A new report from Snowflake highlights three key forces—generative AI, evolving privacy norms, and data gravity—as transformative drivers of marketing technology for 2025. These shifts are set to redefine how marketers interact with data, tools, and consumers, promising enhanced personalization and efficiency while raising new challenges in data management and privacy.
The “Modern Marketing Data Stack 2025” report sheds light on a rapidly changing martech landscape, driven by major technological and regulatory shifts. With over 14,000 vendors competing in the space, the report warns that a simple upgrade in marketing tools is no longer enough; instead, a comprehensive overhaul of strategies, tactics, and team roles is required to stay competitive.
One of the most significant trends highlighted is the impact of generative AI on marketing operations. With the ability to generate creative content, analyze data, and produce insights from natural-language prompts, AI is already beginning to empower marketers to perform tasks that previously required specialized data teams.
“What’s amazing about generative AI is not necessarily what it puts out, but what it lets you, the nontechnical user, put in,” the report notes, illustrating the democratizing potential of AI.
This, however, comes with the growing responsibility to manage and safeguard personal data. Privacy has shifted from a mere trend to a foundational element in the marketing ecosystem. The report points to global regulations, such as the European Union’s GDPR and new U.S. privacy laws, which are pushing marketers to adopt more robust data governance models. Brands are now tasked with managing consumer data with transparency and precision to meet both regulatory and consumer expectations.
A third major theme is “data gravity,” referring to the growing complexity and cost of moving large datasets. Marketers are increasingly consolidating data within unified platforms to streamline processes, reducing reliance on fragmented data sources. The report underscores that marketing is becoming an integral part of enterprise-wide data ecosystems, driving companies to deploy their applications directly where the data resides. “Application processing is moving to the data, not the other way around,” it notes.
These three factors—AI, privacy, and data gravity—are not only influencing how marketers operate but also shaping the development of new technologies and tools. The rise of first-party data, for example, is positioned as a critical response to the decline of third-party tracking methods, such as cookies, which have faced increasing scrutiny from regulators.
The report concludes by outlining a vision for a future marketing stack deeply integrated with enterprise AI systems, emphasizing the need for marketers to evolve from tool users to managers of complex AI-driven systems. This shift, it suggests, will ultimately empower marketers to focus on strategy and creative execution rather than technical processes, marking a profound change in how marketing teams function.
As the industry moves toward 2025, the report stresses the importance of adopting a forward-looking approach, anticipating that the convergence of these trends will fundamentally alter the marketing landscape, while offering significant opportunities for businesses that can adapt.