Why Everyone in Martech Feels Behind Right Now with Scott Brinker

MSoM Podcast (00:01.185) You see anything? Scott Brinker (00:02.971) Just you, so.

MSoM Podcast (00:04.15) Okay, good. That's really I think it's just 'cause I joined automatically and it was I don't know. Made no sense.

Riverside. I mean they're all little stuff. Ugh, yeah. I mean Scott Brinker (00:13.

024) riverside. Is Martech not actually working the way you'd expect it to? That never happens. MSoM Podcast (00:20.

583) Never. I mean I do like it more than like D script squad cast, but that's not saying much. Alright. Let me go ahead and get started.

Sorry, Christine, we've been having some technical d difficulties. Alright. the Martech landscape is flat for the first time in fifteen years. AI is everywhere and integrated nowhere.

And the most important problem in the stack right now doesn't even have a name yet. Scott Brinker (00:24.037) I know. MSoM Podcast (00:49.

418) I named my company Monarch for a reason. And for me, it's interesting that the end of Scott Brinker's State of Martech report ended with context is the Monarch. I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm at the end of the episode, I don't think you will either.

So first and foremost, welcome to the Making Sense of Martech podcast, where we interview leaders and put them in the hot seat. I'm Jacqueline Friedman. Today we have a special two-part episode. And if you're wondering why it took two parts, stay tuned.

My guest today is Scott Rinker, the godfather of Martech, and he has been mapping this industry longer than most of us have been in it. And a little bit about him first. Scott has been analyzing marketing technology and its impact on organizations for more than 17 years as the editor of the Chief Martech blog, co-producer of the Martech map, and co author of the State of Martech Report, which just dropped last week. He previously served as VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot.

Welcome Scott. Thank you for being here. Scott Brinker (01:48.266) Jacqueline, thank you so much for having me in the very kind intro.

MSoM Podcast (01:51.912) Well, it's it's deserved. I'm excited to dive in, but first up, a couple of rapid fire questions just to kinda get you ready and loosened up. What was your first Martec tool?

Scott Brinker (02:05.457) WordPress. MSoM Podcast (02:07.004) Ooh.

You know what? This is probably mine too. Scott Brinker (02:09.167) Not my first love, but my first Martech tool.

MSoM Podcast (02:12.34) Understood. What is one Martech tool or feature you think is totally overrated and why is everyone still buying it? Scott Brinker (02:25.

649) I don't know that I have one that I think is overrated any more so than Scott Brinker (02:35.643) Too often in Martech or in marketing, we like look to the tool to like provide the magic. and there's just not a lot of examples of like the tools actually being magic. you know, they are tools.

So yeah, it the tools that are overrated tend to be the tools that you you you you chose the tool more than the actual marketing. MSoM Podcast (02:47.442) Yes. MSoM Podcast (02:57.

842) Yes. I call that SOS Tiny Object Syndrome and the marketing department overall. Very Scott Brinker (03:04.527) You do SOS, you end up S O L.

Yeah, it's MSoM Podcast (03:07.625) You know what? There you go. Exactly.

Okay, what is one word you would use to describe Martech in twenty twenty six, right? Ooh. Good thing I'm chaotic neutral, let's go. What's a prediction from a previous state of Martech report that you got definitively wrong?

Scott Brinker (03:17.073) Chaotic. Scott Brinker (03:22.028) Scott Brinker (03:31.

025) Scott Brinker (03:34.741) So we generally avoid trying to make predictions because if the one thing I've learned year over year of working on this is, I don't know, but I would be honest, there were a number of years I didn't go out on the limb. I was like, surely this is peak Martech. I mean, come on, and it's at like 5,000 tools.

You're like, there's just no way it's gonna ever get larger than that. No, I mean, come on. It's 10,000, you're like, okay, now it's just silly, but it's not gonna go more than that. MSoM Podcast (03:41.

62) Yeah. MSoM Podcast (03:52.651) Mm. MSoM Podcast (03:57.

597) It's not gonna get better than this. Scott Brinker (04:04.301) So yeah. if I had made those predictions, I would have totally got it.

MSoM Podcast (04:05.214) Ha ha. MSoM Podcast (04:10.163) Okay, so underestimation.

The that's the only thing. That's not too bad. Now the real question. Did you use anything AI to build this year's landscape?

Scott Brinker (04:23.441) we don't all right. So there's the research on the Martech companies themselves. and so Franz has a team.

He's he's actually built a whole little engine that does the first round of like evaluating the websites and attempting a first pass categorization. We still verify every single one by a human, but like using some custom AI tools to be able to just sort of help augment that process has been very valuable. MSoM Podcast (04:36.921) wow.

MSoM Podcast (04:51.828) Makes sense. Scott Brinker (04:52.975) And then, well, I don't use AI for writing in the sense of like you know, like, here, write me, write me a blog post and publish it.

not because I actually have a philosophical objection to that, it's more of just like I'm one of those crazy people who I actually love to write. So I like to do it on my own. so I generally wouldn't even like touch AI. I will confess, this time around I'm working on the Martech state of Martech report, I found a way of working with AI that was MSoM Podcast (05:02.

