Scott Brinker on if AI brings MarTech consolidation or deeper fragmentation, and what it means for leadership, innovation, and the new rules of marketing.
When Scott Brinker mapped MarTech’s expansion from a handful of vendors to more than 14,000, he wasn’t just chronicling industry chaos—he was forecasting its future. Now, with generative AI rewriting the rules again in 2025, is the MarTech universe due for an overdue fusion, or will AI’s creative power further fragment the field?
In this candid pillar interview, Brinker shares why he thinks the answer is “both,” and what it means for platforms, leadership, and the next wave of marketing innovation.
Full interview;
You’ve mapped MarTech’s explosion to 14,000 vendors. With generative AI rapidly advancing in 2025, do you see a future of consolidation or deeper fragmentation in this vast landscape?
That’s a great question. With so much rapid change, predicting the future is difficult. Still, if I had to make an informed guess, we’ll see consolidation and fragmentation unfold simultaneously.
The forces of consolidation naturally benefit platforms at the center of the MarTech stack. These could be cloud data warehouses, data lakehouse platforms like Snowflake or Databricks, or major MarTech platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Braze. There is a significant advantage in having these consolidated solutions at the core because they bring cohesion to the many disparate tools and integrations an ecosystem might require.
However, fragmentation should continue at the edges because AI makes it incredibly easy to develop new software. We’ll see more commercial products, AI agents, and an explosion of custom tools that brands can create for highly specialized needs. This will open the door for increased variety and specialization, especially around those primary platforms.
In short, consolidated platforms will anchor the stack while highly fragmented and specialized tools rapidly proliferate around them.
At HubSpot, you oversee an 800-partner platform. How do you balance openness with competitive advantage in today’s increasingly interconnected digital ecosystems?
That’s a great follow-up and is closely related to the previous discussion. At HubSpot, our goal is to be one of the primary platforms at the center of the MarTech stack—a central hub for what happens within the HubSpot application and the broader ecosystem of applications and integrations that connect with HubSpot.
There’s always tension between maintaining a proprietary edge and fostering openness within such expansive ecosystems. In practice, though, the overlap between what HubSpot offers and what our ecosystem partners provide is relatively modest. For instance, within our platform’s 1,900+ integrations, only a dozen products overlap directly with our in-house offerings in any given year.
HubSpot’s philosophy is to keep the platform and ecosystem open even in these instances. Companies that may compete with some aspect of our product are still welcome to be listed in our app marketplace. We have many customers who love using HubSpot for one capability and another provider for something else—and we’re perfectly comfortable with that.
We see openness as a real advantage. It allows us to serve our customers better and keep evolving our core offering while encouraging partner innovation and diversity. That balance between openness and proprietary value is fundamental to our approach in today’s interconnected digital world.
You helped define the Chief Marketing Technologist role. As technology permeates every function, are we witnessing a merger of CMO, CIO, and CPO roles? What new leadership models might emerge?
I don’t see those roles converging into a single position, mainly because each role covers a broad scope of responsibilities. The scope of marketing, for example, keeps expanding year after year. Similarly, the role of the leader of IT and information systems continues to grow. And of course, a product leader who decides what the company builds for customers also carries tremendous responsibility.
That said, while I see the CMO, CIO, and CPO as three very distinct roles, what’s far more critical than a convergence of titles is their ability to collaborate effectively. How products get distributed to the world relies heavily on the marketing engine, which leverages a great deal of technology.
The IT leader supports the product team, marketing, and virtually every other team within the organization. Much of their focus is on systems and infrastructure that span and connect the entire business. Cloud data warehouses are an excellent case where the CIO is likely the right person to lead deployment and operational oversight across the organization.
Meanwhile, marketing still has very specific needs regarding MarTech and marketing operations. Marketing operations and MarTech leaders use cloud data warehouses to enable increasingly sophisticated, data-powered marketing within their departments.
In essence, the future is less about merging the roles and more about fostering tight collaboration among them to align strategy, technology, and customer experience.
