Keanu Taylor is the Global Head of Research at The Martech Weekly, where he leads its research and editorial strategy on how enterprise organisations make decisions about marketing technology, AI and customer strategy. He has spent 13 years in martech across vendors, consultancies, agencies and research. In this written interview he draws on The Martech Weekly’s Enterprise Martech Outlook 2026 research, which combines 417 enterprise consumer-brand stacks with a survey of 127 brand-side martech leaders.
What separates high-performing Martech teams from the rest today?
Operational discipline. The strongest teams can take a technology investment and turn it into a repeatable improvement in the customer experience. That requires clear ownership, usable data and a scientific way to tell whether the work is delivering value.
Our Enterprise Martech Outlook research combines 417 validated enterprise consumer-brand stacks with a survey of 127 brand-side Martech leaders. Across the findings, stronger customer experience maturity sits alongside better practices for governing technology, demonstrating its contribution and putting new capabilities to work.
We call the highest-performing group of Martech teams the Martech Advantage cohort, based on respondents’ assessments of their own customer experience delivery. These are associations, rather than proof that a particular practice causes growth, but the pattern helps show which operating practices tend to accompany stronger customer experience maturity.
Two companies can buy the same technology and get very different results; it happens all the time. The advantage is in the organisation’s ability to make it useful, consistently, at scale.
Why do some Martech investments fail to translate into measurable growth?
Too often, the business funds the purchase more carefully than the change management required to achieve a decent pay off. Any platform still needs reliable customer data, useful content and people with the time and authority to improve the experience.
Our research found that 40.2% of enterprise Martech leaders could not demonstrate a clear, measurable contribution to financial objectives or accepted financial proxies. That leaves a significant measurement challenge. It does not establish that all those investments failed, but it leaves a lot of leaders struggling to defend their value.
There are two problems every Martech leader needs to tackle: whether their investments are creating value, and whether they can show it. A busy campaign calendar answers neither. If the objective was retention, you need to understand whether customers are staying longer and how your work contributed.
How can Martech leaders better connect technology investments to business outcomes?
They first need to agree what would count as success before signing the contract. The business owner, finance team and technical team should share a definition of the outcome, a baseline and a credible way to measure the contribution.
For a retailer, the objective might be increasing the proportion of first-time buyers who make a second purchase. That gives you a specific customer journey to improve. You can then assess repeat purchase and margin alongside the cost of delivering the intervention. More emails sent or faster campaign production may help explain the result, but they can’t substitute for it.
Where practical, use a control group or phased rollout to test the effect. Be honest about attribution and agree the definition of any financial proxies in advance.
There is a budgetary reason to do this well. In our survey, 56% of organisations able to demonstrate measurable value reported budget increases in 2026, compared with 37.5% of those without measurable proof. It’s another reason to treat measurement as part of the investment itself, rather than something added later.
What role does organizational alignment play in building an effective Martech function?
Alignment is everything in enterprise settings and it becomes real when teams have the right conditions and frameworks to make decisions together. Everyone can agree that customer experience matters; the test is what happens when marketing needs a change that competes with the data team’s backlog or a regional team’s priorities.
An effective Martech function needs clear decision rights. Who owns the customer outcome? Who can approve a change? Who resolves a conflict between local requirements and enterprise standards? Those answers need to survive from the steering committee meeting all the way through to the hands-on-tools delivery teams.
Our research did not identify a significant difference in operating model selection between the Martech Advantage and Market Baseline cohorts. However, a federated governance model where a central team can provide shared standards while local teams adapt execution to their customers was much more common for large enterprises. The practical goal is to give people enough clarity and authority to act. A reorganisation that leaves the same decisions unresolved will leave the same work stuck.
From your research, what are the strongest Martech teams doing differently?
Content operations were one of the clearest differentiators. Among the Martech Advantage cohort, 51.4% rated their capability to use technology and AI to automate, scale and manage content as mature or very mature. That fell to 11.3% in the Market Baseline cohort.
