McKinsey’s recent Rewiring Martech: From Cost Center to Growth Engine report offers one of the clearest roadmaps yet for how artificial intelligence will transform marketing. At the heart of their vision is a new concept — the Agentic Orchestration Layer — a governing system that coordinates specialised AI agents across four layers of the marketing ecosystem: data, decisioning, design, and distribution. This model represents a fundamental shift in how enterprise data and AI systems will work together. Rather than just analysing information, AI agents will act on it — automating workflows, optimizing creative and media in real time, and delivering personalised customer experiences at unprecedented scale.
It’s an exciting evolution. But as McKinsey cautions, the technology is outpacing both talent and governance, and that’s where most organizations will hit a wall.
McKinsey’s framework shows how AI can orchestrate across the martech stack, but it quietly assumes that the underlying data is already clean, connected, and reliable. That assumption rarely holds true. Before any AI agent can orchestrate across systems, it needs data integrity: information that’s verified, structured, compliant, and explainable. Without that foundation, intelligent orchestration simply accelerates chaos. As the saying goes: if garbage goes in, garbage comes out, only faster.
AI doesn’t solve bad data. It amplifies it.
The next phase of martech maturity won’t be about adding tools. It will be about creating the conditions where those tools can actually work together with confidence.
Most enterprises today have more data than they can meaningfully use. What’s missing isn’t data volume, it’s data trust.
To move from disconnected execution to intelligent orchestration, leaders need to treat data integrity as an enterprise discipline. That means building systems that:
Without these controls, orchestration becomes guesswork, and AI becomes ungovernable.
McKinsey calls on marketers to “stop counting clicks” and connect martech investments directly to business outcomes. That connection only happens when every record, campaign, and interaction is traceable from first touch to closed revenue. True AI-powered orchestration isn’t just about speed, it’s about accountability.
The ability to follow a single customer or lead through the entire journey (to understand what worked, why, and at what cost) is what separates marketing organisations that scale with AI from those that drown in it.
In that sense, data integrity isn’t a technical goal — it’s the foundation of measurement.
As AI systems begin to automate millions of micro-decisions every day, governance becomes the ultimate control mechanism. Enterprises will need to explain not only what their algorithms did, but why. This will require new transparency standards: audit trails for data movement, clear lineage for enrichment and transformation, and shared frameworks that ensure every AI-driven decision can be traced to a verified source.
Governance, not automation, will define the next era of marketing maturity.
McKinsey’s Agentic Orchestration Layer concept points toward a future where marketing technology extends across the entire enterprise, linking systems like Azure, Salesforce, Snowflake, and beyond into a cohesive, intelligent network.
But for that vision to work, organisations will need a neutral, governed foundation that ensures interoperability and trust across vendors, data models, and AI frameworks. Without it, orchestration will remain fragmented, and the promise of intelligent marketing will stay theoretical.
The leaders who win the next decade won’t be those who automate first. They’ll be the ones who integrate responsibly.
The martech stack is evolving from a tangle of disconnected tools into a governed, intelligent ecosystem powered by AI agents. But intelligence without integrity creates risk. Before enterprises can orchestrate intelligently, they must first build a foundation of trust with clean data, transparent governance, and connected systems that make AI explainable.
Because in the end, the future of marketing won’t just belong to those who move fast. It will belong to those who can prove their data right.
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