According to chiefmartec’s latest annual report, the MarTech landscape now features more than 15,000 tools. As our founder & CEO Raja Walia said: “That’s not a map; it’s a warning label. The real issue isn’t a lack of solutions. It’s that most companies can’t get the ones they already have to work together. Tech sprawl isn’t innovation. It’s fragmentation, and it’s burning marketing teams out.”
Build > Buy: The DIY Developer Era Is Here
At GNW, we’re seeing a clear pattern: the rise of the Do-It-Yourself Developer. “What once was too expensive and complex to do in-house, with AI, is now becoming incredibly fast, easy, and therefore affordable–especially at small companies,” commented Andrea Lechner-Becker, our chief strategy officer. What once took a full-stack team now takes one savvy operator with Clay, GitHub Copilot, or Zapier, and that shift is redefining what it means to scale inside SaaS.
This isn’t a passing trend. According to chiefmartec’s 2024 report, there’s been a 5X rise in companies identifying their core MarTech as “Other,” which includes custom-built platforms. That’s not market noise. That’s a tectonic shift. If even half of that growth is from companies building their own tools, we’re witnessing the beginning of a build-over-buy era.
Emily Hood at GNW had this to say: “Tech consolidation is huge. We help clients choose the right tools as opposed to more tools to accomplish the same job. AI isn’t just helping companies develop more in-house solutions; it’s helping MarTech vendors enhance offerings quickly as well. Sometimes too quickly to keep up with.”
Why This Should Worry SaaS Vendors
Some SaaS leaders are still skeptical. They think these DIY solutions won’t scale. But the same was once said about low-code. Now, AI is closing the skills gap faster than most vendors can evolve. And that’s the real threat to SaaS: not AI itself, but what it’s enabling users to do without you.
Integration challenges are a key signal, with 29% of companies reporting they can’t integrate AI into their existing stack or are struggling to do so. As Mike Guanci pointed out: “The reasons why AI doesn’t integrate well is more a function of closed or outdated martech platforms in their current tech stack than it is the new AI tools they want to bring in. That…should worry a lot of vendors.”
And even when companies build their own tools, success isn’t guaranteed—because the hardest part isn’t the code, it’s the coordination. The most commonly cited MarTech implementation challenges that lead to failure include change management (57%) and cross-functional misalignment (49%). In other words, what breaks most often isn’t the tech. It’s the team trying to implement it.
The Cost of Chaos: Burnout, Bloat, and Missed Targets
The implications go beyond product. They impact people. Marketing teams are being asked to drive revenue from bloated stacks with disconnected data and no roadmap for alignment. The more tools teams add without alignment, the more value they lose. A shocking 28% of failed Martech projects never generate measurable ROI at all. That’s not a strategy. That’s chaos dressed up as innovation. And with generative AI accelerating new tool creation at breakneck speed—last year alone saw a 35% and 47% growth in content and sales tech startups, respectively—the overload is real.
Victoria Escala from our team asked, “How does a term like ‘digital transformation’ evolve in an AI-enabled future? What is the time frame of long-term versus continuing to put band-aids on anything in the short term? Categories in MarTech, functions, everything in an AI-enabled future is up for grabs and worth rethinking and challenging commonly held beliefs.”
A Career Crossroads for SaaS Marketers
This shift is forcing a career reckoning, too. As AI continues to evolve, it will significantly reduce the need for traditional SaaS structures and marketing teams, consolidating roles that once required many people into a single position supported by hundreds of AI agents. So in the next three to five years, expect a drop in the number of SaaS companies with large marketing teams.
The safest bets if you’re a SaaS marketer, according to our own Andrea Lechner-Becker? “Sharpen your AI fluency, become indispensable in cross-functional communication, and align yourself with buyers who are slower to change, like construction, logistics, and skilled trades.”
We’re already seeing tool preferences shift: among B2C and hybrid B2B/B2C companies, CDPs dropped from 26.9% to 17.4% as the reported center of the MarTech stack. As Blake Eaton said, “Ultimately, I think it all drives back to the central concept that the most valuable marketers aren’t going to be the ones with specific platform expertise—they will be the ones that understand the goal outcomes and become most capable of finding the path to it.”
The Hypertail Is Coming
The report also highlighted that we’re entering the era of the “Hypertail”—billions of micro, disposable software tools, built and discarded in days. Consider that 1,211 tools disappeared from the landscape this year alone, either because they were acquired or shuttered, representing a churn rate of 8.6%. In such a world, the most valuable marketers won’t be the ones who know every button in a legacy platform. They’ll be the ones who can quickly build what matters or orchestrate the team who can.
Blake Eaton captured it best: “The Hypertail concept…blew my mind, specifically the bit around the millions/billions/trillions of custom software programs being generated by AI engines, which only exist when we need them. Like Schrödinger’s software. I’ve always been a poo-pooer of custom solutions but that does put it into a different perspective. Shouldn’t the future look more like that—every org customizing hundreds of micro software solutions at speed to meet their particular needs? Makes a lot of sense, on top of being just a tad frightening.”
What the Future Actually Needs
As our CEO Raja Walia said: “The future isn’t more platforms. It’s better alignment. The companies that figure that out will stop chasing features and start fixing processes.” That includes not only stitching tools together but also building in governance, especially as AI features roll out faster than trust can keep up.
Christian Iloreta shared one cautionary example: “Although the possibilities are cool, businesses rolling out AI features don’t seem totally prepared to answer questions around privacy and use. An unnamed client asked an unnamed MarTech company to provide documentation on how their tool will use their data. The provider offered crickets in response. It’s made the client uncomfortable and made them unwilling to buy into the new feature.”
In the end, we’re not in a platform race anymore; we’re in a coordination crisis. And the winners will be the ones who can build less, connect better, and focus on what actually moves the business forward.
