Data is exploding, stacks are sprawling, and AI is raising the stakes. Discover what needs to sit at the center of your martech stack — before it’s too late.
As data and AI become the dominant forces in marketing, the real question is no longer if your martech stack matters, but what belongs at its center.
The tools and platforms marketers choose today will determine whether their organizations are ready to compete in an AI-driven future.
The martech ecosystem has never been larger — or more complicated. In 2025, the landscape surpassed 15,000 distinct solutions, a 9% increase over last year.
The 2025 State of Your Stack Survey found more than six in 10 marketing leaders are using more tools than they did just two years ago, and nearly a quarter plan to build their own internal solutions in the next 12–24 months. But as stacks expand, so do the headaches. Two-thirds of marketers identify integration as their top challenge, while another quarter cite data silos as the most significant barrier to effectiveness.
This growing fragmentation underscores why the conversation is shifting to the application at the center of the stack. Increasingly, that “anchor” is being tied to a cloud-based data warehouse or data lake: more than 56% of organizations now integrate with one to create a unified data layer.
Industry experts note that universal data layers are key to breaking down silos, standardizing customer information across applications, and unlocking more actionable insights for personalization and AI.
Yet the question of how to get there remains unsettled. The long-standing “build vs. buy” debate is intensifying as companies balance the flexibility of custom-built tools with the reliability and scalability of established platforms. Nearly a quarter of organizations are leaning toward building homegrown solutions, even as they rely on core platforms like CRM and marketing automation for foundational infrastructure.
A live panel will explore these critical questions at the Sept 17, 2025, installment of the MarTech Conference, a free online event.
What does a future-ready martech stack look like in the age of AI? How should marketers think about the role of their central application? And how can integration and silo challenges finally be solved to unlock real value?
Join MarTech contributor Milton Hwang, principal, Mission MarTech LLC, as he leads a panel discussion with:
- Florian Delval, product marketing principal, AI Data Cloud for Marketing, Snowflake.
- MarTech contributor Natalie Jackson, director of demand generation, CBIZ.
- Angela Vega, director, capabilities and operations, Expedia Group.
For marketing and operations professionals, this session will cut through the noise and focus on what matters most: ensuring that your stack’s center is built not just to manage data, but to activate it, orchestrate it, and make AI work for you.
The post What should sit at the center of your martech stack in the age of AI? appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Mike Pastore has spent nearly three decades in B2B marketing, as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.
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