Agentification: The Biggest Shift in Martech Since the Cloud

Gartner® Predicts 2026: CMOs Prepare AI to Carry Them Across the Martech Finish Line

You’ve heard it all before: Artificial intelligence is transforming marketing. But despite making significant investments in AI, most brands are struggling to scale and derive true value from it. In their recent report Predicts 2026, Gartner® projected that “by 2029, AI will augment 90% of marketing workflows, but only 20% will show incremental ROI from AI beyond the pilot stage.”

Even as agentic pilots dominate the conversation, marketing budgets climb, and the promise of autonomous marketing workflows and agentic AI in marketing become a reality, there is still work to be done to turn AI into a durable advantage that drives measurable ROI. 

At Insider One, we are building the multi-agent future of customer engagement that delivers real business results – enabling AI agents for CMOs to manage complex marketing workflows through AI-orchestrated marketing and decisioning. 

At Insider One, AI is not a feature within the stack. It is quickly becoming the operating layer – an AI orchestration layer in martech. And the operators? They’re agents. As we strive to move decision ownership from humans to agentic systems, we believe the quality, explainability and governance of AI decisioning will define winners and losers. 

Marketing and customer engagement teams need to trust the AI decisioning of their agents before making them autonomous. To do that, AI agents need a depth of context provided by data ownership, identity, and rich contextual graphs for customer engagement. The result will be better outcomes for marketing and customer engagement teams, and ultimately for consumers navigating an increasingly AI-mediated customer journey.

Insider One is uniquely positioned to respond to four major challenges that stand between the market and this promising future:

1. The persistence of siloed data that limits AI-driven experiences
2. The changing nature of customers and personalization
3. The growth of AI spending with uncertain ROI
4. The competitive pressure to adopt AI without the confidence to scale it

1. The data foundation

AI execution requires disciplined use of data. Insider One delivers.

Legacy Martech stacks silo customer data across point tools, making marketing AI orchestration, agent orchestration and CDP integration nearly impossible. The future belongs to organizations operating on governed, interoperable data that is centered around a CDP.

Insider One creates a closed feedback loop between organizational data sources, the CDP, and the execution layer for AI learning. This ensures that every interaction contributes to the data sources of truth to enrich profiles, learn over time and improve relevance and contextual understanding – effectively making your data more valuable, quicker. To do this, we provide:

• An integrated, real-time CDP with unified customer profiles
• Native omnichannel activation and decisioning
• Modular capability exposure through open APIs in martech stacks
• Interoperable integration with hundreds of pre-built connectors.

As Insider One traces human and agent decisions made across the platform, these insights become context graphs that enable agents to make better decisions in increasingly complex contexts, while preserving explainability in an AI agent governance framework.

Our platform acts as both the execution layer and the connective tissue across marketing capabilities, so virtual and human agents can orchestrate experiences with full customer context. 

2. Built for humans and AI 

Marketing now has two customers: people and machines.

Your business is using generative and agentic AI to make and execute decisions, and so are your customers. As generative AI search and AI agents increasingly mediate discovery, commerce, and decision-making, static experiences become conversion blockers in the emerging world of agentic commerce.

Insider One’s capabilities are designed for a dynamic customer base and feature:

• ChatGPT custom apps integrations, which transform Chat GPT into a revenue channel 
• Real-time personalization across web, app, email, and messaging
• Structured, composable templates and generative content ready for machine interpretation
• API-first infrastructure and model context protocol to support interoperability and readiness for AI agent-to-agent marketing
• Dynamic journey orchestration adapting to human or agentic visitor intent

Optimizing for clicks and conversion will only become more complex as generative AI search and machine customers enter the loop. Insider One keeps you ahead with dynamic AI-orchestrated marketing, AI-enabled personalization, and journey orchestration across an evolving AI-mediated customer journey.

3. Controlling AI costs while driving ROI

AI promises transformational results for marketing revenue, and as a result, it is also driving marketing technology budgets higher. 

Without cost discipline, AI experiments can quickly turn into overruns — raising concerns about how to prevent runaway AI costs, manage AI token costs, and ensure transparency in AI consumption pricing models.

Insider One approaches AI governance differently to maximize ROI for marketers and customer experience professionals.

• A modular but cohesive architecture minimizes redundant tooling and fragmented workflows
• Unified orchestration reduces duplicated activation costs across channels
• Agentic AI focuses on outcomes, not novelty — optimizing toward revenue, conversion lift, and customer lifetime value with decision explainability
• Frequency capping, usage analytics and journey prioritization help users control AI cost management in marketing and avoid overages.

These capabilities help leaders navigate CMO AI budget strategy and the AI total-cost of ownership (TCO) model for marketing leaders.

Instead of running uncontrolled pilots, Insider One enables measurable, governed deployment of agentic use cases so AI scales with purpose, trust, and strong CFO and CMO alignment on AI investments.

4. From crawl-walk-run to scalable AI

Marketing and customer engagement teams are “running” to agentic AI under competitive pressure. Even if they succeed in the pilot stage, they often lack the governance foundations to scale.

Insider One helps organizations:

• Pilot high-impact, measurable use cases with potential to scale
• Modernize integration and API layers for real-time data synchronisation
• Build trust with agentic systems by starting with agent-assisted modes, and increasing agent autonomy over time
• Govern AI actions with decision transparency, observability and guardrails within an AI agent governance framework
• Prepare their workforces with the training and tools necessary to succeed as marketing operations shifts towards agent-run customer engagement and autonomous marketing workflows

Most organizations are stuck experimenting with AI because they don’t have the right data and governance foundations to feed their models, understand their impact and scale what works. 

Insider One operationalizes intelligence by maintaining focus on AI-driven business outcomes, not just agentic features. 

The Strategic Advantage of Insider One

The operating model for customer engagement is changing.

From human-led to agent-led.
From static campaigns to autonomous orchestration.
From platform lock-in to modular interoperability.

With so many vendors making promises they struggle to keep, Insider One has the complete infrastructure to make customer engagement agentic, including:

• Data-centric design
• Contextual graphs and understanding
• Purpose-built AI agents
• Activation across the widest number of native channels

Insider One is built for exactly this reality.

AI is redefining marketing. But only platforms architectured for real-time data centricity, dual audiences, measurable ROI, and scalable marketing AI orchestration will convert AI momentum into lasting competitive advantages.

Gartner, Predicts 2026: CMOs Prepare AI to Carry Them Across the Martech Finish Line, Adam Sarner, Benjamin Bloom, Lacretia Marsh, Suzanne Schwartz, Audrey Brosnan, Nicole Greene, Sandy Shen, Lizzy Foo Kune, Andrew Frank, Eric Schmitt, Joseph Enever, Matt Wakeman, 13 February 2026

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.