Five years ago, when marketing teams were still debating cloud migrations and debating whether martech stacks had already peaked, Scott Brinker made a far more ambitious call.
In Martech 2030, a report he co-authored with Jason Baldwin in 2020, Brinker argued that the 2020s would belong to what he called the Augmented Marketer. It would be a decade defined not by tools alone, but by the deep entanglement of humans and machines, platforms and ecosystems, and an explosion of software that would permanently reshape how marketing operates.
Now, at the start of 2026, the industry has reached halftime. Brinker recently revisited those predictions and even asked AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to grade them. Their verdicts were generous. But the more important question is whether the predictions hold up in lived marketing reality.
A closer look suggests that many of those forecasts were not only directionally right, but structurally accurate in ways that are now reshaping how modern marketing teams work.
Prediction One: The Rise of No-Code Citizen Creators
Brinker’s first bet was on the democratization of creation. Long before generative AI entered the mainstream, he believed marketers would stop waiting on engineering teams and begin building their own digital assets. Tools like Airtable, Webflow, and Zapier were early signals of this shift. Gartner called these users citizen creators. Brinker preferred the term marketing makers.
That prediction landed squarely.
What accelerated it beyond expectations was the generative AI wave that followed late 2023. No-code platforms evolved from drag-and-drop interfaces into natural language systems. Marketers no longer needed to learn tools. They simply needed to describe outcomes.
By 2025, teams were using conversational prompts to build landing pages, campaign workflows, analytics dashboards, agents, presentations, and even lightweight applications. The rise of what Andrej Karpathy famously described as English becoming the hottest programming language changed the economics of execution.
Vibe coding, a term popularized in 2025, pushed this even further. Platforms like Bolt, Replit, Lovable, and Vercel made it possible for non-engineers to ship functional software in hours, not weeks. These tools did not replace professional developers, but they unlocked a massive layer of previously unmet internal use cases.
The outcome has been clear. Marketing teams that embraced this shift gained speed, creative range, and operational leverage. The challenge, however, emerged just as quickly. Governance, brand consistency, and compliance struggled to keep pace with this newfound freedom. Empowerment outpaced control, setting the stage for a much larger operational problem.
Prediction Two: Platforms, Networks, and Marketplaces Take Over
The second prediction focused on business structure. Brinker argued that linear value chains would give way to interconnected ecosystems driven by platforms, networks, and marketplaces.
In martech, that transition is now largely complete. The old debate between all-in-one suites and best-of-breed tools has been replaced by platform ecosystems. Interoperability is no longer optional. It is foundational.
Universal data layers such as Databricks and Snowflake have emerged as central connective tissue across fragmented stacks. Meanwhile, AI engines themselves are becoming platforms, complete with connectors, extensibility frameworks, and app-like experiences.
Marketplaces have quietly become one of the most powerful distribution channels in enterprise software. Hyperscaler marketplaces run by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft now account for tens of billions of dollars in annual transactions. Major martech vendors sell directly through these channels, blurring the line between infrastructure and application.
The paradox Brinker highlighted five years ago has proven true. Centralized standards and governance, when paired with openness, enable decentralized innovation. Companies that resist ecosystems in favor of tight control increasingly find themselves constrained by outdated mental models.
Prediction Three: The Great App Explosion
In 2020, the martech landscape contained roughly 8,000 tools. Many assumed the industry had reached saturation.
Instead, the number nearly doubled by 2025, crossing 15,000 commercial solutions. Consolidation happened, but new entrants arrived faster than incumbents disappeared. AI lowered barriers to entry to near zero.
Yet even that growth understated the real shift.
Brinker predicted that the true explosion would not be in commercial software alone, but in custom-built internal applications. He described a future where organizations would build vast hypertails of bespoke tools tailored to their own workflows, customers, and data.
That future is already here.
Generative AI and no-code tooling have made internal app creation routine. Marketing teams now spin up agents, workflows, scoring models, and interactive assets as easily as they once launched campaigns. The number of custom apps inside enterprises now dwarfs the commercial martech landscape.
This shift has quietly redefined what a martech stack even means. It is no longer a finite list of vendors. It is a living, evolving ecosystem of internal and external software.
Prediction Four: From Big Data to Big Ops
If the first three predictions created abundance, the fourth acknowledged the inevitable chaos.
Brinker argued that the defining operational challenge of the decade would be Big Ops. Just as Big Data forced organizations to rethink how they stored and processed information, Big Ops would force them to rethink how they orchestrate thousands of apps, agents, and automations acting simultaneously on that data.
That problem is now impossible to ignore.
Citizen creators and internal app proliferation have outpaced coordination. Decision logic is scattered. Automations collide. Data moves faster than governance frameworks.
The industry response has coalesced around orchestration and decisioning. Nearly every major martech platform is repositioning itself as a control plane for complex operations. Data clouds, CDPs, automation tools, and AI agents are converging into a single competitive arena.
Brinker’s metaphor still resonates. Data is not the new oil. It is the new oil paint. Without operational systems to translate insight into action, it remains unused potential.
The orchestration wars are only beginning, but the contours of the battlefield are now visible.
Prediction Five: Harmonizing Humans and Machines
The final prediction tied everything together.
Brinker argued that automation would not eliminate marketers, but elevate them. By offloading repetitive execution to machines, humans would gain more time for creativity, strategy, and customer understanding.
Five years later, this idea feels obvious. But it was far from consensus in 2020.
Today, marketers routinely collaborate with AI systems as creative partners, analysts, and copilots. Human judgment guides strategy. Machines handle scale, speed, and personalization. The result is not replacement, but augmentation.
Perhaps most prescient was Brinker’s prediction of buyer-side AI. In 2025, customer-controlled agents emerged as real market actors. Optimization shifted away from traditional search toward AI engine optimization. Commerce itself began to evolve toward agent-mediated interactions.
The terminology has changed, but the underlying logic has not. Humans and machines are no longer opposing forces in marketing. They are co-authors of the experience.
A Decade Still Accelerating
At halftime, Scott Brinker’s five predictions appear less like speculative futurism and more like a structural blueprint for modern marketing. Not every detail unfolded exactly as imagined, but the core dynamics have proven resilient.
If anything, the pace is accelerating.
As Amara’s Law suggests, the short-term impact of technology is often overstated, while the long-term impact is underestimated. The 2020s are still far from over. But if the first half of the decade is any indication, the augmented marketer is no longer a theory.
It is the default.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research.
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