Less funding, fewer product announcements and reduced M&A activity were the hallmarks of the martech space in 2023, said stack management platform CabinetM in their year end review. The slowdown became gradually visible as the year wore on with the worst performance in all categories in Q4. Unsurprisingly, Q4 investment heavily favored AI (22% of funding) with workflow and productivity in second place.
Business processes using generative AI grew by 400% in 2023, according to work automation platform Workato. While operations roles are automating more processes than any other group, the leading adopters specifically of generative AI are RevOps and IT. The citizen developer trend continues to grow with 44% of automated processes developed outside IT (although IT plays coach for many of those).
CEOs are leaning heavily on marketing and communications to drive short-term profits and long-term growth in 2024, with 95% planning to maintain or increase funding for AI capabilities for those teams. Seventy-nine percent anticipate a positive effect of AI on the marketing function. This is based on a survey of over 1200 international CEOs.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)