For the last couple of years, we’ve been in AI’s gold rush. To borrow from Taylor Swift, it’s been the “Lover” era — everything felt fresh, exciting, and full of promise.
- The behavior: Buy anything that looks promising.
- The metric: Can it spit out something impressive?
- The vibe: Wall-to-wall FOMO.
Now we’re shifting into a different chapter. Call it the “Reputation” era — moodier, more skeptical, and obsessed with proof.
A clear signal of this change showed up in recent coverage about Microsoft cutting its AI sales growth targets. Commentators rushed to label it a letdown, a slowdown, even evidence that enterprise interest is fading.
That interpretation misses what’s really happening. This is the market growing up.
We’re evolving. The AI gold rush is winding down. Microsoft’s reset is just one of many indicators that we’re entering AI’s Production Phase across the industry.
You can see it in how executive questions are changing:
- Will this actually work inside our business?
- Does it plug into our existing stack?
- Can it demonstrably impact revenue?
Leaders are becoming more discerning. It validates what many CMOs already suspected: We don’t need a bigger pile of tools. We need orchestration across those tools so the stack we’ve bought finally works as a unified system.
This is happening while the broader AI landscape is still unsettled.
Almost 40% of U.S. consumers have tried generative AI, but only about half use it consistently, per eMarketer. Platform loyalty is shaky. ChatGPT’s global traffic share slid from 86.6% to 72.3% in a year, while Google Gemini’s share tripled to 13.7%.
For marketers, that kind of volatility means orchestration is essential to stay resilient in a fragmented ecosystem.
The ‘Pilot Theater’ problem
The martech universe just surpassed 15,384 solutions, a 9% increase year over year, according to ChiefMartec. We’ve never had more tools or capabilities on offer.
Yet Gartner reports martech utilization has fallen to 33%. Companies are funding the full stack but only extracting value from about a third of it — even as budgets are being cut.
During the gold rush, we snapped up point solutions to patch specific problems. One tool for copy. Another for creative. Another for bidding. Every team assembled its own mini stack. We built an orchestra pit full of virtuoso soloists but never hired a conductor.
That’s how you end up with what I call Pilot Theater: dazzling AI pilots and demos that look cutting-edge but never scale to enterprise ROI because they’re isolated in silos.
Here’s what Pilot Theater looks like in your actual P&L:
- The budget disconnect: Your CTV campaign drives a 40% jump in branded search volume. Your search team has no automated way to adjust bids or reallocate spend. By the time you review performance next week, the surge is gone and a competitor has harvested the demand you created.
- The experience break: A prospect clicks your LinkedIn Thought Leader Ad and then visits your pricing page — a strong buying signal. Your demand gen platform misses it and keeps serving them a generic “get to know us” ad. You just paid to push them backward in the funnel.
- The content gap: Sales keeps losing late-stage deals because Finance stalls over compliance concerns. Your content team, unaware of this pattern, continues churning out top-of-funnel brand pieces instead of ROI calculators and security documentation that would actually close deals.
The signals are there. The technology exists.
What’s missing is orchestration. And the urgency to solve it is rising, with 86% of CEOs expecting AI to deliver ROI within three years (eMarketer).
Showy pilots no longer cut it. The orchestration gap has become a direct revenue threat.
From automation to agentic orchestration
Many leaders still conflate automation with orchestration.
Automation is rigid: “If X happens, do Y.” Orchestration is dynamic: “Given our goal Z, use the best combination of tools and context to get there.”
In the emerging agentic AI era, systems don’t just generate content — they observe, coordinate, and optimize workflows across your entire stack.
Think of orchestration as the nervous system of your marketing organization: the connective tissue that reads signals across channels and instantly triggers the next best action.
I’d argue this is now a survival tactic. Smaller AI vendors are running out of runway as VCs grow impatient, according to eMarketer. The upside for winning in AI is enormous, but so is the capital required.
Putting all your chips on a single platform is dangerous. Building adaptive orchestration is how you stay ahead as the ecosystem reshapes itself.
What real orchestration looks like
This isn’t theoretical. Manual handoffs are already being replaced by intelligent feedback loops. Here are three concrete examples:
- The Budget Fluidity Workflow
- Signal: Audiences exposed to your CTV (Connected TV) ads show a 3x higher CTR on branded search queries.
- Action: Your orchestration layer automatically applies bid modifiers and shifts budget toward that high-intent cohort in real time.
- Result: You capture the demand you created instead of letting competitors conquest it.
- The Buying Group Alignment
- Signal: Three different stakeholders from the same enterprise account interact with your content within a 48-hour window.
- Action: The system marks the account as “Active,” notifies Sales, and automatically pivots creative from education to social proof and compliance-focused messaging.
- Result: You market to the account as a coordinated buying group, not as unrelated individuals.
- The Sales-to-Content Loop
- Signal: Conversation intelligence surfaces recurring objections: “security certification,” “integration timeline,” “ROI validation.”
- Action: Your orchestration layer spots missing late-stage assets and kicks off a workflow for the content team to prioritize those deliverables.
- Result: Content production aligns with real buyer friction points, not just a pre-set editorial calendar.
The rise of the “Builder” leader
One of the standout findings from the 2025 State of Martech report: Homegrown internal platforms jumped from 2% to 10% of core stacks.
That’s a 5x increase in a single year.
Marketing teams are starting to operate like product teams. Adoption of product management tools climbed from 23% to 42%, the fastest growth of any martech category.
Off-the-shelf tools aren’t solving the coordination challenge quickly enough. So marketing leaders are building the connective tissue themselves.
This parallels what’s happening with AI platforms. Google Gemini is gaining ground thanks to deep integration across search, Chrome, and Android — advantages OpenAI can’t easily replicate. The takeaway for marketers: integration is the real edge.
Welcome to your conductor era
Don’t mistake the end of the gold rush for an AI bust. What’s ending is AI tourism.
In this new phase, you can’t brute-force growth with more volume. You have to orchestrate growth with intelligence.
Your edge will come from building the strongest AI nervous system — one that can detect a signal in a single channel and respond across the entire stack before the window closes.
As AI platforms race to monetize with ads and sponsored experiences, orchestration layers will be how you measure and optimize ROI across the full funnel.
The gold rush is over. The production era has arrived — and it belongs to the orchestrators.