The 15,000-tool martech era is ending. Consolidation is why.
A decade of explosive growth pushed the martech landscape past 15,000 tools, but that abundance is now the problem: duplicative apps, fractured data, and runaway integration costs make more tech mean worse operations. AI is the accelerator, folding content, analytics, personalization, and orchestration into single platforms. The real question for leaders is no longer "can a tool do this?" but whether a capability earns its place as another layer of complexity.