The role of AI and data orchestration in marketing operations: the death knell for marketing automation platforms?
What we recognise as marketing automation platforms have been around for over the last few decades and have become a mainstay in the modern marketing tech stack. Initially developed to move marketing teams beyond basic email service providers and sit alongside CRM systems, they introduced greater sophistication to how marketing teams could nurture prospects and automate repetitive tasks.
Today’s platforms enable marketers to design complex customer journeys, automate communications, gain more control over campaigns and adapt to market changes. In today’s martech stack, marketing automation platforms are central to managing and scaling marketing operations efficiently.
The changing marketing automation landscape
However, with budgets falling and technology developing quickly, we’ve seen some marketing automation platforms fall behind marketers’ needs and expectations. As platforms increasingly focus on AI capabilities as the ‘hot new thing’, they can overlook the need to maintain and evolve the core functionalities that are essential to ongoing marketing success.
While rapid market evolution and changing customer behaviours are putting increasing pressure on businesses to continually evolve and improve their marketing and data strategies, platforms are not always keeping up. This means marketing teams face challenges around slow integrations, time-consuming processes to implement workarounds, and additional pressure on already stretched marketing resources.
As a result, we’re hearing increasing discussions around whether marketing automation platforms are fit for purpose. Many organisations are questioning whether to move data processing infrastructure out of marketing automation platforms to more sophisticated data orchestration platforms. These allow for more streamlined processes, rather than being spread across separate marketing automation and CRM systems. resulting in cleaner and higher quality CRM data.
Why marketing automation platforms still matter
Marketing automation platforms still have great value in managing campaigns and email automation, and in maintaining GDPR compliance across systems. However, they represent just one piece of the martech puzzle.
Depending on an organisation’s strategy, the processes to normalise and enrich data, maintain data quality, score engagement and demographic across individuals and accounts, and manage campaign hierarchy are a lot to ask of marketing automation and CRM platforms.
The speed and capabilities of integrations that work in this way are very much tool dependent. As a result, marketing teams often find they need to implement workarounds or patch processes together, which can take time away from more strategic tasks and cause frustration and delays.
Data orchestration platforms – the next big thing?
With AI at the forefront of people’s minds, and senior leadership teams demanding a focus on AI across every department, marketers are asking how AI can help them support future marketing strategy, make the tech stack simpler and streamline data, lead and campaign processes.
To reap benefits from AI, data must be clean, high quality and well populated. With companies trying to adopt an AI-led strategies, data orchestration will support in maintaining the data quality AI requires.
In fact, data orchestration delivers on multiple marketing requirements, primarily by putting data strategy as a foundational marketing process. We predict that data orchestration platforms will play a bigger role in the martech stack as the answer to marketers’ technology and process challenges.
Putting data at the core of marketing operations
A technology solution designed to coordinate, manage and streamline the flow of data between various systems and tools within an organisation, data orchestration platforms ensure that data is collected, transformed, enriched and distributed efficiently, maintaining high levels of data quality and consistency across platforms such as CRM systems and marketing email tools.
By automating and centralising these data processes, orchestration platforms enable businesses to simplify their tech stack, reduce manual intervention, and support the advanced capabilities of AI-driven marketing, making them increasingly vital in modern marketing strategy.
It’s highly likely, then, that future optimised marketing tech models will consist of three core elements:
- A sophisticated data transformation and orchestration platform
- A robust CRM platform
- A more streamlined marketing email tool.
In this model, the data transformation platform will still require integration with the CRM platform, but if constant syncing between systems is kept to a minimum it will greatly improve data speed and increase scalability for businesses wanting to use AI.
Scalability, agility, reliability
In our day-to-day experience, we are seeing clear evidence that data orchestration will reshape marketing automation as we know it – but this is a natural evolution of the martech stack, rather than the death of one platform and the emergence of another.
The evolution of data orchestration is reshaping marketing automation by enabling operations to scale with unprecedented agility and reliability. It’s ability to connect various technologies and data will reduce the manual burden on marketing teams, allowing them to focus on strategy and creative execution rather than data wrangling. As a result, organisations will be better positioned to scale their campaigns quickly and efficiently, responding in real time to shifting market demands and audience preferences.
Conclusion: Marketing automation is evolving – but certainly not dying
Crucially, the focus on high-quality and efficient data management within these orchestration solutions ensures that every campaign is built on a solid foundation of accurate insights. Automated data cleansing, enrichment and synchronisation processes minimise errors and inconsistencies, empowering marketing operations teams to deliver more targeted, personalised, and effective campaigns.
By centralising and automating these processes, data orchestration not only boosts operational efficiency but also supports the delivery of measurable business outcomes, giving marketers the confidence to innovate and expand their efforts at scale. In our book, that’s certainly not a death knell for marketing automation; it’s the next step in an ever-evolving technology ecosystem that continually aims to deliver better, faster, more accurate marketing results.
We’ll be looking at more predictions for 2026 in a later blog, so do keep an eye on our Knowledge Hub!