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The coming months will be more daunting than most as AI transforms and disrupts the MarTech landscape. Perhaps more than ever, marketing leaders need to know their strengths and weaknesses to navigate this landscape successfully.

Earlier this month, Scott Brinker dropped the 2025 version of his uber popular Marketing Technology Landscape, where “AI sparkles everywhere.” The landscape has 15,384 solutions, up 9% from 2024, with some consolidation and failures to offset the number of new entrants.

“Inside that numbing number are very interesting dynamics of real consolidation, a new generation of AI-natives, a global phenomenon, and a rising tide of user sentiment,” said Brinker and Frans Riemersma in their State of MarTech 2025 report.

Like a modern-day labyrinth, there are monsters everywhere. There’s the dreaded Frankenstack, where a CMO faces a disjointed MarTech stack and an integration nightmare. CMOs also need to avoid MarTech zombies, deadman-walking SaaS vendors riding out the last of their subscribers.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The CMO Council has heard from marketing leaders who feel overwhelmed by the many choices and categories in the MarTech landscape. That’s why we partnered with Zeta to develop a self-assessment tool that measures your maturity in this marketing intelligence era. It’ll be a quick, online scoring exercise to give you a general sense of strengths and weaknesses.

The assessment tool will consist of only 20 or so questions across five core marketing categories:

• Leadership and Strategic Alignment
• Technology and Automation
• Data and Analytics
• Customer-Centricity and Personalization
• Operations and Executing

It should only take 10 minutes to complete. You’ll receive an immediate overall score, and a detailed evaluation with prescriptive suggestions will arrive in your inbox later. Click here to learn more about the upcoming free self-assessment tool.

AI Sparkles Everywhere

As the AI earthquake continues to rattle the MarTech landscape, marketing leaders need to become agile and adaptable. AI assistants and standalone AI tools are now used by a majority of marketing organizations. AI agents and workflows are still the domain of early adopters, Brinker says, but accelerated adoption rates may make them mainstream by the end of the year.

“We wanted to better understand where and how AI was being more deeply incorporated in the MarTech stack, especially the role of AI agents and agentic workflows with MarTech composability,” Brinker and Riemersma said.

The State of MarTech 2025 report found at the highest level, 72% of companies still see themselves in the ‘experimenting’ or pilot stage with AI (32%) or having deployed AI for limited use in specific workflows (40%). Top AI use cases ranged from audience segmentation and targeting to data analysis and reporting to email/SMS automation and personalization.

A BPI Network and EcompaaS report found that 4 in 5 business leaders expect GenAI to deliver a competitive advantage over the next 18 months. But 3 in 5 lack confidence in their data-AI readiness to achieve this business value. Specifically, to AI agents, 81% of business leaders who are confident in their data-AI readiness expect to see AI agents improving customer experience. Only 21% of not-so-confident leaders said the same thing.

These and other findings are described in the report, The Pathway to GenAI Competitive Advantage, which you can download here.

Spotlight on Unstructured Data

One of the themes in the BPI Network report deals with unstructured data. Anywhere from 70% to 90% of enterprise data — such as emails, social media posts, meeting transcripts — is unstructured and may be missing from the AI pipeline. If GenAI can’t interrogate this data, then answers to prompts risk being flawed.

“One of the most exciting developments in MarTech is greater collection and productive use of unstructured data,” Brinker and Riemersma said. “LLM models are particularly good at summarizing and distilling insights from this kind of data.”

However, most organizations are only scratching the surface of their unstructured content. Most of this data is missing from AI pipelines because it’s undiscovered, lacking context, and not trusted. It takes considerably more effort and resources, in the form of expertise and tools, to make unstructured data AI-ready than with structured data.

The Path Forward

As AI continues to redefine the MarTech landscape, the path forward is both exhilarating and uncertain. Marketing leaders are being called to rise above the chaos of fragmented stacks, zombie vendors, and overwhelming choice by sharpening their self-awareness and strategic focus. Tools like the CMO Council’s self-assessment can provide vital clarity, helping leaders identify where they stand and what they need to evolve.

The insights from the State of MarTech 2025 and the Pathway to GenAI Competitive Advantage reports underscore a pivotal truth: While AI sparkles with promise, its true value depends on thoughtful integration, strong data foundations — especially unstructured data — and confident, capable leadership.