The Generality Tax: Why enterprise marketing software costs what it does, and how AI changes the equation

If you manage a large CRM or lifecycle marketing operation, it’s likely that The Marketing Platform defines how your team works. Unfortunately, your entire operation may also be dictated by the boundaries of The Marketing Platform. It’s likely been a functional necessity for your team, but it’s also a compromise.

The Marketing Platform was built for every enterprise. And yet the underlying data, marketing strategies, and business priorities for a meal-kit subscription are not the same as a regulated investing platform. Whether you are a services business or a fintech app, you use the same core engine. This means the software has to accommodate every industry and edge case, creating unwieldy platforms that you pay for in four distinct ways:

• The configuration tax: the hours spent stripping away what you didn't need.
• Engineering debt, as you built bridges to data the suite couldn't natively ingest.
• Contractual inertia, where long-term commitments were the only way vendors could recoup the cost of high-friction deployments.
• Dormant modules. Features bundled into your renewal that added cost without adding value.

The reason these systems are so expensive is exactly why they are now becoming less useful: generality.

This is supported by the flow of dollars. According to Gartner, martech capability utilization fell from 58% in 2020 to a dismal 33% by 2023. CMOs have also been defunding their tech stacks, dropping martech spend to 22.4% of total marketing budgets.

As we’ve argued in The Marketing Cloud is Broken, AI-native systems offer an off-ramp. The economic incentives that once favored The Marketing Platform are changing, and fast. AI is driving down the cost of software production, which means companies can now deploy systems tailored to specific business needs at a reasonable cost of ownership.

The caveat is that "tailored to your business" is a possible outcome, not a guarantee. A system built around one company can be built badly (and usually quickly). What matters is who does the building, and how you continue to evolve the system. Without accountability to marketing outcomes, this is a miniature version of the same problem.

So the important question: how much of your expenditure pays for use cases that are not yours? Whatever that figure is, it used to be an unavoidable tax. It is not anymore. Consider this with your team before your next renewal.