New report identifies 15,000+ tools in today’s marketing ecosystem and highlights the rise of “agentic content systems” built to scale personalization
Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform, released new research revealing that modern marketing stacks have reached an unprecedented level of complexity, with more than 15,000 tools now available in the martech landscape. The company’s latest report, “Composable by Design: Building an Agentic Content Ecosystem,” outlines how organizations can bring order to sprawling systems by embracing a composable, AI-powered approach to content and digital experience creation. This research builds on Optimizely’s commitment to helping marketing teams navigate the evolving digital landscape.
The average enterprise marketing stack now resembles a “solar system,” with a handful of core platforms at the center and hundreds of specialized systems and tactical tools orbiting around them. Yet despite major advances in data platforms and analytics, the content layer remains the biggest bottleneck for organizations seeking to scale personalization.
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“AI is speeding up the entire content lifecycle, but it’s also revealing where stacks have lost their gravitational center,” said Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely. “Composable design restores that pull — aligning creativity, intelligence, and delivery in a more intentional, scalable way. The result is a stack that finally works at the speed the business demands.”
Key findings from the report include:
15,000+ tools now exist in the martech landscape, reflecting 10x growth over the last 14 years.
Expansion of “hypertails,” or company-specific applications, is accelerating as organizations increasingly supplement core platforms with dozens of small, single-purpose tools for niche use cases.
Marketers cite fragmented content workflows, siloed teams, and manual production processes as common struggles despite heavy investments in new technology.
AI is emerging as the connective tissue of modern stacks — but only when treated as a platform-level capability, not a bolt-on feature.
Composability is now about engineering outcomes with structure, governance, and accountability built in, not about implementing every new tool on the market.
The rise of agentic content ecosystemsThe report highlights a shift toward agentic content ecosystems — systems in which AI takes an active role in producing, shaping, and optimizing content across the full lifecycle: creation, delivery, personalization, and analytics.
The report emphasizes that data alone no longer drives meaningful experiences. Instead, data + content + AI form the three essential pillars of modern personalization.
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A path forward for enterprisesAs martech stacks grow increasingly layered, marketers can harness this complexity to deliver personalized experiences customers expect. But to accomplish this goal, AI must be integrated across platforms throughout the organization, not siloed in individual tools. When fully embedded, AI can be the connective intelligence that accelerates workflows, connects data and content, and delivers relevant experiences.
“Composable technology shouldn’t mean chaos,” added Corey. “It’s about designing systems that work together instead of against each other. When AI ties those systems together, teams finally get the speed and clarity they’ve been missing.”
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