Production used to prove competence. AI broke that chain. The same break is happening to martech stacks, and the fix isn’t more tooling.
So, before we sit down and enjoy MartechDay 2026, let's take a moment to reflect on the Hypertail situation as described in the State of Martech 2025, where companies are starting to leverage AI to build production solutions to fill the gap left by off-the-shelf Martech.
A scale-up
Most Martech development services in 2026 answer the wrong question. Here's what precision builds on top of your existing stack actually look like.
Last month a CMO emailed me a screenshot. It was a Google search for "Martech development services" and she had circled three of the top results in red pen. (Digital pen, on a screenshot. I know. Oh, the irony) Her question was a single line.
"Which one of these am I supposed to approach?"
None of them, as it turned out. But I understood why she was asking. When you Google that phrase right now, you get agencies pitching campaign microsites, systems integrators quoting discovery phases, and vendor-certified partners offering to configure the Salesforce or HubSpot or Braze stack you
Brinker and Riemersma drop the State of Martech 2026 report on May 5. One week to form your own view before the social feed fills with hot takes. Three things I’m watching for: the maturity gap, what AI is doing to roles in the middle of the org chart, and whether the composable canvas is real.
There’s a sequence in Star Wars’ Andor where the pilgrims walk to the Eye of Aldhani. Once a decade, a meteor storm lights up the sky above a remote plateau. The faithful trek for days, sleep on rocks, and look up. It’s beautiful. It’s also, in the show, the perfect cover for a heist. Everyone’s distracted by the lights.
I keep thinking about that scene as May 5 approaches.
That’s when Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma debut the State of Martech 2026 report and the updated 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape on MartechDay. It’s the
Even after 20 years in Martech, I recently felt lost. With 15,000 tools and constant change, the problem isn’t access to information, it’s knowing what actually matters. This piece explores why teams struggle to navigate Martech, and where decisions really break down.
I’ve been doing this work for close to twenty years now.
Helping companies make sense of their data and marketing technology, guiding selections, fixing what doesn’t work, occasionally building something in between. It’s been a fairly consistent thread.
And recently… I found myself staring at it all thinking:
“I’m not entirely sure where I’d start anymore.”
That’s not something I say lightly.
It has been half a year since the State of Martech 2026 edition was published. It included a staggering 15,000+ tools.
Fifteen thousand.
At that point, it stops being a catalogue.
Piedmont is French for Niederberger. Foot of the mountain. It's where most organisations find themselves when they reach out. I built a practice around that moment. Here's what it looks like.
If you read my post at the end of last year, you know that my client work changed toward the end of 2025.
It wasn't dramatic. No single conversation triggered it. But looking back at December, roughly 20% of what I was doing had moved from strategy and advisory into actually building things. Custom data apps, operational tools, activation layers that clients needed but couldn't find off the shelf. By April 2026 that number was closer to 50%.
When half your work has subtly become something different from what your practice was named for, it's time to pay attention.
With 15,000+ martech tools out there, the problem isn’t choice, it’s fit. The “perfect” solution rarely exists. The real challenge is finding your Goldilocks zone, where technology, people, and process are balanced enough to actually make things work.
If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you’ve probably noticed I have a bit of a thing for astronomy metaphors. We’ve talked about entropy creeping into martech stacks, and how data gravity quietly pulls everything toward the warehouse, turning tools into satellites orbiting a growing center of mass.
So let’s add another one to the collection.
The Goldilocks zone.
And yes, before anyone jumps in, I know. For some, Goldilocks is a fairy tale about porridge, chairs, and questionable home invasion ethics. For others, it’s an astronomical concept, describing the narrow band around a