A look at the MarTech trends shaping 2026.
With martech budgets increasing in 2026, organizations are treating AI as a core investment—not a pilot. Across priorities and planned investments, AI is becoming a central focus of marketing technology roadmaps, with teams putting emphasis on AI-powered tools and the capabilities needed to deploy them effectively.
At the same time, how marketing work gets done is shifting. Companies are placing more emphasis on internal enablement—reskilling teams and improving the workflows that support faster execution—while agency services sit at the bottom of the priority list, indicating a tilt away from outsourced campaign support and toward building in-house capacity.
Stensul 2026 MarTech Outlook is a MarTech trends report based on a quantitative survey of 321 economic buyers of marketing technology solutions (U.S. n=269; U.K. n=52). The research examines marketing technology priorities, budget expectations, planned investment areas and execution-model shifts for 2026.
