Marketing teams today are awash in technology – so much so that the chief marketing officer (CMO) often doesn’t even know about half the tools in use. Call it the rise of the “invisible martech” stack, a proliferation of marketing tools and platforms adopted under the radar of central oversight. It’s a trend playing out in companies globally and now accelerating in India’s enterprises, where savvy marketers sign up for apps and AI tools at will. The result is a double-edged sword: rapid innovation and personalization on one side, and fragmented data, governance headaches, and opaque ROI on the other.
Defining Invisible Martech: Invisible martech refers to all those marketing technologies that teams adopt without formal approval or awareness at the top. It’s the marketing counterpart of “shadow IT” – the unauthorized apps and cloud services employees use to get their work done. In a traditional visible tech stack, the IT department or CTO’s office vets and integrates tools, maintaining a tidy list of sanctioned software. The invisible stack, by contrast, is made up of the myriad specialized tools that individual marketers or teams plug in on their own – often cheap or free, cloud-based, and solving a niche need. These could be anything from a new AI-driven email automation service one growth hacker is testing, to a design team using a freemium Canva account, or a social media intern experimenting with the latest analytics widget. If it’s not on the CMO’s spreadsheet or the CIO’s asset inventory, it’s “invisible.”
This phenomenon has upside and downside. On the upside, shadow marketing tech empowers front-line teams with agility. Unauthorized tools let teams move fast and experiment freely, sidestepping the slow bureaucratic process of enterprise IT. Shadow IT allows teams to quickly test and implement new solutions without bureaucratic delays, fostering a culture of innovation and creativity in marketing departments. Indian marketers, famous for their jugaad, have embraced this ethos – spinning up campaign-specific tools or hacks as needed to seize opportunities in real time. The results can be impressive: a clever mashup of tools might automate lead generation overnight or personalize a campaign for a micro-segment of customers with zero involvement from the official marketing operations.
However, the downsides are real. When your stack is full of invisible parts, no one is driving the bus as a whole. One major concern is the lack of centralized oversight and control. Marketing data ends up scattered across dozens of unconnected apps, customer insights stay siloed, and security and compliance risks multiply. Nearly half of the software in use inside enterprises today is not actively managed or monitored by IT. The ease of swiping a credit card for a SaaS subscription or signing up for a free trial has led to the decentralization of IT across the organization. Marketing is a prime culprit in this decentralization because it has an insatiable appetite for new capabilities.
Even marketing leaders admit many tools escape their view. More than a decade ago, industry studies concluded bluntly that most CMOs are unaware of how many digital marketing solutions they are using. That observation rings even truer today in an era of exploding martech options. The same research showed that many marketing teams lacked a coherent plan for their technology, bolting on point solutions without a unified strategy. Fast forward to today, and the problem has only grown. Surveys show that only about half of martech tools are actively used, and a small minority of organisations believe they are extracting full value or ROI from their martech investments. In other words, half the stack sits idle or redundant, and most CMOs are not sure which half.
The sheer explosion of martech tools is a big driver behind the invisible stack trend. Over the last decade, marketers have seen the available universe of marketing technology solutions swell from a few hundred to well over fourteen thousand. Many of these are highly specialized apps that do one narrow thing brilliantly. The average enterprise marketing stack today resembles a solar system of tools: a few big platforms orbited by hundreds of smaller, specialized tools and plugins. Industry estimates suggest that large enterprises routinely use more than a hundred martech tools across teams. It is easy to see how that happens – email platforms, web CMSs, analytics dashboards, ad tech, social listening tools, content creation systems, CRM, automation platforms, experimentation tools. The list quickly reaches triple digits.
Crucially, many of those tools enter through side doors. Research shows that organisations often have dozens of “discovered” applications brought in without IT involvement. Popular examples of shadow tech that marketers adopt include collaboration tools, design platforms, survey software, scheduling tools, and content optimisation engines. These are not rogue tools. They are genuinely useful. But when each team chooses independently and data is not synced, the CMO ends up with fragmented visibility and partial customer understanding.
Why Marketers Go Rogue: What fuels this invisibility is speed and specialization. Marketing leaders face relentless pressure to move quickly, personalise deeply, and do more with less. Traditional enterprise software often cannot keep up with niche needs. As Indian growth leaders point out, the moment you try to scale personalisation beyond templates, complexity explodes. Teams turn to whatever tool solves the immediate problem.
The generative AI boom has accelerated this dramatically. Marketing teams have quietly layered AI tools across content creation, personalisation, analytics, customer engagement, and experimentation. Many of these tools were adopted long before internal AI policies existed. Some teams simply began using AI assistants to keep up with output expectations. This new AI layer often sits entirely outside official martech diagrams.
This creates a paradox. Marketing outcomes improve, but visibility declines.
Globally, marketing technology now accounts for roughly a quarter of marketing spend. In India, the share is lower but growing faster. The Indian martech market is projected to multiply several times this decade, driven by personalisation, automation, and AI adoption. Yet utilisation remains uneven. Companies actively use only about half the tools they pay for. Fewer still believe they are extracting full business value.
Indian companies are now encountering this reality at scale.
Digital native firms were first. Travel platforms, fintech apps, ecommerce brands, and media startups stitched together tools to optimise onboarding, personalise recommendations, and automate engagement. The approach worked. Many scaled rapidly. But as they matured, hidden complexity surfaced.
At Ixigo, personalisation sits at the heart of growth. Delivering tailored itineraries at scale requires heavy automation, analytics, and experimentation. Over time, managing those layers becomes as important as building them.
Legacy companies are following the same path. Air India’s transformation is not just about planes and branding. It is about rebuilding customer experience end to end. Delivering seamless journeys requires a dense mesh of experience platforms, feedback systems, analytics layers, and engagement engines. Many of these tools did not exist in the airline’s legacy technology environment and had to be introduced incrementally.
Automotive brands, banks, and consumer goods companies face similar challenges. As AI driven marketing spreads, pilot projects multiply. Tools enter faster than governance frameworks evolve.
This is where risk emerges.
Invisible martech creates governance challenges. Data security is one. When customer data flows through tools that have not been vetted, compliance risks increase. Data fragmentation is another. When teams operate with different versions of customer truth, alignment suffers. Reporting becomes inconsistent. Leadership loses confidence.
Then comes ROI. When adoption is decentralised, attribution becomes difficult. Leaders sense efficiency gains but struggle to connect outcomes to investments.
Yet invisible martech is not going away.
Many organisations now recognise that shadow adoption is not rebellion but signal. It reveals unmet needs. It highlights gaps in existing systems. Some companies now encourage controlled experimentation. Teams test new tools, but successful ones are reviewed, integrated, or replaced systematically.
This requires a mindset shift.
Marketing leaders must move from gatekeeping to orchestration. The role of the CMO is no longer about owning tools, but about designing systems. Indian CMOs increasingly recognise that fluency in data, technology, and AI is no longer optional.
The invisible martech stack is a symptom of marketing’s transformation into a real-time, data-driven discipline. It reflects urgency and ambition. It also exposes structural weaknesses.
Marketing today may already be running on tools your CMO has never seen. The real question is whether leadership chooses to ignore that reality or design for it.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research.