NEW YORK, Dec. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform, today released new research revealing that modern marketing stacks have reached an unprecedented level of complexity, with more than 15,000 tools now available in the martech landscape. The company’s latest report, “Composable by Design: Building an Agentic Content Ecosystem,” outlines how organizations can bring order to sprawling systems by embracing a composable, AI-powered approach to content and digital experience creation. This research builds on Optimizely’s commitment to helping marketing teams navigate the evolving digital landscape.
The normal business marketing stack today looks like a “solar system,” with a few main platforms in the middle and hundreds of specialized systems and tactical tools circling around them. But even while data platforms and analytics have come a long way, the content layer is still the largest problem for businesses who want to make customization work on a larger scale.
“AI is speeding up the whole content lifecycle, but it’s also showing where stacks have lost their center of gravity,” said Tara Corey, Optimizely’s Senior Vice President of Marketing. “Composable design brings back the pull by bringing together creativity, intelligence, and delivery in a more planned and scalable approach. The end result is a stack that eventually works as fast as the business needs it to.
Some of the most important things the report found are:
- 15,000+ tools now exist in the martech landscape, reflecting 10x growth over the last 14 years.
- Expansion of “hypertails,” or company-specific applications, is accelerating as organizations increasingly supplement core platforms with dozens of small, single-purpose tools for niche use cases.
- Marketers cite fragmented content workflows, siloed teams, and manual production processes as common struggles despite heavy investments in new technology.
- AI is emerging as the connective tissue of modern stacks — but only when treated as a platform-level capability, not a bolt-on feature.
- Composability is now about engineering outcomes with structure, governance, and accountability built in, not about implementing every new tool on the market.
The growth of agentic content ecosystems:
The paper talks about a move toward agentic content ecosystems, which are systems where AI plays an active role in creating, shaping, and improving content throughout its entire lifecycle, from creation to delivery to personalization to analytics.
The paper says that data alone doesn’t create meaningful experiences anymore. Instead, data, content, and AI are the three most important parts of modern personalization.
A way for businesses to move forward:
Marketers can use the growing complexity of martech stacks to give customers the tailored experiences they expect. For this to happen, though, AI needs to be used across all of the company’s platforms, not just in separate tools. When completely integrated, AI may be the smart link that speeds up operations, integrates data and content, and gives users experiences that are relevant.
Corey said, “Composable technology shouldn’t mean chaos.” “It’s about making systems that work together instead of against each other.” When AI connects those systems, teams finally receive the speed and clarity they’ve been looking for.
About Optimizely:
With Optimizely One, the first operating system for marketing teams, Optimizely wants to make marketers’ life easier. Optimizely One brings together the best technologies in content management, content marketing, experimentation, commerce, and customization into one AI-accelerated workflow that powers every stage of the marketing lifecycle. Optimizely is happy to help big brands like Salesforce, Zoom, and Toyota make content quickly, run tests with confidence, and give customers the best experiences possible. This is possible because Optimizely is a fully composable platform. Visit optimizely to find out more.
Optimizely and Optimizely One are trademarks of Optimizely North America Inc. They are registered (or registrations are pending) in the US, EU, UK, and other countries. All third-party trademarks mentioned here are owned by their owners and are simply used as examples.
