Blog – chiefmartec

Here’s your copy of our Martech for 2026 report — free and ungated

December 2, 2025 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

It’s here! Our brand-new, 127-page Martech for 2026 report. No form to fill. No “leave a comment on LinkedIn” arm twisting. You can simply download the full PDF right here. These are the 7 major subjects we cover to prepare you for 2026: It includes all the latest data from our AI & Data in Marketing survey conducted a couple of months ago. No techno-jargon. Just plain language explanations and helpful visual illustrations. For a …

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Buyer-side agents are the real disruption (a sneak preview of our Martech for 2026 report)

November 19, 2025 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

It’s almost here! We’re launching our in-depth Martech for 2026 report on December 2, and you can be among the first to see it. Simply sign up for our Martech for 2026 webinar, and you’ll get the full report the instant it’s released — along with our scintillating repartee of key findings that you can catch live or on-demand. To share a sneak preview with you, we’ll affirm: AI agents in marketing are real. 90.3% …

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AI Agents in Marketing: Improving vs. Disrupting

Our big Martech for 2026 report is almost here — be the first to get it for the ground truth of martech AI

October 27, 2025 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Every December for the past few years, Frans Riemersma and I have published a deeply researched report on what’s actually happening in martech as the New Year approaches. These aren’t the crazy fever-dream “predictions” that you’re used to reading during this eye-rolling, end-of-year prophecy season. It’s a pragmatic assessment of what’s really happening inside marketing tech stacks and the martech industry as a whole. Existing, real-world patterns that can be reasonably extrapolated for the next …

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Close encounters with zombie martech automations and AI agents — just in time for Halloween

October 13, 2025 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

The lights are on but nobody’s home. The engine’s running but no one’s driving. The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead. Pick your preferred idiom for unattended automations run amok. (“The Wi-Fi’s on, but there’s no Internet.”) Over the past weeks, I encountered AI agents and automation at two separate martech companies — as a customer of one and a pseudo-prospect for the other — that leaned toward the “annoyingly efficient” upper-left quadrant of …

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Zombie AI Agents and Automations in Martech

The first generation of gen AI use cases in marketing are streaking through the Hype Cycle

September 18, 2025 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Ah, the Hype Cycle. No other curve is both so revered and reviled. When it comes to generative AI’s Hype Cycle, especially its application in marketing, there are three things we need to acknowledge: First, “gen AI” is not a single technology moving along the Hype Cycle. Is it at the peak of inflated expectations? The trough of disillusionment? The slope of enlightenment? The answer is: all of the above. Different gen AI applications and …

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Gen AI Martech and the Gartner Hype Cycle

1967 was the Summer of Love; we will remember 2025 as the Summer of Vibes

August 27, 2025 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Are you feeling the vibes yet? “Vibe” has become the latest AI buzzword. Even more than “agentic,” which is saying a lot. While both terms are widely open to interpretation — and therefore ripe to be appropriated by anyone selling anything — vibe stands out for sheer weirdness. The term originated with a post by Andrej Karpathy, one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, who described vibe coding as a new way of rapidly building …

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2025 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: 100X growth since 2011, but now with AI…

May 6, 2025 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

tl;dr The martech landscape grew again since last year, up 9% to 15,384 solutions. While new AI natives continue to blossom, the previous generation is consolidating more. There’s also an exploding “hypertail” of custom software. We cover all of this and more in our new State of Martech 2025 report (free and ungated). Over 15 years ago, I tossed a bunch of martech logos on a slide to present the Rise of the Marketing Technologist …

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2025 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (Martech Map)

Beyond AI assistants: how AI is being more deeply embedded in marketing and martech stacks

May 2, 2025 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

This is a short excerpt of data from The State of Martech 2025 report that will be released on May 6, 2025. You can get the complete 100+ page report and access to an extended keynote presentation of our research by registering for free for #MartechDay. It’s no surprise that stand-alone AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become ubiquitous. In our study of 96 martech and marketing operations leaders, 87.5% reported these …

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Complicated to Complex: AI Agents and Managing a Dynamic Martech Stack

April 27, 2025 / Agile Marketing / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

The following is a short excerpt from The State of Martech 2025 report that will be published on May 6, 2025 — #MartechDay. Sign up for free to attend our keynote presentation, which you can watch live or on-demand. You’ll also get first access to our 100+ page report, the new 2025 marketing technology landscape, and full deck of all the 2025 Stackie Award entries. Don’t miss the martech bundle of the year — register …

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Everything you could want to know about AI, martech stacks, and the 2025 marketing technology landscape

March 31, 2025 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

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 …

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