Marketing Tech Stack 2024: an AI Explosion

Yesterday, Frans and Scott walked through the Martech landscape for 2024! Click through to get their full take, but here are a few highlights that I thought were worth capturing. Another massive growth in tools, with a majority leveraging AI.

Yep, it grew again. Up to 14,000+.

Instead of constantly reminding people that there are over 10,000 Martech possibilities, I can now say 14,000!

Yay?

Scott and Frans also mentioned:

• This does NOT include an additional 3,125 Martech GPTs that were ruled out—"disqualified if not Martech (FinTech, EduTech), or no proposition (pricing plan, login)."
• There was a very small drop off of 263 (tech products that were stood down, went out of business, etc.)

AI/GPT-based Tech: 2,324 New Tools

And don't forget, this is only new tools - the growth doesn't show the explosion in AI capabilities across the 11,000 existing players we're already leveraging.

AI for content marketing AND beyond.

The highest volume of GenAI tools by category: Content! No surprises there...

When broken out, we see a vast frontier: 

AI is making EVERYTHING less technical.

The image below says it all, I think: 

Tech stacks are big, but consolidation is not the only goal. 

Here's the level of consolidation seen YoY, broken down by company size: total stack size is still massive.

Techstack Feature Duplication

Even when core platforms offer features/modules, most marketing teams reported using additional, specialist tools to solve problems/enhance :

What to do?

I reckon it's worth remembering to give yourself some grace, realizing it's not possible to take advantage of—or even know about—every great new opportunity out there. I'm VERY aware that despite the hours I've spent using, experimenting, learning, collecting...it's a drop in the AI ocean. 

• Start with your strategic goals: What key objectives are highest priority? What kinds of initiatives would produce the best ROI? 
• Look for bottlenecks, problem areas: What are we dealing with now that we might be able to make disappear?
• Look for repeatable tasks that take time: How could we increase the efficiency of work we're already doing?
• Find a community for learning, real-life examples, just-in-time advice: Matt Heinz suggests Marketing AI Institute's Slack community, and I also appreciate the AI thread on the CMO Alliance Slack community.

Bonus: here's a great cheat sheet from Matt Heinz this morning (presenting for MarketingProfs "AI for Demand Gen" series) on possible AI/tech use cases by function: