AI is rapidly changing marketing tech, creating a competitive "land grab" and threatening established businesses, but leaders can proactively adapt to this new landscape.
Robert Webster, CEO of TAU Marketing Solutions, explains that companies must embrace AI to protect their value and stay relevant.
He advises leaders to defend their unique business role, actively use AI to their advantage, and invest in training their teams.
While conversations at Advertising Week last month in New York focused on the ongoing turf wars between traditional adtech players, a different discussion was happening at the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON). There, the talk centered on a much bigger convergence, where business tech, martech, and adtech are all collapsing into a single, AI-driven ecosystem. The result is a competitive land grab where everyone from Google and Amazon to OpenAI and a wave of startups is fighting for control over enterprise data and, ultimately, marketing decision-making.
For an on-the-ground view, we spoke with Robert Webster, the Founder and CEO of TAU Marketing Solutions, a firm specializing in AI-driven marketing transformations. With a background in senior strategy and technology roles at companies like MediaCom and Crimtan, he now advises businesses on AI and go-to-market strategies. “AI is bringing everything together, data, marketing, advertising. Everyone’s fighting to be the system that makes the decisions,” he says.
When 50 become 5: The battlefield is crowded. You have the established giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft using their vast client bases to push AI services. You have the new titans like OpenAI and Anthropic forcing their way into enterprise conversations. And then you have a whole raft of new productivity tools and startups, all vying for what Webster calls an "AI slot" in a company's tech stack. “If you drew it all out on a map, they can’t all win. In the future, we'll be down to less than 10, maybe less than five,” Webster notes.
Moats and notes: He cautions that as AI models connect directly to a company’s core data, they could simply bypass the specialized software that sits in the middle. If an AI can build a front-end faster and cheaper, the protective moat around established incumbents gets much smaller. “What’s to stop OpenAI launching a CRM-style plugin that goes directly to your data cloud? Everyone’s core business could be disintermediated by AI linking to a central database and doing the work,” Webster observes.
This free-for-all introduces another problem of "shadow AI." When organizations restrict access to approved tools, employees often bring their own AI to get the job done. While using a corporate account on a major platform like Google or Microsoft comes with security and legal protections, the use of unsanctioned tools exposes a company to accidental data leaks.
It's not just brands who are at risk. Advertising agencies are also in the crossfire. With adtech growth stagnant for nearly a decade outside of the walled gardens of Google, Amazon, and Meta, the big agency holding companies find themselves in a precarious position. Their response has been to launch their own AI platforms, like WPP’s Open and Publicis’s Marcel, in an effort to own the AI-driven decision-making for their clients before someone else does.
Fighting fire with fire: So, how should marketing leaders navigate this chaotic environment? Webster suggests a three-part strategy: defend, attack, and upskill. First, leaders must identify their unique, defensible role, whether it’s a publisher’s first-party data, an agency’s global planning power, or a martech vendor’s specialized function, and protect it. “Honestly, you’ve got to fight AI with AI. If I was The New York Times right now, I would launch a New York Times chatbot that gives you the news in a New York Times style editorial,” he outlines.
With so much of the battle taking place in the digital space, the most important investment is still in people. To combat the risks of "shadow AI" and truly leverage new platforms, companies must focus on training their teams. If only a small fraction of a marketing department are experts in a core platform like Salesforce, the organization isn't prepared for a future where that expertise needs to be even deeper and more widespread.
Ultimately, Webster brings the conversation back to a fundamental business principle. Amidst all the complexity and competition, the path forward is about proving your worth. “The biggest piece of value advice I can give is just add value,” he says. “If you can show them a low-risk, fast way of delivering outcomes, people are going to lean in.”
