The CMO's Guide to the Changing Marketing Stack | Auxia Blog

The CMO's Guide to the Changing Marketing Stack

Sandeep Menon

July 14, 2026

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How we got here

The 2000s: the internet gave marketers a channel that scaled. Email, search, and display meant you could reach millions for a fraction of what broadcast used to cost. Salesforce, Adobe, and the other big platforms grew up here, with much of it acquisition-driven.

The 2010s: data and mobile changed the game. Customer Data Platforms, marketing clouds, and behavioral analytics meant you could finally understand who you were talking to, and segment and target more granularly. This is also when the cloud-native data warehouse became transformative. Instead of every tool hoarding its own copy of customer data, companies started centralizing it in one place they actually owned.

The 2020s: composability won. Once data had a permanent home in the warehouse, the rest of the stack could become modular. You no longer needed a single monolithic suite to get a unified view of the customer. You needed a warehouse and a way to sync data in and out of best-of-breed tools. That is the stack most companies run today, and it has a predictable shape.

Today’s marketing stack

Systems of Truth

Systems of Activation

Where the stack is going

Over the last decade, the marketing stack evolved in two different directions.

The bottom of the stack became the ‘system of truth’. Warehouses and data lakes consolidated enterprise data into a single source of truth.

The top of the stack became the system of execution. ESPs, journey builders, campaign managers, content tools, and analytics products gave marketers places to plan and launch work.

AI changes both layers simultaneously.

The first wave of AI adoption taught companies two important lessons:

  1. AI delivers fundamentally better customer experiences. Systems that continuously predict, recommend, and adapt outperform systems built around static rules and manual segmentation.
  2. AI only works as well as the context available to it. That has accelerated the push toward centralizing enterprise knowledge rather than scattering it across dozens of applications.

#1) The data stack is consolidating, with everyone racing to own ‘decisioning’

This is why infrastructure companies, like Databricks, keep moving upward. The data warehouse and data lake remain gravity central for the organization, and at Auxia, we don’t see that changing anytime soon. But they're also recognizing there is so much more value customers are looking for than simply storing data. They increasingly want to become the platform that understands business context, serves intelligence to applications, and ultimately owns the decision trace, what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next.

#2) Agents are completely disrupting marketing execution

They were not built for intelligence. The strategy, decisioning, and optimization that currently take an army of people and an 18-week campaign cycle increasingly look like things that can run continuously and autonomously.

#3) To drive transformative change for your company, you need to adapt both capabilities

Replacing one layer independently is probably not going to cut it. The companies with the richest business context, best decision making in the world, and incredible model performance will struggle to drive adoption if they aren’t tailor-made for marketers.

What does this mean for my company?

To drive truly transformative change in your organization around marketing and customer engagement, you’ll need three capabilities:

  1. An omnipresent "brain" across the organization, connecting to all your existing context and data.
  2. A way to curate the experience for every single user individually.
  3. A suite of tools that takes the operational burden off your teams because executing on all of it is usually half the battle.

In our view, there’s a few ways you can tackle this: