1) AI moves from copilots to agents, but discipline will decide winners
Generative AI is shifting from prompt-based helpers to task-oriented agents that can plan, execute, and optimize marketing work across channels. Gartner lists agentic AI among its top technology trends, describing systems that take actions toward goals rather than only generating content. The promise is a virtual workforce that accelerates research, media operations, testing, and creative iteration.
The caution is equally clear. Gartner expects a large share of early agentic projects to be scrapped by 2027 due to costs and weak business cases, a reminder that governance, evaluation frameworks, and tightly scoped use cases matter more than the hype cycle.
Despite the friction, enterprise adoption continues to rise. McKinsey’s 2025 survey finds broader use of AI, including agentic patterns, though most companies are still moving from pilots to scale. Marketing leaders should treat 2026 and beyond as a build phase for agentic workflows, with guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, and hard ROI thresholds.
2) Privacy-first data strategies replace the cookie narrative
The industry’s headline about a cookieless web has shifted. In April 2025 Google stepped back from a standalone Chrome prompt and reiterated it would not deprecate third-party cookies, a move the UK Competition and Markets Authority reflected in its Sandbox oversight updates. The net effect is that cookies remain, but regulator attention and platform controls are not going away.
Rather than banking strategy on a single browser change, marketers are investing in first-party data, clean rooms, and new interoperability standards. The IAB Tech Lab issued formal Data Clean Room guidance and an interoperability standard for private audience activation, with updates continuing through 2025. Clean rooms and publisher–advertiser reconciliation protocols like PAIR are emerging as practical pipes for privacy-safe matching and activation.
Action point for the next decade: deepen consented data capture, unify identity with clear value exchange, and standardize collaboration through clean rooms to reduce dependence on brittle third-party identifiers. Google’s own materials reinforce that focus by steering advertisers toward privacy-preserving signals even as cookies persist.
3) Commerce media and retail media mature into a primary channel
Retail media is no longer an add-on. WARC estimates retail media investment will be about 175 billion dollars this year, with the category on track to overtake linear plus connected TV spend in 2026. Concentration remains high, but the growth curve and the shift from on-site search to display and offsite formats are clear.
Multiple forecasters now expect retail media to exceed 300 billion dollars by 2030 and to account for roughly a fifth of global ad revenue as more markets build scaled networks beyond the United States and China. The strategic implication is that product, media, and data teams must collaborate on measurement, on-shelf content, and audience governance rather than treating retail platforms as isolated performance channels.
In the near term, brands should test full-funnel retail media plans, connect retailer audiences to their own CDP segments via approved clean room workflows, and plan for supply consolidation among the largest networks. eMarketer’s latest data shows the United States and China still dominate, but share is spreading to other regions, which will broaden inventory and data partnerships over the decade.
4) Composable stacks become the default operating model
The past decade’s suite versus best-of-breed debate is giving way to composability. The MACH Alliance’s 2025 research shows organizations increasing their modular, API-first infrastructure, with respondents expecting an average of 61 percent of their tech setup to be MACH or composable by early 2026. Nearly all report ROI meeting or exceeding expectations, citing better customer experience and faster integration as top benefits.
For marketers, this means designing stacks as interchangeable services anchored by a data layer that supports real-time decisioning. It also means stronger governance. Gartner’s marketing tech work has warned of low utilization across stacks, which composability can fix only if teams enforce standards for integration, tagging, and lifecycle management. Over the next decade, expect packaged business capabilities and event-driven orchestration to replace monolithic rewrites and to reduce the risk of sunk-cost platforms that nobody uses.
5) Measurement resets around experiments and modern MMM
As signal loss, platform policies, and privacy laws complicate multi-touch attribution, brands are returning to durable methods. Google’s 2025 launch of Meridian, an open-source marketing mix modeling framework built on Bayesian causal inference, and Meta’s continued development of the open-source Robyn project, have accelerated a renaissance in MMM. These tools are not silver bullets, but they make transparent, reproducible modeling more accessible to in-house teams.
Think with Google’s guidance underscores why MMM is relevant now. It estimates channel contribution without cookies and pairs well with geo experiments and lift tests to validate causality. The practical playbook for the next decade is hybrid measurement that combines randomized experiments, calibrated MMM, and platform-native clean room reporting, then feeds results back into budget allocation and creative optimization systems.
The bottom line
The next decade in MarTech will be defined less by the arrival of a single disruptive technology and more by the steady layering of capabilities. Agentic AI will absorb repetitive work, but only disciplined teams will convert it into advantage. Privacy will continue to favor first-party data and interoperable collaboration rather than risky workarounds. Commerce media will sit alongside search and social as a core channel that blends brand and performance. Composable stacks will help marketers adapt as vendors and policies change. Measurement will rely on experiments and open MMM to keep strategy grounded in causality rather than correlation. The marketers who win will be the ones who operationalize these shifts early, set realistic checkpoints for value, and keep people-centered creativity at the heart of the stack.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research.