729) Write my full hundred fifty page report. Scott Brinker (05:22.511) very helpful where I would come up with like I would do my writing, but then I'd like throw it to the AI to be like, okay, you're you know CMO, like what doesn't make sense here? Or you know, like you're a you're a Martex skeptic, you know, what's gonna be your objections to that?

and i exactly and it was actually, you know, again, most of the time it would say whatever it's saying be like, all right, that's fine, you know, stuff with white happening. MSoM Podcast (05:39.348) Yeah. Okay, so you use it as a thought partner mainly.

MSoM Podcast (05:50.698) Agreed. Scott Brinker (05:51.841) There there were definitely times I was like, that's actually a very interesting angle that I hadn't thought about.

And so yeah, definitely I I'd say it's become a thought partner in how I evaluate and critique these things. MSoM Podcast (06:05.61) Amazing. Okay, speaking of Franz Riemersma, who also co-authors this with you every single year, who is the contrarian in your relationship and where did you two actually disagree for 2026?

Scott Brinker (06:16.241) I I I think we actually switch hats on that. you know, I mean this is one of the one you know, just the wonderful thing about, you know, being able to collaborate with someone who, you know, is, I mean, clearly like just, you know, an incredibly well respected leader in this field, you know, on his own. And he he brings a certain viewpoint to the world that's just different than mine.

MSoM Podcast (06:25.001) Okay. That's a healthy relationship. Scott Brinker (06:46.

275) And so we we constantly talk about it as the Venn diagram. And you know, there'll be things where the Venn diagram overlaps beautifully, and like you're okay, okay, great, we're good on that. but there are plenty of times where it's like, no, you know, maybe I say something, and Sponge's like, I'm not so sure I buy into that. Or he'll say something, I'm like, I'm a little suspicious of that.

I'm trying to think if I can give you a concrete example, because it it we do it so much, like it's it's just a fluid. MSoM Podcast (06:50.548) That's awesome. MSoM Podcast (07:02.

258) Yeah. MSoM Podcast (07:11.945) It's okay if he can't. It was more just curious.

Yeah. Scott Brinker (07:15.227) pro part of the process. and it's a great way to almost like the AI thought partner thing.

It just like, you know, you don't want to get what's the phrase? you know, high on your own supply. like you really want that that critical eye, exactly. MSoM Podcast (07:28.

317) Yeah. Well you want you want someone to pressure test. Yeah. Agreed.

Alright, speaking of diagrams, not a Venn diagram this time, but the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Useful tool or expensive theater. Scott Brinker (07:46.977) less relevant in today's world.

I think that I think there was an era where it actually was a pretty helpful tool for I'd say the the way the tech industry was structured is it was actually a decent way of looking at that and doing that evaluation. I think in a world where I mean just picking Maritech, you're MSoM Podcast (07:50.621) Love the sound of that. Scott Brinker (08:11.

525) Got 15,000 solutions out there, and the categories are constantly blurring and changing, and things are evolving at such a crazy rate. And there's just so much specific specific dependencies that vary from one company to another as to what's going to be right for them. I think it's just really hard to like say, okay, and we'll just have this, you know, two by two, and we'll have 10 things in the two by two, and that will just magically give you the answer. I just don't think like.

MSoM Podcast (08:34.226) Yeah. Scott Brinker (08:42.201) I I don't think the tech industry looks like that anymore.

MSoM Podcast (08:45.19) Yeah, it's almost as if that magic lost all of its spark. Alright, so you end this report saying content was king, and now context is the monarch, and because my company is called monarch, I take it very personally in the best possible way, but I'll also say it wasn't entirely an accident as to why I named my company that. And so before we get into that context, I wanna know Scott Brinker (08:50.

033) Touche. MSoM Podcast (09:12.408) where to start and that's at the very beginning of the chrysalis. And so because I think we're still look, most of us in the Martech space are still in that soup and we want to know where we're supposed to be going, how long we're supposed to stay here.

And so you describe AI everywhere, integrated, nowhere, as a necessary state and not a failure state at the moment. Marketing ops practitioners keep holding the stack together with duct tape. What is it actually costing them? And are we automating the burnout or are we solving it?

Scott Brinker (09:43.707) Wow, so many great questions in there. You know, so when we started the report, and we, you know, we're kind of we we knew very early on that, hey, listen, we're just we're in a crazy period of transformation. frankly, unlike anything any of us have ever experienced.

and so we knew that really was the overarching theme. When we were like, you know, searching around to find the metaphor for that. And It's an absolute cliche to like, well, you know, like the butterfly comes from the caterpillar. you know, but it actually, as we thought about, we're like, you know, as cliche as that is, actually, that probably is a really accurate metaphor for what's happening because of that middle stage of the chrysalis, which by the way, I've been mispronouncing for like the past two months and calling the chrysalis.

and I finally come to the conclusion that yes, it is the chrysalis. So yeah, set the record straight on that. but you know that that middle stage where yeah the caterpillar is dissolving, the butterfly isn't quite formed, it is it is messy, and if you were to just cut it open in those early stages. MSoM Podcast (10:40.

