What it is
Scott Brinker of chiefmartec and Frans Riemersma of MartechTribe, who publish the annual martech landscape. The 2026 report is sponsored by seven martech vendors.
The landscape count moved from 15,384 to 15,505 products, the first flat year in fifteen, with almost as many products removed as added. The report’s central idea is what it calls context, meaning what an assistant needs to know about the customer, the company and the systems it can act in, brought together at the moment of a decision rather than stored in one record.
It describes, in its own terms, marketing roles moving from campaign manager to agent operator to value engineer, and marketing operations from system administrator to stack wrangler to context engineer. A companion survey of about 200 marketing leaders, skewed to technically sophisticated teams, informs the AI chapter. A separate survey found 73% of executives believe a formal AI policy exists while 49% of individual contributors say none does.
What marketing teams should take from it
- The landscape has stopped growing. The next money goes into connecting what you already own to assistants, which is exactly where the exit test in finding 02.4 applies.
- The three layers of context, customer, company and systems, are a usable checklist for what an assistant is missing when a task stalls.
- The policy gap between leaders and their teams is the same shape as the readiness gap in finding 04.4, where leadership sees a program and the team sees a few trials.
- Landscape counts measure supply, not what any given stack exposes to an assistant.
Where to start
Ask marketing ops which of your core platforms an assistant can operate directly and what context it would be missing on the three layers. Add the exit test to the next big renewal, as finding 02.4 sets out.
Test the policy gap in your own function: ask three individual contributors whether an AI policy exists and compare their answer with what leadership believes.
Keep in mind
Vendor-sponsored, with a small and self-described sophisticated survey behind the AI chapter. Several figures often quoted from it in coverage come from an earlier report by the same authors.