Thanks to AI, marketers are using more tools than ever, and more are homegrown, in line with the 2025 State of Your Stack Survey, a collaboration between MarTech, Chiefmartec.com and MarketingOps.com.
The survey found that 62.1% of respondents use more tools than two years ago.
“It’s surprising to see now how many people we have now saying, ‘Yes,’ even provided that environment of fiscal discipline around martech stacks. Yes, their stacks are expanding. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to put the credit or the blame for that on AI,” said Scott Brinker, editor at chiefmartec.com and VP of platform ecosystems at HubSpot.
Brinker and MarTech Editorial Director Mike Pastore unveiled the survey today at the first session of The MarTech Conference 2025.
They acknowledged how ever-present and overwhelming AI is in marketing technology.
“How many of you might be just sick of the word AI at this point?” Brinker asked. “There’s just a lot AI noise. The thing that makes this each exciting and difficult for folk is … it’s not only smoke … there’s lots of fire.”
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Generative AI tools at the moment are utilized by 68.6% of organizations, making them the sixth hottest martech tool. This rapid adoption is unprecedented. “To have generative AI be right up there in the top seven in two, two and a half years, that’s pretty remarkable,” said Brinker.
Marketers are doing it for themselves
One of the survey’s most surprising findings is the resurgence of homegrown martech solutions, with nearly 1 / 4 of respondents planning so as to add them in the next 12 to 24 months. This is a big shift in only just a few months.
“When The 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey was done lower than six months ago,” said Pastore, “almost nobody [2%] was saying they were replacing their apps with homegrown apps.”
In The State of the Stack Survey, “business software still has a reasonably large advantage, near 60%,” said Pastore, “but homegrown solutions, near 25%, that’s a giant, big change.”
Brinker said the reason is the “recent generation AI tools” that speed up development speed and enable non-professional developers to create easy applications.
Content is the AI king
AI-powered content generation is currently the hottest application, especially amongst small businesses. Looking ahead, marketers plan to further integrate AI for data evaluation and insights, personalization, and automatic marketing tasks.
While the use of AI for automated workflows isn’t currently a top priority, Brinker said all the speak about “AI agents that may tackle more be just right for you” suggests “this appears to be the theme moving forward in 2025: How can we discover a place where we actually do trust these AI agents?”
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Interestingly, 46% of respondents indicated they were working with or planning to make use of AI for decisioning.
Despite the enthusiasm for AI and expanding martech capabilities, familiar challenges persist. Data integration stays the biggest hurdle in managing martech stacks, cited by 65.7% of respondents.
Can you trust your data?
“Without data, lots of your AI applications just aren’t going to work thoroughly,” said Pastonre. “Or if you happen to feed them bad data, they’re going to feed you bad responses, make bad decisions, bad workflows.”
Where there may be data, there are silos, that are the top concern for marketers regarding their martech stacks.
Brinker highlighted the potential of cloud data warehouses and “composable” architectures to handle this issue, suggesting that “this concept of a universal data layer” could alleviate the problem of siloed data.
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Budget constraints remain the top barrier to adopting recent martech tools, particularly for smaller organizations.
While data integration poses a management challenge, “integrating tools ranked fairly low” as a barrier to adoption, perhaps because, as Pastore suggested, marketers “weed out the ones that aren’t going to integrate with what you’ve gotten early on in the selection process.”
The complexity of implementation also presents a barrier, especially for larger enterprises with more intricate stacks.
Goals and satisfaction
The primary goal driving martech investments is revenue growth. It was cited by nearly 30% of respondents, followed closely by increasing marketing efficiency. Customer experience can be a consideration, particularly for larger organizations.
Overall, marketers are relatively content with their martech stacks, with 56.8% reporting they’re either satisfied or very satisfied.
Mid-sized firms showed the highest satisfaction rates, while smaller firms reported the most dissatisfaction, likely because of resource limitations.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about the stack. It’s entirely about what we’re doing with it,” said Brinker.
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