The news: Spending on martech tools will continue to grow over the next five years, but data silos, inefficient ROI measurement and training gaps could hold back the tools’ potential.

• 78% of B2C organizations increased their martech budgets over the last five years, and that pace isn’t slowing: 79% plan to raise them again by 2029, per McKinsey’s Rewiring Martech report, and 34% will boost it by at least 11%.
• Despite these aggressive investments, only 35% of organizations say their martech operations have reached a “transformational” level of maturity.

Digging into the data: The numbers suggest a gap between optimism and execution, where brands are investing ahead of capacity by buying advanced tools without the integration infrastructure, ROI metrics or skills to fully use them.

The challenge: Heavy martech spending risks outpacing operational readiness, creating barriers that could limit the technology’s ROI potential.

• Nearly half (47%) of martech decision-makers point to stack complexity and poor system or data integration as top hurdles, which can lead to duplicated tools, unreliable data, and slow campaign activation.
• Another 34% of martech buyers and decision-makers say underskilled teams are a key barrier to realizing the technology’s full value.
• Zero of the approximately 50 senior marketing leaders at Fortune 500 companies interviewed by McKinsey could clearly measure the ROI on their martech investments.

The opportunity: The next phase of martech growth could depend less on buying new tools and more on integrating existing ones around shared data. Companies that embed martech into enterprise strategy—including through cross-team collaboration, AI-driven insights, and tighter leadership alignment—tend to achieve stronger growth and efficiency gains, per McKinsey.

• AI can help simplify martech adoption by automating integrations, identifying redundancies, and coordinating workflows across systems.
• It can also enhance decision-making by surfacing actionable insights from siloed data, helping move towards real-time optimization.

What marketers should do: CMOs should ensure teams are supplied with the technical skills to aid martech’s advancement and treat the tools as a part of operations across the board—not just an IT task. They should also connect martech success metrics directly to clear outcomes—like customer retention—to prove its value across the organization.

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