How Can Marketing Leaders Revive Martech?

Marketing chiefs entered the 2010s with a bold promise: marketing technology would reinvent the function, delivering real-time personalisation, automating complex workflows and illuminating customer behaviour.

Yet more than a decade on from martech’s 2011 arrival, many leaders are still asking whether the investment is paying off.

McKinsey’s Rewiring MarTech: From cost centre to growth engine surfaces a sobering reality.

Drawing on the perspectives of 233 senior marketing and technology executives, the report finds that fragmented stacks, entrenched data silos and weak measurement discipline mean much of today’s spend underperforms.

Not one of the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) interviewed was able to quantify the ROI of their martech investment - placing the projected US$215bn in spending at risk of disappearing into a black hole.

McKinsey argues the way out is AI - specifically, agentic AI - when it’s elevated from tooling to strategy and governed at the top table.

Is AI the solution?

The firm asserts that, in the hands of the C-suite, AI can shift martech from cost centre to growth engine, with the potential to double activation speeds and materially lift conversion rates.

Robert Tas, Partner at McKinsey & Company, says: “Martech has the opportunity for revival with AI. But only if CMOs eradicate complex martech stacks and anchor it as a strategic priority in the C-suite.

“Only then can brands activate AI-powered customer journeys to realise the potential jump in conversion that AI promises, and see this growth engine in action.”

For marketing leaders, the mandate is clear: treat martech not as a collection of disconnected tools but as a strategic business asset.

That means C-suite fluency in what AI-driven martech enables, disciplined prioritisation and an insistence that every investment ties to measurable value.

Done well, AI-enabled personalisation can become a sustained competitive advantage, but only when marketing, product, data science and technology teams execute in lockstep under a digital-first strategy.

Barriers to martech's revival

McKinsey highlights the barriers and how to overcome them:

• Appoint a revenue-accountable Chief Experience Officer (CXO) to lead. A seasoned CXO should own the total cost of ownership and connect technology investment directly to business outcomes. This role brings coherence across channels, journeys and data, ensuring martech decisions are governed by growth, not just capability.

• Simplify the stack. Years of vendor accretion have produced unwieldy architectures. McKinsey reports that 47% of martech decision-makers cite stack complexity and system and data integration challenges as key blockers to unlocking value. Rationalisation, a unified data model and interoperable platforms are prerequisites to productive AI.

• Scrutinise spend with AI outcomes in mind. In the next three to five years, 25% of CMOs say they will increase martech investment; over a five-year horizon, 80% say they will. That capital will be wasted if it layers on complexity rather than funding AI-powered agents and use cases that clearly move revenue, conversion and engagement.

• Raise martech maturity. Only 35% of respondents say their firms’ martech has transformational capabilities - such as advanced omnichannel personalisation, integrated data platforms and automated workflows. Closing this gap is essential for AI to operate at scale and for marketing to deliver consistent, end-to-end experiences.

• Invest in people and change. Over a third of martech buyers point to under-skilled teams as a primary cause of underperformance. Persistent underinvestment in training, along with unresolved issues in data, governance, integration and AI risk management, slows progress. Capability-building and clear guardrails must accompany any platform or AI rollout.

Practically, CMOs should reset the operating model around value creation: define a handful of high-impact AI use cases; align C-suite sponsorship and funding; instrument end-to-end measurement; modernise data foundations; and redeploy budget from redundant tooling to talent and agentic AI pilots that can scale. Equally important is an explicit stop-doing list—retiring duplicative platforms and workflows that clog speed to market.

Kelsey Robinson, Senior Partner at McKinsey, says: “We need to apply the same discipline and focus that long guided media investment to martech.

“By connecting spend directly to outcomes like revenue growth, conversion and engagement, organisations can unlock far greater value.”

For marketing leaders, the takeaway is not to spend more, but to spend deliberately - elevating martech to the C-suite, simplifying the landscape and harnessing AI to deliver faster activations and higher conversions with provable ROI.