It’s that time of year when LinkedIn fills up with “here’s my tech stack” posts.
I don’t mind them. Tools are useful. I work with a lot of them. Clay. HubSpot. Marketo. Systems that promise leverage, automation, or a little bit of magic if you configure them just right.
What’s stood out to me this year isn’t the tools themselves. It’s how often teams swing between extremes. One month, it’s a heavy AI martech stack held together by hope. The next, it’s Excel, because everything else feels too expensive, too complex, or too brittle to manage.
That whiplash isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a clarity problem.
When teams don’t have a shared understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish, tools become substitutes for strategy. AI doesn’t fix that. It accelerates it. A million automations without direction aren’t meaningfully different from older models of brute-force growth. Lots of activity. Plenty of cost. Very little coherence.
At Cedar Collab, we can implement just about any stack a client brings us. But we rarely start with software. We start with questions that don’t show up in a demo. Who is your ICP, really? What are you actually selling, and how is that different from what customers think they’re buying? How is your brand experienced by real humans, not personas? Where do you want this company to be in one year, five years, ten years? And just as important: what needs to stay human, and what truly deserves to be systematized?
Those questions sound abstract, but they’re practical. When the answers are clear, tools get boring again. They fit. They cost what they should. They can be owned and managed without drama. When the answers aren’t clear, automation starts replacing judgment. Efficiency replaces care. And no amount of AI fixes the underlying drift.
This is why so many teams feel burned by martech right now. It’s not because the tools don’t work. It’s because they’re being asked to compensate for decisions that haven’t been made yet. Strategy, positioning, pricing, audience focus, and long-term intent are all upstream of software. When those are unresolved, every new tool feels both promising and disappointing.
There’s a broader pattern here too. As more brands optimize relentlessly for speed and scale, customers feel less connected, not more. Perfectly templated interactions. Chatbots that answer quickly but say nothing. Systems optimized for response time rather than felt experience. Others have named this tension clearly, and they’re right to do so. Efficiency without care doesn’t build trust. It erodes it quietly.
The most expensive martech decision a company can make is buying software to compensate for unanswered internal questions. Not because the software is bad, but because it delays the work that actually matters.
Good strategy makes technology supportive. Bad strategy makes it exhausting.
That’s the difference.