Pete Stein is the Global President of Merkle.
As we accelerate into Q2 of 2025, I’m seeing a pattern I can’t ignore.
Thinking back to CES in January, the show was full of robots, drones, bigger and brighter displays and all kinds of smart(er) interfaces. The floor conversations were all about AI and how to take advantage of it right now. But there was also something more basic at play.
No fewer than five of our clients emphasized the same challenge: They have invested a lot in marketing technology—some of which is up and running and some that isn't—but this tech is not part of a holistic strategy, and they are unsure of its value. Somewhere between buying and standing up the technology, they lost the business case—or worse, never developed it.
When Your Tech Stack Isn't Delivering Value
There are two ways this happens:
1. The C-suite signs a sweeping deal for enterprise technology, and in order to hit commitments, the tech vendor and/or consultant rushes the implementation without considering actual use cases, organizational readiness or value delivery.
2. A siloed organization buys a bunch of function- or channel-specific technology intended to solve some very specific use cases, but without a broader vision or coordinated strategy for enterprise tech.
Either way, you’re stuck with a tech stack that’s not delivering value, which is an expensive problem to have. In the short term, you’re dealing with high and potentially redundant costs, suboptimal processes and frustrated employees. In the long term, the technology that was meant to accelerate your digital maturity ends up slowing you down, leaving you less able to adapt as customer needs and behaviors evolve.
Most Companies Aren't Ready For The AI Revolution
With technology now so central to the customer experience—and AI poised to overturn the status quo yet again—mastering enterprise tech has never been more essential. The high hurdle is that most nondigital-native companies are still struggling to master earlier waves of digitization. Over the past couple of decades, consultants have bombarded clients with well-intended advice such as:
• Be more like a media company and generate always-on content to engage your customers.
• Become more social and have conversations and interactions with your customers at scale.
• Be more like a software company and digitize everything, own your own data and software intellectual property, innovate, be agile, ship minimum viable products and move fast and break stuff.
Now we are saying: You must be an AI company. Leverage your data (which you’ve already mastered, right?) to create proprietary knowledge models, enhance employee productivity and automate all aspects of the business system.
It’s hard to believe, but we are still in the early days of the AI revolution. We don’t know exactly how AI will change things, but we know the impact will be massive. Most organizations aren’t ready. And redundant, disconnected, nonoptimized deployments of existing marketing and customer experience (CX) tech are a big part of the problem.
What To Do About It
Start with a clear, compelling vision for the digital future of your company. Make sure that vision is broadly shared, understood and embraced. This is the essential foundation for success with enterprise technology—and there really is no shortcut.
Once you’ve defined your vision, refresh it periodically by anticipating future customer needs and behaviors. Even if you’re wrong 50% of the time (and you will be), the process will help set expectations for current and future use cases for CX and marketing tech.
Then, have a similar forecasting process for employee needs, behaviors and attitudes.
• Talk to your people—and not just those in IT and marketing. Businesses often fail to consider end users’ opinions and feedback on existing technology when making new investments. Critical support functions outside of IT and marketing—such as human resources, legal, finance and procurement—are also frequently excluded from the decision-making process. Compiling input from various departments and stakeholders creates a solid foundation for future success. In many cases, brands already have what they need to execute a vision.
• Work toward a “just right” tech stack. Any new addition to the enterprise tech stack must play nicely with what’s already there. Think like Goldilocks: Avoid a highly fragmented ecosystem with dozens of critical vendors all held together with twine and duct tape. But don’t swing to the other extreme, adopting a rigid monolith that keeps you from integrating highly relevant, best-of-breed solutions. We see tech giants rolling out AI solutions that promise to work seamlessly with their other products, but here’s an insider secret: Archival platforms in the marketplace often integrate beautifully together—especially if each has a significant market share within its respective sphere.
• Build the business case. Create a model that captures critical use cases and the value expected from each. Going through this process forces you to discuss and document key assumptions and helps set more realistic expectations about value realization. It’s normal for expectations to shift over time. But it helps to have a solid framework as a starting point for tracking and measuring those shifts. Otherwise, even a well-planned road map can start to feel like a rudderless drift.
• Push forward through uncertainty. Accept that mistakes are part of the process—make changes and take calculated risks to make progress toward your future vision. Encourage healthy debate up front, but do not tolerate analysis paralysis. The market and technology landscapes will continue to evolve even as companies progress along their road maps. This is inevitable. Returning to the two north stars—customers and employees—keeps investments grounded in purpose.
This stuff isn’t easy. The pace of technological evolution is not slowing down. But it’s the ability to ride these waves of change—and turn disruption into innovation—that separates future industry leaders from everyone else. And with the AI revolution unfolding all around us, leaders can’t afford to be slowed down by marketing and CX tech platforms that aren’t delivering value.
The robots and drones aren’t waiting around. Every organization needs to make moves to set up a technology foundation that’s fit for purpose and ready for the future that’s already here.
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