AI platforms, business platforms, and data platforms are locked in a three-body problem. Each wants to be the center of gravity your marketing stack orbits. In this galactic struggle, where will context live? In the AI agent's memory and reasoning? In the business platform's domain model and structured processes? In the data platform's governed semantic layer? The unsatisfying but accurate answer today is "yes." Context is currently scattered (or distributed, if you want to be kinder) across all of them. In this week's chiefmartec newsletter, I map six categories of martech infrastructure colliding in intensifying coopetition: the gravitational pull each one exerts, where the cross-competition is fiercest, and how they map to the composable canvas. The martech infrastructure wars have begun. Which platform is pulling hardest in your org? newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

Here’s the latest edition of what Andy Raskin once called Tech’s Slide of the Year — the 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape. By now, it should be no surprise that it’s a ridiculous sprawl. We’ve been watching it grow year-over-year since 2011 — literally 100X growth in 15 years, from 150 to 15,505 mapped martech solutions. Perhaps surprising that this year it finally leveled out with a mere 0.79% growth from last year. Have we finally — finally — hit peak martech? That’s worth a a hallelujah, right? May 5, 2026: The Day the Martech Landscape Stood Still Perhaps more surprising is that it really hasn’t stood still. 1,488 new products were added, masked only by the fact that 1,367 products exited. (Paging Matt Damon for The Churn Ultimatum.) But the biggest story isn’t the size of the landscape. It’s the new architecture emerging inside it. The first 15 years of martech were the app-centric era: platforms, point solutions, workflows, dashboards, integrations, and stacks. The next era is being reshaped by AI agents, context layers, machine-readable experiences, orchestration, and new kinds of workflows that don’t fit neatly inside the old boxes. So maybe this isn’t peak martech. Maybe it’s the closing credits on Chapter One. The end of martech as we’ve mapped it? And I feel fine.

For most of the SaaS era, martech platforms won by shipping applications. That era is ending. The most sophisticated marketing ops leaders I've talked to recently don't live inside their MAPs anymore. They're building their own apps and agents on top of them — treating Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce as back-end infrastructure rather than cockpits. Jason Lemkin put it well: "The CRM decision is no longer a CRM decision. It's an AI infrastructure decision." The new build-vs-buy equation: buy infrastructure, build differentiation. My latest newsletter explores what this migration means for marketing ops leaders, platform vendors, and agencies — including why the hardest migration isn't yours, it's theirs. newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

It's easy to pile on all the ways in which SaaS is threatened. What's much more interesting is the potential path to its salvation. I have thoughts. 😀 Yesterday's newsletter introduces the concept of context-as-a-service (CaaS) and why it could be a phenomenal opportunity for a new generation of software platforms. Existing SaaS platforms can make this transformation. In fact, their core expertise is a tremendous — and portable — asset in this new framing that I propose. That said, it's not an easy transformation. The hardest aspect of it for many will be that this only works as a true platform play. Unfortunately, most SaaS companies think product-first rather than ecosystem-first. Changing that mindset is key to their survival. Would love to hear your thoughts. If you haven't already received this morning's newsletter in your inbox, it's here: newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p… #martech #marketing #AI #SaaS #CaaS