MarTech Build and Buy in the Age of AI
A former colleague and friend recently asked if companies should build or buy their MarTech solutions. In reality, I've come to believe that it’s not just about build vs. buy — it’s about build AND buy.
Based on tens of MarTech engagements across sectors with clients, I've observed that the traditional binary choice between building and buying is overly simplistic. The reality is that successful companies need to manage both building and buying - creating a hybrid approach that maximizes value while minimizing risk.
The business decision ultimately comes down to economics, both direct (vendor subscriptions, implementation) and indirect (in-house development, opportunity loss) costs. When commodity software becomes highly accessible and cost-effective, buying makes sense. However, when unique value propositions can be created through custom development, building can provide a competitive edge. Even with buying, there’s rarely an out-of-the-box solution—marketing software, unlike Windows, requires substantial customization, business logic implementation, campaign execution, and performance monitoring. In this article, we will explore:
The current status quo of MarTech build and buy;
Common challenges companies face;
Strategic resolutions and recommendations;
Future trends with AI.
Offering pragmatic advices for organizations to manage build and buy strategies.
1. Current Status Quo: How Companies Are Balancing Build vs Buy
A. Corporate
Key needs: Enterprise-level scalability, global deployment capabilities, robust security, and seamless integration across complex tech stacks.
Build: Substantial in-house tech teams focused on core foundation layers, often housed within central IT services. However, this results in siloed stacks across different functions like performance marketing, ecommerce, and CRM. Implementation involves a mix of in-house integration, technical consulting, and vendor services, leading to long and complex implementation cycles. Feature additions and campaign launches often face significant delays.
Buy: Invest in enterprise-level super platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, with some transitioning from legacy systems like IBM or Oracle. Marketing teams frequently adopt point SaaS solutions without IT involvement to address specific needs.
Use case examples: Global retailer implements Adobe real time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Campaigns for campaign execution. In-house built real time recommendation engine powers on-site product recommendations while contents are managed in AEM.
B. Mid-sized
Key needs: Cost-effective solutions, faster time-to-market, flexibility to scale, and manageable integration complexity.
Build: Typically maintain small in-house tech teams and rely heavily on local agencies for implementation and operations. This can lead to knowledge fragmentation and dependency on external partners.
Buy: Most mid-sized organizations mix challenger platforms (e.g., Braze for customer engagement, Segment for CDP) or even “lite” versions of super platforms like Salesforce. The focus is on plug-and-play solutions that can be deployed quickly with minimal in-house overhead.
Use case examples: A subscription business has rebuilt its lake house on Azure Databricks, uses Segment for real time data and customer data platform, and migrated to Braze for multi-channel campaign execution. Reporting is built in Databricks with dashboarding in Tableau.
C. Small business
Key needs: Rapid plug-and-play, minimal technical overhead, low and predictable costs, and basic integration capabilities.
Build: Limited to no custom development, resulting in fragmented solutions with minimal integration. Focus is on quick wins and immediate business impact.
Buy: Heavy reliance on best-of-breed SaaS solutions, often starting with free-tier pricing. Popular choices include Mailchimp, HubSpot, Shopify, and various point solutions for specific needs.
Use case examples: An online boutique using Shopify for eCommerce and Klaviyo for email automation, but with no unified customer data layer.
2. Common challenges companies face
The growing gap between business and IT represents a fundamental challenge across organization sizes. Beyond this, specific challenges include:
Corporate: Inefficient workflows and processes between business and IT create significant friction. There's a notable shortage of tech-savvy product owners who can effectively manage both build and agency relationships. Poor implementation frequently leads to delays and under-utilization of capabilities. Migration projects can stretch over years, seriously impacting agility and market responsiveness.
Mid-sized: These organizations often struggle with legacy stack fragmentation across solutions and regions. The lack of in-house talent to drive change creates dependency on agencies, leading to misaligned implementations and delays. The balance between capability and cost remains a constant challenge.
Small business: Limited budgets force reliance on fragmented, often freemium solutions lacking proper integration. This results in missed growth opportunities due to limited functionality and automation capabilities. The technical debt accumulates as the business grows.
3. Strategic resolutions and recommendations
Moving forward, a modular solution architecture—or “composable services”—is emerging as a future-proof approach. It blends customizable core tech platform with best-of-breed add-ons and integrated AI capabilities. This approach is grounded in three essential pillars:
Product and content
For corporate & mid-sized: Consolidate your existing super platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Adobe) or challenger platforms (Braze, Segment), and extend them with emerging AI tools (LLMs, personalization APIs, data enrichment services). Experiment with new usage or outcome based services and APIs for better ROI.
For small business: Modern low-code or no-code tools now make integration and automation faster and cheaper. Even a lean budget can support automated workflows that once required complex custom development.
Process and workflow
Modularize Your Marketing Processes: De-compose end-to-end workflows—creative ideation, asset production, campaign activation, data analytics—so you can identify bottlenecks and define clear SLAs for each step.
Automate in Stages: Once processes are modular, pinpoint tasks suitable for automation (e.g., creative versioning, email personalization, landing page generation). This also clarifies which steps should remain in-house vs. outsourced to agencies.
Talent and team development
Upskill teams and in-source critical steps: Both creative and technical roles benefit from AI “co-pilots” (e.g., automated briefing, code gen). Upskilling ensures teams can fully leverage these tools. It often becomes more cost effective to bring critical steps such as insights and first-party data in house for tighter control.
Technical Product Owners: There is a growing demand for hybrid skill sets that blend marketing strategy with technical knowledge—sometimes referred to by Andrew Ng as “the new product managers”.
4. Future trends with AI
Looking ahead, we anticipate a future where business teams act as “composers”—assembling modular services and custom apps on demand. AI is shaping several key trends in future:
Continuing decrease in custom development costs
Rising adoption of dynamic and custom apps built by business users
Growing importance of technical product owners who can write precise specifications
Shift from subscription-based to usage and outcome-based pricing models
Exponential growth in AI assistants and agent-built software
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang projects the creation of 100 million "AI assistants", which translates to roughly 3,000 virtual helpers per employee. The latest MarTech report envision a billion agent-built software instances across industries (MarTech for 2025 by Brinker and Riemersma).
Organizations can prepare for this transformation by:
Leveraging existing platform capabilities while experimenting with new AI functionalities
Evolving toward modular architectures that enable rapid adoption of new capabilities
Investing in continuous capability building across people, processes, and technology
By proactively embracing these shifts, businesses of every size can build a future-proof MarTech stack, balancing the best of “build and buy” and unlocking sustainable growth.