104) That sounds fancy. I like it. Scott Brinker (11:04.559) You would have no hint that there was actually gonna be this like beautiful butterfly coming out on the other end.

And you know, I mean, that does feel like it's a very apt metaphor for where we're at. And actually I think the message we were trying to communicate is MSoM Podcast (11:09.21) Right. Scott Brinker (11:20.

961) Think we're kind of all in that state. and and like, you know, each each of us individually probably feels this enormous stress and pressure of like, hey, my world just seems really messy. boy, I must be behind. I must be like, I must be the slow kid in the class here that I'm just not, you know, where I need to be.

Because you know, every now and again you read all these things on LinkedIn of people who are like, yeah, you know, I run 5,000 agents and they generate five million dollars a day for me. And you're like, MSoM Podcast (11:47.812) Oof. Scott Brinker (11:50.

443) yeah, no, I'm not doing that. MSoM Podcast (11:53.155) Yeah, I feel like we're in that messy middle stage and it's not just for A like AI, it's for Martech, it's for all of us and as you say it so dys distinctly, like it's hard to keep up. It's every day.

Scott Brinker (12:07.323) Yeah, and and and so let's just give ourselves permission that this is the actual state we're all in. So we're gonna continue to transform and metamorphos, but it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen overnight. and I suspect we're not even I suspect we're further behind than we are ahead in that.

We've got further to go than we've already cut. MSoM Podcast (12:34.394) Definitely agree, and this is a tangent we can cut out. But if you haven't read Sound of Thunder, it's one of Ray Bat Bradbury's short stories that actually created the concept butterfly effect.

I recommend. It's a quick read, it's my favorite short story. yeah, I I even dressed up as that for a Halloween one. Like I've been in the butterfly space for a very long time.

Scott Brinker (12:49.425) Okay, I'm added to my list. Scott Brinker (12:58.426) clearly like yeah, we we definitely resonated you know with this metaphor with you, so excellent.

MSoM Podcast (13:04.045) Yes. Exactly. I mean it for me it's just like the ice egg on the cake.

okay. If we can back into being serious. Your report describes marketing ops shifting from system administrator to context engineer. That's a fundamentally different job.

What is happening to the people in that messy middle who can't make the leap? Scott Brinker (13:29.519) Well Scott Brinker (13:32.881) I think for the most part, this is actually, I mean, let's be honest.

Most people in marketing ops didn't really aspire to be system administrators. they didn't really aspire to be like, yeah, you marketer, you're gonna come up with all the great ideas, and then you just want me to like, you know, punch the keys to like, you know, make that a reality. I mean, they were happy. To do it because again, they knew how to do it, you know, it is an essential part, but the aspirations were always like, you know, like how do we, how do we really transform how marketing works and how it operates and like bring up that skill set to a higher level, the value that they're delivering to the company to a higher level.

And so in many ways, I think like this is an incredible moment for the marketing ops profession to MSoM Podcast (13:57.734) Right. Scott Brinker (14:21.911) clearly now have the opportunity.

now does this require new skills? Yes. But I think these skills are actually within reach for everyone who's able to you know basically allocate time and and and willpower to it. I mean one of the great things about these AI tools is and it's a little bit like self-referential to these, but one of the best ways to learn these things is to actually ask the AI, like, all right, teach me here.

You know MSoM Podcast (14:51.567) Yeah. Scott Brinker (14:51.823) Walk me through, workshop me through this, help me work on examples, help me learn, test me, quiz me.

You know, it it is really kind of wild. We've have this like amazing tutor professor in, you know, right here, you know, in our laptop. And I mean like two years ago, like it would have been inconceivable, you know, to have that sort of a a a tutor. MSoM Podcast (15:14.

584) Right. Scott Brinker (15:18.513) you know for anything you wanted on that and yet here we've got it and so like we shouldn't just take that for granted. So I don't know.

I think like this is the opportunity. marketing ops is going to be the foundation upon which all these things that we want to do that are so miraculous and wonderful and exciting and creative with AI marketing, they have to be on a solid foundation that Marketing Ops is the ideal team to be able to deliver. MSoM Podcast (15:19.456) Yeah, just a coach.

Yeah. Okay. MSoM Podcast (15:45.069) Yes, one of my favorite CMOs when I ask her what are her like guiding principles, and she goes, community and marketing ops.

Without those two, you don't have a business. Alright, so we've been talking about the human side of things. Now I want to look at the market side because the headline number this year is one that no one saw. The landscape is effectively flat.

