Almost every martech tool you pay for has embedded AI. But those capabilities are about the vendor’s goals, not necessarily yours. Here’s how to use AI to rationalize your SaaS budget and get the unified customer view you’ve always wanted.
How many SaaS tools does your marketing team use? Chances are you have no idea. The number may run into dozens, and Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey says marketing teams use only about a third of the capability they’re paying for. The same survey shows that 51% of the tools are never used at all.
The rest? Some were contracted years ago and never canceled. Some are too hard to fit into existing workflows. Some were bought by an enthusiastic team member who skipped security and contract review.
That’s a lot of wasted money. What makes the situation worse is that a disjointed collection of platforms means the customer relationship resets with each data handoff.
Then there’s AI. Every marketing tool now claims AI enablement. But think about what that AI was built to do. Vendors focus on AI integrations that make their tools more usable and sticky. Those are the vendor’s business objectives, not necessarily yours.
Executive Summary
- Your team likely only uses a third of the martech capabilities you pay for (Gartner).
- “AI-powered” features in a vendor’s SaaS platform serve their objectives, not necessarily yours.
- Brands need an AI strategy built to address their own goals.
- A governed AI context layer delivers the single customer view, and you own it, not a vendor.
- Cutting redundant SaaS tools can fund part or all of your first AI initiatives.
- The right AI approach enables you to get AI solutions into production in weeks, with the data you already have.
A brand can own multiple AI-powered tools and have no AI strategy. A strategy starts from the brand’s own data and customer journey, decides where AI should act across the whole stack, and puts a governed layer over the tools so they work together, from the same unified customer view.
Four things AI should do for marketing
What do you want AI to do for the business? For most organizations, it’s four things.
- Unifies data into a single customer view. One picture of each customer across browse, purchase, loyalty, service, and in-store behavior, so every decision draws on everything you have.
- Orchestrates an omnichannel go-to-market. Campaigns, offers, and inventory decisions that carry across email, site, app, paid media, and store without the journey resetting at each handoff.
- Automates manual work that wastes team time. Reporting, list pulls, campaign setup, QA, and re-keying data between systems, handled by AI.
- Gives the team time to focus on strategic tasks. Recovered time goes to positioning, creative, customer insight, and the judgment calls a model can’t make.
Each of these goals depends on unifying the data that currently sits in multiple subscriptions.
Rationalizing your stack
Given how little of the average stack gets used, start by rationalizing your tools. Three steps:
- Inventory the stack and what each platform can do.
- Map that against which tools are used and how.
- Eliminate tools that are redundant or deliver no value.
Consolidate toward the tools that do more of the job and that the team has shown it will adopt. A smaller stack costs less and is easier to govern and connect. Canceled licenses can cover some or all of the costs of your first AI initiatives.
How to create a real AI strategy and action plan
A strategy is a plan with goals, owners, and dates, built with the people who will live with it. It sets a vision for AI within your function and targets the specific challenges that impede performance.
- Define goals with experts and front-line teams. Bring in the people who run campaigns, manage data, and answer for the P&L, alongside AI specialists who have done this before. Map the goals to the four outcomes above.
- Prioritize initiatives with the most ROI for the least effort. Choose projects that are contained, tangible, and measurable, and give each one an owner.
- Write the action plan. Sequence, budget, dependencies, timeline, and owners.
Sequencing initiatives drives early wins and ROI, and that momentum carries the next projects as you prove the value.
Building AI solutions that work
AI needs context to transform operations. Your tools each hold a separate set of insights and data points. An Enterprise Context Engine™ integrates the data from your existing stack, cleans and standardizes it, and makes it agent-ready. It lives on top of your platforms and delivers a single customer view. It differs from platform APIs or a CDP because it also handles governance, security, and workflows for the challenges named in your strategy.
That layer powers more than one use case. It becomes Compounding Intelligence for multiple initiatives.
Getting it done
The right AI solution simplifies the task marketers have struggled with for years: a single, actionable customer view. A flexible AI solution will:
- Adapt to your existing stack.
- Clean and standardize data.
- Apply proven approaches.
- Make solutions usable by your front-line team.
It’s a simple model, but many companies try to skip one or more of these steps. In our work with hundreds of companies, we’ve learned this approach works and delivers results in weeks, not months. It’s also critical that your context layer is owned by you, not by a SaaS or AI vendor. Every decision the agents make feeds back into it, so it grows more accurate the longer it operates, creating a moat competitors can’t match by buying a tool or a model.
At RapidCanvas, we’ve developed our approach to align with this model. Our Hybrid Approach™ pairs your team with PhD-level data scientists and category experts to understand your goals, stack, and processes. Then we use our proven agentic AI platform, with more than 1,000 prebuilt agents and connections, to get solutions to production in 6 to 12 weeks. Your team sets the rules for governance, security, and which decisions AI makes on its own and which it escalates to a human.
Every brand needs an AI strategy developed for its unique needs. If you’d like to talk about your goals and challenges, get in touch, and we’ll set up a call. You can also visit the RapidCanvas website, read client case studies, and see verified customer reviews on G2.
