In 2020, I made 5 predictions about marketing and martech for this decade. Here’s how they’re going… – chiefmartec

Comfortable New 12 months!

5 years in the past, Jason Baldwin and I revealed Martech 2030 (ungated PDF), a report predicting 5 main traits that might form advertising and marketing and martech by means of what we christened The Decade of the Augmented Marketer.

We’re now at halftime firstly of 2026.

How are these predictions holding up? I requested ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to grade them. Their assessments had been fairly favorable — particularly for our imaginative and prescient of “harmonizing people & machines.” (It’s price a chuckle that Claude and Gemini gave us A+’s on that one. Very harmonious.)

However you have to be the true decide. How do these line up together with your lived actuality?

Pattern #1: “No Code” Citizen Creators

Even within the earlier decade, I used to be already bullish about “no code” platforms empowering entrepreneurs to self-service implementation of their digital concepts. Airtable, Webflow, Zapier had been my go-to examples for databases, web sites, and workflow automations respectively. Gartner known as these customers citizen creators. I’ve known as them “advertising and marketing makers,” builders within the go-to-market realm. And I anticipated that we’d see much more of them — with much more energy at their fingertips.

In all modesty, we nailed this one. However largely on account of a improvement that we didn’t see coming: the generative AI explosion that began in late 2022.

No code was largely drag-and-drop. With LLMs, all of a sudden you would merely describe what you needed, and the AI would create it. At first, it was largely for creating textual content and six-fingered pictures (paging Inigo Montoya). However over the previous two years, you would discuss your method into constructing apps, brokers, movies, infographics, workflows, campaigns, knowledge analyses, PowerPoint decks, and many others. It’s nonetheless a jagged frontier, however the output for a lot of of those is getting fairly good.

As Andrej Karpathy mentioned, “The most popular new programming language is English.”

The vibe coding phenomenon of 2025 — a time period coined by Karpathy — pushed this into hyperdrive. Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and Vercel made it insanely straightforward for non-engineers to create apps and brokers. Granted, this labored greatest for comparatively fundamental use circumstances. However these had been precisely the sort of underserved alternatives that Clay Christensen had noticed as the inspiration of disruptive innovation. See my submit on the Lemkin Scale of Vibe Coding for a deeper dive on this.

In some ways, the foremost AI assistants corresponding to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are über no code platforms, letting you create an ever-wider vary of digital belongings on demand. Groups who leaned into these capabilities have reaped the advantages of higher pace, bandwidth, creativity, and studying of decentralized self-service.

That mentioned, governance and guardrails for citizen-created belongings stay immature. Many organizations are nonetheless determining learn how to stability empowerment with model consistency and compliance. We’ll come again to this topic with Pattern #4 about Huge Ops…

Pattern #2: Platforms, Networks & Marketplaces

If prior many years had been about companies optimizing linear chains — worth chains, provide chains, distribution chains — we believed the construction and technique of companies would evolve to more and more be pushed by interconnected graphs and ecosystems by way of platforms, networks, and marketplaces.

In martech, platform ecosystems have now totally supplanted the outdated suite vs. best-of-breed dichotomy. (I used to be delighted to contribute to this shift as VP platform ecosystem of HubSpot, a job I left this previous September after 8 years of constructing the corporate’s ISV program from the bottom up.)

Two of the most well liked platforms right this moment are Databricks and Snowflake, which function unviersal knowledge layers that combine throughout heterogeneous tech stacks. Most likely essentially the most intriguing platforms headed into 2026 although are the foremost AI engines, with MCP connectors and the rising idea of ChatGPT Apps.

Networks had been already ubiquitous, however have grown much more so. Digital marketplaces have proliferated. I might say essentially the most noteworthy ones in martech are the hyperscalers: AWS Market, Google Cloud Market, and Microsoft Market now transact an estimated $45 billion in annual enterprise software program gross sales. Adobe, HubSpot, and Salesforce now all provide merchandise by means of this channel.

One seemingly paradoxical balancing act of platforms, networks, and marketplaces: it’s by means of the centralized management of requirements and governance, when paired with technical and philosophical openness, that these ecosystem mechnisms drive decentralized development and innovation. You centralize to decentralize. It’s a little bit of a Zen koan for the digital age.

That’s partly why that is solely an A-/B+ to date. Ecosystem dynamics are nonetheless new for a lot of firms, preferring the higher management they’ve — or at the very least the phantasm of management — with extra direct, linear go-to-market methods. However these are outdated psychological fashions from a earlier period. I’ll double down on my wager that ecosystems and the platforms, networks, and marketplaces that animate them will underpin advertising and marketing by the tip of this decade.