Scott Brinker (15:55.27) Love it. MSoM Podcast (16:10.574) for the first time in 15 years, a less than one percent, excuse me, less than a point one percent growth after a decade of explosive expansion.

You call 2026 the pause, not the peak. Maybe it's because you've learned not to predict things, but I want to push back on that. Have we entered our own trough of disillusionment, or what would make you wrong here? And it would actually be fewer in the future.

Scott Brinker (16:37.817) Yeah, so it's a great question. one of Let confess one of the things I've struggled with over the year of that Martech landscape, and that is where to draw the boundary. you know, I mean it's easy to say like, okay, you know, Adobe and Salesforce and HubSpot and all these clearly they qualify and they can be on there.

You know, but as you start to go down to that long tail of smaller and smaller companies that are doing more niche products or startup products. Where do you draw the line and say, like, no, that's just too small and too niche. It doesn't actually qualify. you know, and we've tried to make that call using a variety of you know heuristics, but for instance, one of the things we chose not to do was if you were just a plug-in to WordPress, we're not going to include it.

Not because actually, I mean, you might be legitimately entitled, like you might be a really great Martech tool, but it's like there are what was something like 59,000 WordPress plugins alone. So if we were gonna like just pull that in and say, like, well, those all qualify, you know, as a kind of Martech app you could plug in. And it would be even more silly than it already is. So my point in leading up to that is I think we're on the precipice of an absolute explosion of the number of pieces of software and apps and agents that are just because.

MSoM Podcast (17:45.24) Whoa. Scott Brinker (18:11.247) I mean the barriers have been dropping and dropping and dropping, but now with AI, I mean, just the ability to create incredible things.

you know. so the question becomes like, okay, well, how much of that is going to qualify as, you know, commercially valuable? How would we evaluate all that? Totally.

But MSoM Podcast (18:31.784) Yes, that's where my cynicism comes into play. I have a f I have a feeling a lot of sort of expansion. and we're entering into a contraction phase that will eventually lead to an expansion.

Scott Brinker (18:48.539) So my answer to the question would be I think it's going to be a bifurcation. This is my best guess, but it is only just a guess. I think we are seeing the split between core infrastructure capabilities in the Martech stack and then a whole menagerie of amazing things that, you know, are gonna be built on top of that.

The infrastructure, I do think, is going to lead towards consolidation. MSoM Podcast (18:53.483) Mm. Scott Brinker (19:15.

705) You know, I mean, arguably it actually already had been for years and years. you know, but I think that consolidation process is gonna create some really strong and amazing companies. I it's actually one of the reasons why I think a lot of the incumbents who are already very strongly established, I think SAS pockets be damned. I think actually a lot of them have a very good opportunity to bridge into this transition of the next next era and like MSoM Podcast (19:16.

195) For sure. Scott Brinker (19:45.689) You know, the two examples that come to mind most immediately is just a few weeks ago when Salesforce announced their, you know, Salesforce headless. like that is sort of an embrace of saying, like, yep, we we have a different role for, you know, our software than the UI.

And then I saw a few days ago, you know, HubSpot announced, like, okay, yep, we're gonna make everything available programmatically. You can do it all through APIs. You know, there are others like that too, but I think that th those are two great representatives of saying, like, okay, we've entered the phase where MSoM Podcast (19:54.412) Yes.

MSoM Podcast (20:05.087) Ha. Scott Brinker (20:14.043) The major Martech platforms are really infrastructure.

And I'm assuming we'll probably want to continue to track those as a market, and there'll be interesting new categories around that. I think for the explosion of other stuff that happens on the other side, I don't know that it's actually going to be possible to track it in any meaningful way. Certainly not on a logo-by-logo basis. As a research scientist, I am intrigued about mechanisms to try and Quantify the scale of that universe, but yeah, there's no way it's gonna fit on a slot.

MSoM Podcast (20:51.67) Yep, the I mean it d doesn't fit on a slide at the moment. Even though we try. Scott Brinker (20:54.

673) Yeah, you could argue it doesn't fit on a slide now. It stopped fitting on a slide like ten years ago, but MSoM Podcast (21:00.898) Exactly. Yeah, I I strongly believe it will become an ecosystem play.

Similar to how the app exchange or how you previously mentioned for ho excuse me, WordPress with all the different like add-on widgets. I think almost everything is gonna become that whether it's via MCP or through some other means that we just don't know of. Scott Brinker (21:22.033) All right.

So if you know, I was able to connect with you through like the butterfly metaphor, you know, the moment you say the word ecosystem, that's that's my happy place. so I actually agree with you, but yes, it is an ecosystem world. MSoM Podcast (21:33.39) yeah.

Without a doubt. Okay. Content marketing. That led all of the subcategories of net production removal.

And you identify Yeah. And it it's it's a little sad, but it makes sense. And you identified three different causes. So foundation models are commoditizing to the core feature.

