Open your last 12 months of software invoices and you will almost certainly find three things: a tool nobody has logged into since the person who bought it left, an “AI” upgrade you're paying a premium for without a single metric attached to it, and two products that do roughly the same job. The average marketing stack didn't get designed. It accreted — one urgent purchase at a time — and the AI gold rush of the last two years has poured petrol on it. Renewal season is the moment to stop accreting and start governing.
The direct answer: Audit your martech and AI stack by mapping every tool to a job it does and a number it moves, then sorting each into keep, cut, or consolidate. A tool earns renewal only if it's actively used, owned by a named person, and tied to a measurable outcome — adoption, time saved, pipeline, or revenue. Everything else is a candidate for the chopping block. The goal isn't a bigger or smaller stack; it's a stack where you can defend every line to your CFO.
Why has martech spend become a board-level problem?
Two forces collided. First, marketing teams accumulated tools for years with little governance — Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found marketers use just 49% of their stack's capability, even as martech still accounts for around 22% of the typical marketing budget. Second, nearly every vendor bolted on an AI tier and raised prices, so leaders are now being asked to justify a spend that quietly grew while budgets stayed flat or shrank.
That's why “what is our marketing technology actually returning?” has moved from an ops question to a CFO-and-CEO question. The leaders who can answer it crisply protect their budgets. The ones who can't get cut by people who don't understand the stack — which is the worst way for it to happen.
What does an ROI-led stack audit look like?
You don't need a six-week consulting engagement. You need a spreadsheet and the discipline to be honest. For every tool you pay for, capture:
- The job it does — the specific outcome it exists to produce, in one sentence.
- Annual cost — the real number, including the AI tier and per-seat creep.
- Actual usage — active users and last-login reality, not the licence count.
- The owner — one named person accountable for it. “The team” means nobody.
- The metric it moves — what measurably changes because you have it.
- Overlap — what else in the stack does the same job.
The act of filling this in is the audit. Tools that can't get a clean answer in the “metric” and “owner” columns are where your savings live.
A tool you can't attach to a number isn't a tool. It's a subscription. Renewal season is when you find out which is which.
How do you judge whether an AI tool is actually paying off?
AI features get a free pass they haven't earned, because “AI” sounds like progress. Hold them to the same standard as everything else — sharper, if anything, because you're often paying a premium. Three honest tests:
- Adoption. Is the team genuinely using it in the workflow, or did it get demoed once and abandoned? An unused AI seat is pure waste at a premium price.
- Time-to-value made real. “It saves time” only counts if that time is reinvested in something that moves a number. Faster drafts that produce more mediocre content nobody asked for is not ROI — it's volume.
- Net of the new costs. AI output usually still needs human review and editing. Count that. The honest ROI is the value created minus the oversight it now requires.
This is also where stack and team decisions meet. If an AI tool genuinely absorbs work, that should change how you structure and hire your marketing team — fewer hands on execution, more senior judgement directing the machine. A tool that changes your spend but not your org design usually isn't delivering the leverage the invoice implies.
Keep, cut, or consolidate: making the call
With the audit in front of you, sort every tool:
- Keep — used, owned, and tied to a metric. These you renew without flinching, and you negotiate hard on price using the genuine usage data you now have.
- Cut — low or no adoption, no clear owner, no metric. The hardest part is emotional, not analytical: someone championed this tool. Cut it anyway, or downgrade off the AI tier you're not using.
- Consolidate — two or three tools doing one job, or point solutions a platform you already pay for now covers. Consolidation is usually the biggest single saving, and it reduces integration fragility as a bonus.
Run this before renewal dates, not after. Vendors auto-renew on annual terms; the leverage to cut or renegotiate exists in the weeks before the date and evaporates the day after.
Who should own the stack?
A stack with no owner is a stack that will re-bloat within a year. Someone — a marketing ops lead, a senior marketer, or your marketing leader directly — needs standing accountability for the tooling: what's in it, what it costs, what it returns, and the authority to say no to the next shiny purchase. In smaller businesses without that role, this is one of the clearest, fastest wins a fractional CMO delivers: an outside senior operator has no political attachment to any tool and will cut the dead weight in week one.
Quick answers
How often should we audit our martech stack?
Lightly every quarter, thoroughly once a year — timed just ahead of your major renewal dates so the findings actually inform what you renew, cut, or renegotiate.
What percentage of martech goes unused?
By Gartner's 2025 survey, marketers use only about 49% of their stack's capability — and utilisation has dropped as low as a third in recent years. Rather than anchor on one benchmark, measure your own utilisation tool by tool — that's the number that justifies cuts to your CFO.
Should we cut AI tools that aren't showing ROI yet?
Downgrade or cut AI tiers with low adoption and no measurable outcome. If a tool is promising but unproven, set a short, explicit trial with a success metric and a decision date — don't let “promising” auto-renew indefinitely.
The takeaway: The stack rarely fixes itself, because the people busy enough to need the tools are too busy to govern them. Whether you assign clear ownership internally or bring in a senior operator to do the cut, the discipline is the same: every tool maps to a job, an owner, and a number — or it goes. If you're building (or restructuring) the team that runs your stack, getting the ops and leadership hires right is where it starts. Related reading: when to hire a fractional CMO.