MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth MarTech Insights and Highlights from 2025
Jan 6, 2026
Scott Brinker, VP at HubSpot and chiefmartec.com founder, dives into the intricacies of MarTech's evolution amidst an 8.6% vendor churn rate. He highlights how AI has not unified but rather fragmented the landscape, and introduces the concept of context engineering for enhanced customer interactions. Expect a dramatic shift in 2026 towards AI that prioritizes customer needs, altering traditional sales strategies. Brinker thwarts the notion that chatbots solve everything by discussing their limitations and emphasizes the synergy between deterministic workflows and LLMs for better marketing outcomes.
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Rapid Yet Early AI Adoption
- Marketers rapidly adopted AI in 2025 but remain early in experimentation and limited production use cases.
- The quick pace of experiments is impressive given many capabilities barely existed before 2025.
AI Accelerates Content Workflows
- AI meaningfully speeds up content production by assisting at each step without fully automating the whole process.
- Humans still drive decisions, but tasks like brainstorming, repackaging, and analysis complete much faster.
Chatbots Finally Becoming Effective
- Website chatbots began resolving a majority of customer service queries as LLMs improved and connections to backend data increased.
- When unresolved, smooth handoffs to human reps remain essential for good customer experience.