Incumbents have moved quickly. Scott Brinker (21:47.747) Yeah, do they get an award for that? trophy.

MSoM Podcast (22:03.877) And product market fit has been just completely elusive to so many. And so what isn't let me read my question, sorry. Okay.

But isn't that just what happens to every first wave of mover and shakers and what makes the second wave maybe more durable? Scott Brinker (22:24.047) Yeah, I mean, and again, even though you know, there was yeah, a hundred some odd companies that got removed from the content marketing category, there was still another hundred or so that got added. there's still new companies that are coming in, you know, that have an idea, have an innovation, a way they're gonna do it.

So you know, while the net was certainly a compression, yeah, it it is in no means a static. MSoM Podcast (22:41.899) Fresh blood Scott Brinker (22:52.977) category.

In fact that's arguably one of the overarching themes of that whole landscape is while there's a lot of churn going like while while the number dropped well right while the number stayed flat, you know, the actual churn happening within these categories of some going away and new ones coming in, yeah, it's it's it's frothy, I think would be the word. I don't know. I think the let me push back on the question. I'm not sure We have come from a world where the value of software, the the the degree to which we said, like, this is a great software application, has been its durability.

Because frankly, it took so much to build software. You know, the expectations became, software is a business model, you build it once, you then like make infinite copies and you know, buy a yacht somewhere in the South Pacific. you know, that world is, you know. MSoM Podcast (23:48.

672) Hopefully one day. Scott Brinker (23:51.846) I won't say it's completely going away. There will still be software technologies, you know, that might fit that model.

But for the vast majority, it's gonna be no, actually, there's this amazing piece of software that shows up and it does what it does incredibly well, and people love it. And then time goes by and something else comes along. you know, and that sort of fluidity of software. I don't know.

I let me give this as a analogy. At the various points in times when I produce that Martech landscape, you know, one of the pushbacks I get is like, how can marketers be expected to choose among like 15,000 different options? And I'm like, well, they do a perfectly good job choosing between 450,000. And you're like, what?

What do you mean? I'm like, there are approximately 450,000 agencies of one kind or another throughout this world. Marketers haven't exactly been setting their hair on fire about that. You know, it's it's just the nature of that space is you're like, yeah, there's infinite choice, but we'll have our way we sort of satisfy, you know, who we're gonna work with.

And I kind of wonder if a lot of software is essentially going to go in that direction. There's essentially gonna be an infinite number of ways you can build software or have someone build it for you, or you know, buy this sort of thing. but we're not gonna treat it like this durable asset, you know, the way. MSoM Podcast (24:46.

537) No idea. Scott Brinker (25:16.219) We had for years, and also means as a software creator, just like you know, you can have a creative agency that does amazing work and they do this and they win all these awards, and you know, their clients are incredibly successful, and then two years later, they're no longer the hot agency, and people moved on and they've done something else. And like, that's just how that flow has been.

It kind of feels like the software world might look a lot like that. MSoM Podcast (25:34.74) Yeah. MSoM Podcast (25:40.

168) Very likely. Very likely. Okay, so I keep running into something in practice. The landscape is moving faster than any evaluation cycle and keep up.

Gartner Forester. so for example I would, but I don't. Oops. Scott Brinker (25:55.

649) I I do feel for them. It's a really hard to do that, yeah. Ha ha. MSoM Podcast (26:04.

944) so a as an example, Sora, for example, went from world changing to shuttered in six months. Instant checkout went from existential threat to being sidelined in the same window. How are practitioners supposed to make real decisions and stack decisions when the ground won't stop moving underneath them? Scott Brinker (26:26.

961) By the way, just as an aside, this is why I will not throw stones at Gartner and Forester, because those two specific things of like, Hey, instant checkout and Sora were things in my report back in December of like, Hey, look at these things that seem to be changing the world. And then like three months later you're like, Yeah, no, just kidding. So Yeah. MSoM Podcast (26:39.

103) Yeah. MSoM Podcast (26:44.595) They were worth they're worth highlighting of what it could do. So I I don't think Scott Brinker (26:48.

815) Yeah. But I think the point is like yeah, it is this chrysalis stage. The the s the soup can take any crazy shape that is hard to predict. MSoM Podcast (26:57.

447) It can be cold soup or hot soup. Do you want gazpacho or what? Scott Brinker (27:01.393) Touche.

sorry, after all that I lost track of what the question was. MSoM Podcast (27:08.842) The general question was just like, how are folks supposed to actually make real s d decisions when things keep changing every month or week or year? Scott Brinker (27:13.

937) Scott Brinker (27:19.267) Okay, so a couple thoughts on that. First of all, do not start with the technology. and we tried to drive that home in this most recent report too.

marketing always needs to start with the customer, the business, the value proposition. you know, Franz in particular, he's done a really a lot of work around like how to help people think about this through a value engineering lens. it is so easy to get distracted with the tech, particularly at this moment in time. If you don't maintain strategic clarity about, okay, who are your best customers?

