anything like this. The Internet revolution of the mid-90’s comes close in its transformative power. But that took a good 10-20 years to play out. What’s happening with AI right now is at least the same scale of disruptive innovation — but insanely accelerated, like watching a Loom video on 5X playback speed.
Me and Frans Riemersma, my intrepid collaborator on this project, will do our best in a 60-minute keynote to break it down for you.
Last year, the marketing technology landscape surpassed 14,000 commercial solutions — thanks in large part to the proliferation of AI-native martech startups. This year, did it grow? Shrink? Did the long-predicted apocalypse of VC-funded martech SaaS companies finally arrive? (I’m looking at the answer right now and it’s taking every ounce of my self-control not to give it away until #MartechDay. It’s… remarkable, in several ways.)
The long tail of specialized martech tools — including many new, AI-native ones that have popped up over the past couple of years — continues to be a fascinating mix of startups, vertical industry products, regional leaders, ecosystem entrepreneurs, and productized service-firm offerings. But the bigger story is the rapidly expanding hypertail of custom-built software that AI-powered low-code/no-code platforms have supercharged by letting almost anyone create an app, an agent, or an automation by describing it in a prompt. It’s conversational coding, without the code.
As Andrej Karpathy noted, “The hottest new programming language is English.”
In our keynote and report, we’ll share the results of our survey of AI & Martech Stacks, revealing how marketing teams are incorporating AI at a more structural level into their marketing operations. Brace yourself, the word “agentic” may be used more than once. But we’ll cut through the hype and focus on real adoption and the foundational shifts in stack architecture that we’re seeing in the field.
We’ll walk through an updated version of the stylized new-gen martech stack that I shared last month. (I’ve decided that “systems of knowledge” is a more accurate description than “systems of truth” — for reasons we’ll explain in our presentation.) In short: AI agents are changing employee experiences and customer experiences, but the core platforms and infrastructure of the martech stack are the foundations on which these agents operate. The stack needs to adapt, but it’s not a wholesale replacement. At least not on the near horizon.
There’s much more we’ll cover, but hopefully this gives you a sense of what to expect.
Following our keynote, executive experts from our six wonderful sponsors, who have made it possible for us to share all of this research at no cost to you, will join me and Frans for a series of candid fireside chats. These are not sales pitches. They’re no-fluff discussions on the hard topics that these leaders are navigating with their companies and customers in the real world, working with many top brands worldwide:
- GrowthLoop — Chris O’Neill, CEO
- Hightouch — Tejas Manohar, CEO
- MetaRouter — Greg Brunk, VP of Product
- MoEngage — Ravi Dodda, CEO
- Progress — Sara Faatz, Director of Technology Community Relations
- SAS — Jonathan Moran, Head of Martech Solutions Marketing
Finally, we’ll close out the day with the 2025 Stackie Awards ceremony. Every year dozens of leading companies send in a single slide that illustrates the way they conceptualize their martech stack. These visualizations always reveal fascinating insights into the architectures and operational structures of real brands in B2B and B2C markets. We pick a few winners for the creativity and educational value of their entries, but then we share the full deck of all stacks with you.
So come register for #MartechDay and the State of Martech 2025 report. Again, you can attend as much or as little of it as you like, live or later on-demand. But you only get access — and the first release of the report and the 2025 martech landscape — if you sign up.
Hope we see you there!