Pattern #3: The Nice App Explosion

After we wrote the Martech 2030 report, the 2020 martech landscape had 8,000 options. As a part of an annual custom, most individuals assumed that was “peak martech.” However right here we’re in 2025 with almost twice as many: 15,384 commercial solutions on the map.

Why hasn’t this consolidated? Truly, it frequently consolidates by means of competitors and M&A. However as a result of there are successfully no limitations to entry in software program — a development that AI has dialed as much as 11 — new merchandise proceed to pour in at a sooner charge than they drain out.

Paradoxically, it’s the consolidation of hyperscaler cloud infrastructure and main app platforms that spurred the blossoming of hundreds of specialist apps constructed on these foundations. (Centralize to decentralize.) These apps make up the lengthy tail (the loooooooong, lengthy tail) of the martech panorama: vertical market apps, regional apps, ecosystem apps, service supplier apps, and an endless tide of startups aspiring to disrupt the incumbents.

However we predicted that The Nice App Explosion could be even greater. Not hundreds of apps. Billions of apps. The overwhelming majority customized constructed by organizations, tailor-made to their very own operations and buyer experiences. Whereas we anticipate the lengthy tail of business martech will proceed to develop, it will likely be dwarfed by the hypertail of customized martech. (For extra in regards to the hypertail, obtain our State of Martech 2025 and Martech for 2026 stories from final spring and this previous December.)

AI has delivered The Nice App Explosion, and the hypertail is already thriving right this moment. 5 predictions we made inside this development are additionally materializing, together with service-as-software (takeaway #3) and the rise of clever/interactive advertising and marketing belongings (takeaway #4):

Pattern #4: From Huge Information to Huge Ops

We anticipated that the 2020’s could be a decade of Huge Ops. Analogous to wrangling the dimensions and complexity of Huge Information, the mission of Huge Ops could be to sort out and tame the dimensions and complexity of tons of to hundreds of parallel apps, brokers, and automations working on that sea of knowledge inside an organization’s operations.

We appropriately known as the issue — the chaos of uncoordinated “No Code” Citizen Creators and The Nice App Explosion — incomes ourselves a strong B/B+. Options, each technical and organizational, nevertheless, are nonetheless rising. Virtually each main platform in martech is targeted on this drawback/alternative proper now, framed as “orchestration” and “decisioning.”

That is going to be the platform battle for the remainder of this decade. Seize your popcorn.

Information is a essential asset in Huge Ops. However its worth is simply unlocked by means of its distillation and activation, which we described as knowledge intelligence and knowledge relfexes. Considered one of my favourite metaphors from our report: knowledge isn’t the brand new oil, it’s the new oil paint. Huge Ops is how we go from pigments on a palette to masterpieces on a canvas.

It’s the entanglement of Huge Information and Huge Ops that positions Databricks and Snowflake — in addition to the hyperscalers AWS, Google, and Microsoft — as critical contenders within the Orchestration Wars.

It is going to be a frenzy of coopetition between them and the general public martechs (e.g., Adobe, Braze, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zeta), evolving CDPs (e.g., Hightouch, Tealium, Syncari, Treasure Information, Twilio), agent/automation platforms (e.g., CrewAI, n8n, Make, Workato, Zapier), a wave of next-gen martech startups (e.g., GrowthLoop, iCustomer), and even the AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI.

Going to want extra popcorn.

Pattern #5: Harmonizing People + Machines

“Higher automation and AI help will give entrepreneurs extra time and new instruments to deal with clients, creativity & innovation.” If we made that prediction right this moment, the response could be “no duh.” However 5 years in the past, this was prescient. The graph we sketched under is just about precisely how that is enjoying out.

We famous that automation and human engagement aren’t essentially mutually unique, and when correctly synthesized collectively can ship magical experiences:

We additionally anticipated the rise of buyer-side AI, which emerged as a market drive in 2025 with Agents of Customers. What we envisioned in 2020 as a shift from website positioning to BBO (Purchaser Bot Optimization) is the phenomenon we’ve come to know as website positioning to AEO (AI Engine Optimization). What we predicted as Bot Commerce is now known as Agentic Commerce.

The labels we’ve landed on are cosmetically totally different, however the AI ideas we outlined 5 years in the past have crossed from concept into actuality. I feel we earned our A+’s right here, no?

Conclusion

What do you assume? Did the ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini grade us pretty?

Amara’s Legislation states that we are likely to overestimate the short-term impression of applied sciences however underestimate their long-term results. The objective we had with our Martech 2030 paper was to consider that long-term arc. Whereas these 5 traits are nonetheless evolving, it’s exceptional how far they’ve are available these previous few years. The tempo is quickening.

For higher and worse, I don’t assume it’ll decelerate in 2026.

Let’s revisit this paper another time in 2030 for closing grades.