What are they really getting from us? What do they want? How much money do we make working with those customers? These are the things that drive marketing and drive the business.

And then the technology is much, much lower down you know, the ladder of things that we might implement to be able to execute and fulfill on that. you know, so that's one. The second thing is, you know. I look at technology as often in this this set of layers.

in fact, I've started using these pace layering diagrams more and more frequently. There's one in the State of Martech report, just because, you know, the different components of your tech stack are not equal. They're not changing at the same levels. You know, there is, particularly as we see this shift towards infrastructure, things like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna have a cloud data warehouse or like house or something like that.

MSoM Podcast (28:28.412) Hello. Scott Brinker (28:48.121) That is a decision.

You will probably want to be very thoughtful in evaluating, you know, your choices. But then once you get that in place, you're probably not going to be swapping that out every six months. And it just doesn't make sense to do that. You know, and then there's like layers above that.

I mean, you know, systems like Salesforce and HubSpot. People do change those, but they don't change them incredibly frequently because, you know, again, like once you've made your evaluation, you put something in place, you know, and then MSoM Podcast (29:11.112) Yeah. Scott Brinker (29:14.

969) And and the whole stack kind of has these different layers. And at the very top, yeah, there's a bunch of things that we're always experimenting with now, things that we're bobcoding ourselves and whatnot that might change very, very frequently, you know. But then to me, when you look at those pace layers, the number one evaluation criteria I bring to it is how well does it set you up to support change? because I think that is the overarching meta game here, is we MSoM Podcast (29:23.

919) Yeah. Scott Brinker (29:45.007) We don't know what the future is going to look like, but we can be pretty certain it's going to be different than what we've got today. There's going to be other things we're going to want to do, new apps, new capabilities.

And so to the degree that we are strategically evolving our tech stack in a way that maximizes our optionality for the future, you know, then that also makes it a little bit easier when you start evaluating some of those you know, products or capabilities on the frontier. Because it's a little bit easier to say, like, okay, well, we can bring this in, we can trial this, we can proof of concept this. if it's working for us, great. If not, we'll move it on.

And the way we've designed our stack architecture makes it feasible for us to do that without requiring an act of Congress, which here in the US, we can apparently no longer get any acts of Congress. So, like, yeah, which, you know, you appreciate anything you're gonna do to avoid the acts of Congress, good plan. MSoM Podcast (30:35.153) Ha ha.

Yeah, I think to your point, this is where I'm particularly bullish on modularity and composability is you have that flexibility and that's in my eyes one of the downsides of some of the legacy players where that stickiness is their business function and model as opposed to actually do what they need to do. Scott Brinker (31:01.029) That's actually why I was so impressed with both Salesforce and HubSpot on their commitments on the headless side, because I have to imagine had they had their druthers, they wouldn't have done those things, right?

Because again, it's like, no, use our UI, use our agents, use our thing. This mode of having to essentially surrender to the market and say, like, all right, listen, we get it. You're just gonna want to do your own things on top of this. And if we still want to be at the center of the sack and MSoM Podcast (31:15.

045) for sure. They like their moats. Exactly. Scott Brinker (31:30.

447) They all want to be at the center of this act. They just have to become fully open. but that was not a strateg. My I I don't know for a fact, but my guess would be that was not their strategic preference.

It was the strategic reality that they adapted to. And I give them credit that they're like, okay, let's let's not be delusional about this. Let's give the market what it wants. MSoM Podcast (31:35.

749) Yeah. MSoM Podcast (31:45.143) No, for sure. MSoM Podcast (31:54.

108) Everyone is living in a delusion whether they realize it or not, so we'll see how it plays out. sorry, some Buddhist principles are always required. But yeah, to your point agreed. I don't think they wanna do it at all, but here we are.

but it's gonna be interesting, particularly on the Salesforce side, like if data cloud is still required to Scott Brinker (31:58.161) MSoM Podcast (32:16.024) be the engine of so many things, is that actually an antithetical to what they're claiming they're gonna do? So it's gonna be an interesting situation.

And so while we've been talking about how kind of the ground underneath all of us is moving but also kind of in a specific direction, it brings me to your primary thesis, which I think is your sharpest. So the stack is stratifying. You say AI native wins the creation layer, while incumbent SaaS holds the orchestration layer due to gr data gravity. But that means operators are now governing a stack with competitive physics every layer.

And we've probably talked about this a little bit, but have we solved fragmentation by creating a coherence problem that's actually worse? And this question also we can cut it if we're like, we covered most of it. Scott Brinker (32:56.089) Mm.

Scott Brinker (33:02.255) Yeah, I mean Scott Brinker (33:08.037) This it's gonna get a little bit ugly, is my my honest assessment, because there is a prize at the center of the stack, at least hypothetically, that hey, if I'm gonna have all this stuff moving around at the speed of light, you know, I need some sort of system that provides the center of gravity to be able to orchestrate this, coordinate this, govern this. The in Martec, the major existing platforms, you know, like Salesforce, like HubSpot, they absolutely see that as like, yep, we are this is kind of what they've been doing, you know, but you know, at a layer that was mostly around coordinating humans.

