More than 40% of enterprise marketing leaders are unable to demonstrate a measurable financial contribution from their marketing technology investments, according to a new report by The Martech Weekly, highlighting a gap between technology adoption and business outcomes.
The Enterprise Martech Outlook 2026, released on October 6, examined 417 validated enterprise martech stacks alongside survey responses from 127 brand-side marketing technology leaders across the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.
The research found that 40.2% of respondents could not directly connect their martech investments to financial objectives or accepted financial measures, despite 87% of enterprise consumer brands reporting stable or increasing martech budgets.
The findings also identified differences between organisations reporting stronger customer experience capabilities and those performing at or below industry standards.
Among higher-performing organisations, 74.3% considered their cloud data platform central to their martech infrastructure, compared with 37.8% of organisations in the baseline group.
Contract management practices also differed. Approximately 74.3% of higher-performing organisations reported proactively managing technology renewals, against 45.3% of their peers.
The report further examined the adoption of artificial intelligence agents within enterprise marketing operations. While 95.3% of surveyed organisations had included AI agents in their technology roadmaps, only 10.8% of 461 tracked AI-agent initiatives had reached full production scale.
Additionally, 65.3% of marketing leaders reported having dedicated funding for AI initiatives, indicating that financial commitments have not consistently translated into large-scale deployments.
"Nearly every brand we surveyed has AI agents planned on the roadmap, but few have scaled a use case into full production, so knowing which use cases show returns now matters most," said Keanu Taylor, Global Head of Research at The Martech Weekly.
The research also found a relationship between financial accountability and technology budgets. Among organisations able to demonstrate measurable financial contributions from martech, 56% reported budget increases. The corresponding figure was 37.5% among organisations unable to establish such contributions.
The study examined how enterprises measure technology investments against business indicators including customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, retention and customer lifetime value.
On technology adoption, researchers identified 261 unique platforms across the 417 enterprise martech stacks analysed. Only 89 platforms appeared in five or more stacks, despite the broader martech market containing more than 15,000 products.
Juan Mendoza, Founder and CEO of The Martech Weekly, said enterprise buyers were increasingly looking towards peer networks, practitioner communities and independent research when evaluating technology investments.
Conducted between February and June 2026, the research provides comparative benchmarks for enterprise marketing technology practices. The report noted that the findings reflect associations between organisational practices and reported outcomes, rather than establishing direct causal relationships.
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