The Martech Flexibility Era: How Composability & AI are Reshaping the Stack
Composability and AI are ushering in a new era of Martech flexibility, giving organisations greater control over their data, technology choices and ability to innovate.
In the past few months, there’s been a lot of talk about the massive changes occurring in Martech. Every few decades, there seems to be a step change in Martech, and we appear to be in the midst of one now.
Past step changes include the advent of digital marketing (email/paid search), mass adoption of the Internet, SaaS products moving applications to the cloud, and the mobile phone revolution. Each of these macro events created drastic changes in Martech for both marketers and consumers.
Today, we see two converging macro trends that represent the next step changes in Martech: Composability and AI. Either of these could be a massive industry shift on its own, but with both occurring concurrently, they are driving significant change (and a bit of chaos) in Martech.
I’d argue that there’s one common throughline among these new technologies: flexibility. The following will examine why I believe flexibility is fueling both these technologies and the industry changes we are witnessing.
Composability
Composability – the ability to use applications that run natively on cloud data platforms – has become extremely popular in Martech. In the past year, Martech products that leverage composable architectures have experienced significant growth.
So much so that traditional/legacy Martech vendors have rushed to reposition themselves as composable products, and industry research analysts (Gartner, Forrester, etc.) that had previously downplayed the impact of composability have begun to embrace and even favour composable vendors.
So why is composability so popular now? Flexibility.
For decades, the traditional approach to Martech was to pick a product, feed it customer data, build user audiences, and then activate them. The process was similar for many categories of Martech, from digital analytics to ESP to CDP.
Organisations either went “all-in” on a monolithic marketing suite (Salesforce, Adobe) or they stitched together “best-of-breed” tools. Regardless of the approach, marketing teams typically split customer data into multiple applications, making it difficult to have all customer data in one place.
Additionally, when organisations send customer data, create identity graphs, build customer journeys, and build audiences in monolithic marketing suites or multiple Martech tools, they’re locked into those tools for years to come. All of these marketing assets are tied to specific vendors, and in most cases, you lose the work you’ve done if you decide to switch vendors in the future.
But this isn’t the case with composable architectures. With the rise of cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.), organisations have finally begun to have a lowest common denominator or single source of truth for customer data.
When organisations add composable applications on top of cloud data warehouses, they can store their key marketing assets in their own cloud data platform. First-party customer data, identity graphs, customer audiences, and journeys can be managed by composable applications, but stored in customer-owned cloud data platforms.
By moving these critical marketing assets upstream to the cloud data platform, composable applications help organisations avoid vendor lock-in. While organisations may be locked into their cloud data platform, composable architectures and products make it easier to replace downstream applications, since these applications now represent only the last mile of marketing delivery.
Whether it’s a digital analytics, an ESP, or an advertising tool, composability allows organisations to centralise and govern their key marketing logic and push data and audiences down to the applications that require it as needed.
Composable flexibility also increases pricing power. When you’ve spent years implementing a monolithic marketing suite or have built custom integrations between multiple martech products, the switching costs of moving vendors can be high – and vendors know that. While the idea of moving to newer, better technologies may be appealing, the harsh reality is that switching Martech vendors is often too costly.
Therefore, organisations using non-composable Martech tools are beholden to the innovation roadmaps of their current vendors rather than to the breadth of all available Martech tools. This vendor lock-in can begin to feel like a weight around the organisation, preventing it from out-innovating its competitors.
So when I speak to organisations about their Martech stack, most will describe the chaos of having multiple places to store customer data and keeping it synchronised, or how arduous it has been to deploy a marketing suite.
Organisations may report feeling “trapped” by their Martech stack, which slows them down rather than increasing the speed at which they can deliver marketing experiences. While few will mention flexibility by name, after hearing similar stories from countless organisations, what they truly desire is Martech stack flexibility.
I believe this desire for flexibility is driving the movement towards composability and the technologies that enable it.
Artificial Intelligence
It’s stating the obvious that AI is turning the Martech world upside down these days. Virtually every marketing team is looking for ways to utilise AI, and almost every Martech vendor is repositioning itself as “agentic.”
While it’s yet to be seen whether AI is a technology bubble or the future, it’s already impacting many Martech buying decisions. Like composability, I believe that some of the key drivers behind the marketing AI boom are a long-term desire for flexibility.
Building upon the composability theme above, AI holds the promise that marketers can ultimately be less reliant on “packaged” Martech tools. While it may be a while before large organisations replace Martech products with “vibe-coded” AI tools, the idea has been enough to prompt fears of a SaaS-pocalypse that has reduced the valuations of legacy Martech companies.
One of the reasons traditional Martech companies have seen such a huge devaluation is that shareholders fear their current vendor lock-in annuities will evaporate due to AI advancements. We’re already seeing a massive increase in the number of new “AI-first” Martech vendors leveraging AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and others.
In the long run, organisations will want the flexibility to adopt new AI tools to become more efficient and outpace their competitors. While organisations today may switch Martech tools only once every decade, in the future, they could conceivably switch tools multiple times a year!
Another way AI is increasing Martech flexibility is by reducing the reliance on user interfaces. For the past few decades, Martech tools have provided specific user interfaces for utilising their products. Whether it’s a Salesforce CRM opportunity form or a digital analytics dashboard, users must learn how to use Martech tool interfaces.
User adoption has traditionally been a challenge, and many organisations continue to use Martech tools that don’t add value, simply out of fear of retraining users on a new interface! In some cases, marketers’ knowledge of a specific Martech tool’s user interface is a critical criterion for recruitment or promotion.
But with the advent of AI chat and MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces, more of the user interface is moving to natural language. Users simply ask their questions, and the AI tool produces the output or performs the desired task.
This user interface change will eventually reduce how much end users need to learn about Martech products, which, in turn, will reduce user interface expertise as a reason to keep a Martech product rather than switch tools.
Lastly, AI will inevitably replace much of the grunt work involved in marketing. Human resources are often the most costly and the least flexible. It’s difficult and costly to scale up or down the number of marketing employees.
But AI provides a flexible way to scale marketing teams in ways that are simply not possible with human resources. For example, if a marketing team wanted to create one hundred versions of an advertising campaign, it could take months and require multiple marketing employees.
But AI can create these different campaigns in minutes. AI will eventually give organisations the flexibility to create an unlimited number of marketing assets without increasing marketing headcount or building complex marketing teams.
Final Thoughts
While flexibility isn’t often cited as a driving factor in today’s chaotic Martech landscape, it’s a key element of much of the change we are seeing.
Composable architectures and products are enabling organisations to break free from vendor lock-in, choose from a wider array of Martech tools, and increase their pricing power and leverage relative to legacy Martech vendors.
At the same time, AI is producing an entirely new swath of Martech products, reducing reliance on legacy user interfaces and providing new ways to scale marketing teams. Welcome to the Martech flexibility era!
ALSO READ: Building a Community is About Earning an Ongoing Relationship
