What should sit at the center of your martech stack in the age of AI? | MarTech

"The martech ecosystem has never been larger - or more complicated. In 2025, the landscape surpassed 1 5,000 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."

"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."

Data and AI are driving marketing strategy, making the central martech choice critical for competitiveness. The martech ecosystem surpassed 1 5,000 distinct solutions in 2025, a 9% increase over the previous year. More than six in 10 marketing leaders use more tools than two years ago, and nearly a quarter plan to build homegrown solutions within 12-24 months. Expansion increases headaches: two-thirds of marketers cite integration as their top challenge and a quarter cite data silos as the most significant barrier to effectiveness. More than 56% now integrate cloud-based data warehouses or lakes to create unified data layers that standardize customer information, break down silos, and unlock insights for personalization and AI.

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