MarTech shifts to AI infrastructure
Scott Brinker described a shift where marketing platforms like Marketo, HubSpot and Salesforce are moving from being desktop 'cockpits' to acting as backend infrastructure for custom AI apps and agents. He argued this change lets marketing operations teams build differentiation on top of bought infrastructure rather than inside monolithic vendor apps. (x.com)
Marketing software is starting to look less like the place marketers work and more like the plumbing underneath custom artificial intelligence tools. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com) Scott Brinker wrote on April 14, 2026 that marketing operations leaders now describe platforms such as Braze, HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce as “back-end services” instead of the main “cockpit” where work happens. He said those teams are building their own apps and agents on top of them. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com) Brinker said one marketing operations chief was running personalized campaigns through custom agents layered on Hightouch, while another had stopped renewing several software tools, including lead-routing and revenue-intelligence products. He tied both examples to the same change: companies want software tuned to their own data and workflows. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com) The technical shift sits under the surface. Brinker wrote that cloud data warehouses and lakehouses now pull data from many business systems, and “reverse extract, transform, load” tools send that data back into operational tools, which lets companies activate a shared customer record instead of keeping it trapped inside one app. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com) He argued that artificial intelligence agents need that wider context — campaign results, customer behavior, finance data, content metadata and approval histories — to act usefully. He said platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and Google BigQuery now make that shared layer possible across structured, unstructured and streaming data. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com) The big vendors are already repositioning around that model. HubSpot said on September 3, 2025 that it was launching more than 20 new Breeze agents and assistants, plus Breeze Studio and Breeze Marketplace, and described those agents as software that can be customized and activated with a company’s own customer data. (hubspot.com) HubSpot also said in its Spring 2025 product release that customers were using its Customer Agent to resolve more than 50% of support tickets and spending nearly 40% less time closing tickets. The company framed those releases as artificial intelligence embedded “throughout our entire platform,” not as a separate add-on. (ir.hubspot.com) Salesforce made a similar move. In announcing Marketing Cloud Next, Salesforce said its Agentforce-powered agents can assemble campaigns, optimize performance and handle one-to-one personalization, while a June 23, 2025 update to Agentforce added observability tools, support for the Model Context Protocol standard and more than 100 prebuilt industry actions. (salesforce.com, salesforce.com) Salesforce also changed how it charges for that work. On May 15, 2025, the company introduced Flex Credits, saying customers could pay by action, with 20 credits priced at $0.10, after earlier offering Agentforce at $2 per conversation. (salesforce.com) Brinker’s argument is that this pushes differentiation away from the vendor’s user interface and toward what a company builds on top of shared infrastructure. In that model, the bought software still matters, but the advantage sits in the custom layer a marketing team controls. (newsletter.chiefmartec.com, newsletter.chiefmartec.com)