That’s fairly revealing because content exposes how the organisation actually works. An asset has to move through creation, approval, localisation and delivery, with the right metadata and controls. If that process breaks down, personalization and AI ambitions quickly run into very ordinary operational limits.
We also found that organisations with mature content capabilities were more likely to report meaningful AI impact on customer experience. The research cannot establish which comes first, but it makes content operations a useful place to assess readiness.
My interpretation is that the strongest teams treat content as a capability they keep improving and refining. Generating a thousand assets is easy to celebrate but getting the right approved asset into the right customer experience at the right time is a much harder and more valuable achievement.
How is AI changing what high-performing Martech teams need to prioritize?
AI is making workflow design and accountability much more urgent. Once a system can take action, you need to know what information it can use, what it is allowed to decide and when a person must intervene.
The distance between planning and production is still substantial. While 95.3% of surveyed organisations had AI agents on their roadmap, only 10.8% of the agent initiatives captured were fully scaled in production, showing how much work remains between planning and dependable operation.
I would prioritise a small number of use cases with clear owners and explicit tests for quality and commercial value. Give teams room to experiment within agreed boundaries, and plan how a successful pilot will be supported in production.
Look at the whole workflow, too. If AI reduces content creation from hours to minutes but approval still takes two weeks, the approval process deserves your attention. Faster tasks only help so much when the overall process stays slow.
After studying Martech leaders globally, what is one lesson you think teams often overlook?
How much value depends on the work after go-live. The implementation has a deadline and a budget. Adoption, improvement and renewal decisions need the same seriousness and attention.
Renewal discipline was another area where the cohorts differed. 74.3% of Martech Advantage organisations managed renewals proactively, compared with 45.3% of the Market Baseline cohort. Proactive meant tracking renewals centrally, with alerts that create ample time for review and renegotiation.
That sounds like basic administration, but it creates a valuable moment to ask whether a platform is being used, whether the original need still exists and what evidence supports another year – or multiple years – of spending. It also gives you time to fix adoption problems before a contract deadline forces an autorenewal or otherwise sub-optimal decision.
I would ask every Martech leader to look at every major platform six months after launch. What has changed for the people using it and the customers it serves? If the answer is unclear, that is useful work for the roadmap.
What have you learned from working with enterprise leaders about building high-performing Martech teams?
The leadership job is often to make the work possible across organisational boundaries. Martech sits between teams with legitimate but different responsibilities. A good decision has to make sense commercially, fit the architecture and work for the people delivering the experience.
That puts a premium on people who can translate between technology, data and marketing. A Martech leader needs to explain a data dependency to a marketer, a customer problem to an architect and an investment case to finance. Technical depth helps, but so does the ability to make a decision understandable to everyone who has to support it.
I would also protect the team’s capacity to improve what is already live. When every available person is assigned to the next implementation, adoption and optimization become work that happens only if someone finds spare time rather than being enshrined in the operating model.
For vendors, that also means understanding the operating constraints buyers are working within, particularly around ownership, adoption and evidence of value. Those are substantial parts of the buying problem.
Looking across the industry, what should Martech leaders prioritize to drive sustainable growth?
I would make the next planning cycle much more specific about customer economics. Where are valuable customers dropping out? What prevents them from getting value or coming back? Which of those problems can Martech realistically help solve?
Revenue growth was the leading Martech objective in our research. Conversion, customer lifetime value and retention also featured prominently in how teams are measured. That gives leaders a clear commercial agenda, provided the roadmap connects to those outcomes.
Choose a small number of customer problems and fund the full work required to address them, including content, data and adoption. Review the evidence regularly and be willing to stop work whose case no longer holds. Protect some capacity for improvements to existing investments as well as new capabilities.
The useful question for 2027 is what your organisation needs to get better at, and which investment will help it do so.