It's a a bigger challenge here now, just the scale and speed of all things agenic. but they have a very legitimate claim of like, okay, yes, we should be the ones doing that. you've got the data layer companies, you know, like Snowflake and Databricks and folks that are very clearly moving up the stack. They're like, well listen, we've got the data, we've got the compute, we're running the AI, we've got the semantic layer, we've you know got the the gateway to like, you know, govern the agents.

We should be the ones coordinating that. You've got the Frontier Labs you know being like, hey, well we're the ones actually, you know, I mean we we're the creators of, you know, all this AI magic. and so we've really got the best ideas of how we think these things should be orchestrated and running. We can do that.

You've got a whole bunch of startups on there on there, like, okay, this is a new generation, it's a new opportunity. We've got the idea of how to come in as an independent and be able to orchestrate across all those. All of these folks are like moving towards the same prize at the center. And unlike the previous generation of Martech, where you always had a lot of competition, but the competitors in many ways were very apples to apples.

You've now got a case where it's like the apples, the bananas, the mangoes, the oranges, they're all coming towards the same conclusion. And it is in in my opinion, not at all clear who's gonna win. In fact, there's almost a game theoretic analysis that would suggest none of that can ultimately end up d because they're just so each each one is so strong that MSoM Podcast (35:10.477) A whole fruit farm.

Scott Brinker (35:30.989) It'll be at least a decade or more you know, before that shifts out. And the downside of that is I think it puts a lot of pressure on the marketers, the brands, the IT teams on this. because I don't think the answer is gonna be clear.

Now that's that's the glass half empty view of it. I guess the glass half full is to say, A. MSoM Podcast (35:34.778) Interesting.

Scott Brinker (35:58.159) At the end of the day, you go back to value engineering and like, listen, really all that matters is am I able to deliver the capabilities that serve my customer well? And maybe any one of those options can work. I pick one that works for me, and it doesn't really matter to me that there were other alternatives that could have also worked.

All that matters is like, am I delivering the right value to my business, you know, to my customers? There's also, yeah, the likelihood that again you get these major forces colliding. It's always interesting to see how the market might invent a solution. And just as one hint in this direction, is I think the MCP protocol, I don't think that's the answer, by the way, but I think even the MCP protocol is a little bit of a miracle that that's gotten established as a standard because you know.

MSoM Podcast (36:37.658) Mm. MSoM Podcast (36:53.165) Agreed.

Scott Brinker (36:57.165) This is the it was what we're talking about earlier, kind of the the incentives for strategic lock-in on this. Like, you know, Anthropic comes up with NCP. at the time, like, you know, Google is like, well, maybe we'll support that.

Microsoft was, well, maybe we'll support that, you know, and just because of the specific timing and the circumstances and the market pool, it just happened that that standard sort of came through, got adoption, and now like you you can't shut it down. Like, okay, yep, MCP, it's the standard, everyone needs to do that, everyone is going towards that. And so that in a very real way changed the strategic dynamic of how these things can work together. My glass half full perspective would be like, as we have this collision of these very different kinds of platforms all vying for you know the center of gravity, it very well maybe that collision structure is enough.

MSoM Podcast (37:28.057) Exactly. Scott Brinker (37:55.707) force to create some new kind of market standard.

Maybe there maybe there will be a standard that will move emerge out of the open source world. all this is super hypothetical, but yeah, short answer is yeah. I think it's going to be a really messy a few years ahead. MSoM Podcast (38:06.

967) can dream. That sounds nice. This is MSoM Podcast (38:14.613) Agreed and perfect tie-in to the next question here is kind of double clicking.

So the middle decision layer between data and activation, as you call it, is under invested in in the new battleground. And most major vendors were not found. So who is actually gonna win this and how long do you think it'll take? So for example, there are now almost 30,000 MCP servers in 18 months.

versus it took fifteen years to get fifteen thousand marks. What does that tell us about where the gravity is actually headed? Now you gotta start tracking it. Scott Brinker (38:51.

441) Tempting. you know, as tempting as you know, a hole in the head, but tempting. You know, it's you told me at the beginning of that Martech landscape thing of like, yeah, it's got you all on track 15,000 things. I'd be like, no, not really.

you know, I could have I could have been a contender. so what's interesting about MCP as a protocol is in many ways it's MSoM Podcast (38:57.176) What you don't want thirty thousand more things? Scott Brinker (39:21.

881) Not very opinionated about the architectures you build around it. In fact, I think that's actually why it's caught on so much and so it's strength. So like, hey, listen, I can, you know, have like a product like HubSpot, you know, that has its own Agenic workflows capabilities. It's very easy for them to say, like, yeah, well, plug-in, you know, anything that you have an MCP server too, we can act as a client too and pull stuff from.

