TMW #193 | Wednesday Martech Briefing

Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I look to where the industry is going and what you should be paying attention to.

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The lean Martech stack, trusting the chain of thought, controlling AI-generated video

Here’s the week in Martech: 

• The lean Martech stack: Not everyone can ditch Salesforce like Klarna did.
• Trusting the chain of thought: AI is starting to show its logic.
• Controlling AI-generated video: Control and workflow are key for AI video generators.
• Everything else: Everything is a shop, in-vehicle ads, more antitrust woes for Google, Martech buyers trust Martech buyers, and more.

 👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

📰 Latest Developments

The lean Martech stack. In late August, the CEO of Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, announced that the company would replace its Salesforce and Workday instances with homespun applications built using AI. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff responded to the news with a pertinent question: “How is he doing this?” This news could be seen as proof that AI is helping companies move towards a lean Martech stack, but using AI to replicate Martech is out of reach for most companies. Yes, the user-facing functionality of Martech applications might be possible to replicate as it is easy to explain to AI coding assistants, but there is a lot more to building SaaS than what users see. Things like security, governance, integrations, AI capabilities, and more require expertise that goes beyond anything a layperson could describe to an AI coding assistant. Perhaps Klarna has the in-house expertise to develop its own sophisticated Martech, but for most companies, that is not the case. This is an extension of the build vs. buy debate: Even if you can build Martech internally with AI, do you have the skillsets and resourcing to keep up with established vendors for whom this is their core business?¹ 💬 There are circumstances where internally-built solutions are a good option – particularly for niche but simple requirements – but there are limits to this. Klarna shuts down Salesforce | Marc Benioff responds

💬 Insights from Alium, The Buyer Intelligence Platform:

1. The lean Martech stack: “We like to say we're a technology company that sells fragrances… we've built a lot of our own applications. We built our own Google keyword fitting tool, campaign optimization tool, order management tool, and warehouse applications. A lot of the technology that we leverage, we've built ourselves… [but] we're not going to build an email platform. There are some situations where it makes sense to leverage third-party tech. We can't possibly be the experts at everything, nor do we want to be. We want to focus on what we do best.”
   Cosmetics & Beauty, Retail | $10M – $100M | 50 – 500 employees

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.