In “Hacking Marketing,” you championed agile thinking. How can large, legacy-bound enterprises adopt agility beyond adding more tools to their stack?
I’m not sure if large legacy-bound enterprises really have a choice anymore. What we’re seeing with AI is an incredible acceleration in the pace of change inside businesses. Suppose a company isn’t able to adapt to this rapid change. In that case, it faces a serious existential risk—how will it continue to thrive in this new generation of AI-powered experiences?
Interestingly, many executives, including boards and CEOs at large enterprises, understand this at a strategic level. There are mandates from senior leadership: “We need to use AI. We need to figure out how to apply AI inside our business.”
However, while technology and AI capabilities provide powerful tools, the real bottleneck is often not technology itself—it’s operations, culture, and how we empower teams to leverage AI effectively.
That’s where agile management methodologies come into play. My book Hacking Marketing, published in 2016, remains highly relevant today, especially for business leaders who do not fully grasp agile processes. The book goes beyond software development to show how agile management principles can be applied to business functions like marketing.
It’s really about embracing an agile mindset—empowering teams, breaking down silos, and continuously iterating—all of which are more crucial than ever in this rapidly evolving landscape.
You’ve convened thousands at MarTech events. Beyond technical skills, what cultural or talent shifts are most critical for organizations to unlock the full value of marketing technology?
There are two key things. First, marketing technologists—especially the really good ones—play a crucial bridging role between backend technologies and systems, which enable a wide range of marketing possibilities, and customer experiences, where campaigns and programs drive engagement and delight.
It’s incredibly important to have experts “at the front of the house,” directly engaging with customers, who understand how to leverage technology to improve those experiences. Equally important are the people managing backend systems; they must grasp how their work ultimately supports better customer experiences.
The goal is to avoid a divide between technology on one side and customers on the other. Instead, organizations need to synthesize these domains to work seamlessly together.
Secondly, companies must embrace experimentation. Many new technologies open up unprecedented ways to engage customers and innovate go-to-market strategies. There aren’t decades-old playbooks for these approaches — companies are figuring it out.
Building a culture that values experimentation means empowering marketers with curiosity and eagerness to test new ideas. Management must also support and encourage this mindset for it to thrive.
From startup founder to platform leader, you’ve seen both sides. What key lessons from your entrepreneurial journey have shaped your thinking on innovation and adaptability?
My passion for platforms and ecosystems is genuinely rooted in my experience as a co-founder and CTO of a small independent software vendor. Even the largest companies—Google, Microsoft, Apple—have limits on how many ideas they can pursue at once, constrained by talent and strategic focus.
The true power of an open platform ecosystem is that it enables hundreds or thousands of other companies and entrepreneurs to bring their own ideas to life. This ties closely to experimentation. No single company can explore every possibility around their business, but a vibrant ecosystem of entrepreneurs building products and offering specialized services brings incredible diversity.
This diversity allows you to serve a wider array of use cases and facilitates much more experimentation in the market to determine what works.
Having been both on the startup side and leading a large platform, both benefit immensely from leaning into ecosystems as a core strategy and mechanism for innovation.
As the “godfather of MarTech,” what legacy do you hope to leave? And are you ultimately optimistic that today’s tools truly empower marketers, or do they come with risks we’re not addressing enough?
I always take the phrase “Godfather of MarTech” with a bit of a grain of salt—tongue in cheek. I’m honored by the label, but I’ve been working in this field for a long time, and what excites me most is the blending of two worlds that used to feel separate: technology and marketing.
When I started, technology and software development were on one end of the spectrum, and marketing and customer experience were on the other. Over time, as the world has become increasingly digital and AI-powered, these two worlds have become deeply intertwined.
The most exciting part to me is the emergence of new skills and talents—people who can bridge the technical systems architecture with marketing vision. We’re still early in this evolution. AI continues to open up new possibilities, and those working in marketing technology today have a unique opportunity to pioneer new playbooks and best practices that future generations will learn from.
I don’t know if I’ll leave a legacy per se, but I’m honored to be one of the voices championing this fusion of technology and marketing to innovate the practice of marketing.