We can also expose, you know, what we do as an MCP server. So if you have your own client, if you want to do this in Claude, or it's something you've built yourself, or maybe if Salesforce wants to be able, you know, you y you got this mechanism that simply allows all these different tech services and data sources and whatnot to be able to connect and talk to each other without having to agreed upon what is the higher level architecture and how they're related to each other. And so that's yeah, I don't know that there is one company that wins as a result of MCP.

Yeah. you know, all right. There is another dimension to this, by the way. because this has comes up not just with MCP, but also, you know, with skills and all these other things is the governance and security component to this.

the fact that these are very open ecosystems and anyone can throw this stuff up on GitHub. MSoM Podcast (40:22.336) It's maybe more distributed. MSoM Podcast (40:29.

154) Scott Brinker (40:45.605) it's a real risk because there are bad actors out there. In fact, actually, even not only bad actors, there's just incompetent actors, you know. And so, you know, you yeah, yeah, incompetence can do just as much damage, you know, as someone you know intentionally seeking to cause trouble.

and since you had said the magic word ecosystem earlier, I come back to this like having this incredibly open environment. MSoM Podcast (40:48.482) Mm-hmm. MSoM Podcast (40:55.

256) I think that's usually the case more than anything. Exactly. Scott Brinker (41:14.587) Technically is a wonderful thing, but to make it actually reliable, operational, operational, action actionable, you know, in a way that enterprises can rely on, I actually think it has to be an ecosystem dynamic of like, okay, we're gonna need government ecosystems that actually vet these things and monitor them and manage them.

And one of the reasons you would pay. MSoM Podcast (41:28.215) Yeah. Scott Brinker (41:39.

225) and you know a platform that has an ecosystem is because you are paying them to be doing that work of making sure that they're, you know, curating a set of things that's reliable from that wild, wild, woolly world out. MSoM Podcast (41:55.319) Agreed. Okay, I've now got a hot take for you that your opinion on.

Is HubSpot a Ursula's company or a butterfly company at the moment? Scott Brinker (42:03.881) I think they're all chrysalis companies. MSoM Podcast (42:07.

625) Even the older players, yes, they might be like, Alright, let's Benjamin Button a little bit, but Scott Brinker (42:14.617) No, I mean again like Scott Brinker (42:20.591) Just taking Salesforce and HubSpot just because I paid attention to their two announcements. That's not to exclude other companies.

I just it's finite hours in the day. So, you know, others might be doing this too. But if you take these two, to basically make the commitment that they're opening up all of their platforms to be fully accessible programmatically, so agents or frankly anything else can do that. there's a huge leap.

The reality is there isn't actually. There isn't actually enough materialized demand for that yet. a lot of this is like I mean, there aren't a lot of people have like, yeah, yeah, no, we're just running all this stuff through agents and like we never log into Salesforce or HubSpot anymore. No, actually the vast majority are still using these products the way they were using it last week, the way they were using it last year.

so it is very much a leap of faith on those companies that like we believe this future is gonna look very different than the past. MSoM Podcast (42:56.843) Predictive. MSoM Podcast (43:04.

768) Yeah. Scott Brinker (43:19.631) This could have pros for us, it could have cons. We're we've got hypotheses about how it will change monetization, you know, how it's gonna change competitive things.

But we believe we don't have any choice. We believe that listen, there's the past and there's the future, and we're just gonna lean into it. and that's again why I applaud them. I think they're the they could have taken a much more resistance-oriented stand to it.

As a result though, I kind of feel like they're on the chrysalis stage. They like, yeah, this is our market, our customers, how they use us, what they do. It's dissolving this one way, assembling this other, but it is by no means transformed into the next generation. And I don't know if you're asking, will some of them never escape the Chrysalis phase?

Probably. you know, it's welcome to capitalism. but MSoM Podcast (44:18.07) Well, late stage in particular.

Scott Brinker (44:21.329) Boy, we could take a whole different angle on this discussion. but that'd be completely over my skis. I I know Martech and almost nothing outside of Martech.

so MSoM Podcast (44:24.19) Ha ha ha. Okay, well all of our conversations so far, we've been talking about the landscape from an analyst point of view. I spend a lot of my days inside of organizations using the actual tech stack.

And what I keep running into something I've started just using a term like synthetic certainty. It's AI outputs that feel authoritative, that look like the right answer, but actually can't be validated. So I want to spend our next part of our conversation on part two, pressure testing, where that shows up and what I think is the most important problem in Martech right now and nobody is naming it. Do you even know what I'm talking about before we dive in?

Scott Brinker (45:11.665) I guess I will find out. MSoM Podcast (45:13.749) Fair enough.

Okay. So we're gonna like cut there and then pick back up. So let me actually stop this recording so I can set up another take for it. Scott Brinker (45:25.

829) Okay.