For most of the last decade, the martech landscape only ever did one thing. It grew. Every year brought more categories, more logos, more tools promising to solve a problem the previous year's tools had created.

Most teams read that growth as abundance. More choice, more capability, more ways to build a stack that fit exactly how they worked.

That reading is now wrong, and the data saying so is unusually clean. The landscape is not expanding any more. It is churning in place, and the shape of that churn tells you something specific about what the next two years will ask of anyone who runs marketing operations, including anyone who runs events.

The line that finally crossed

MartechMap's tracking of products entering and leaving the landscape, published through chiefmartec and MartechTribe, shows the same measurement taken four years running.

In 2023, 2,904 products were added and 972 were removed. In 2024, additions held roughly steady at 2,805 while removals fell to 263, the quietest year in the series. In 2025, additions slipped to 2,489 and removals climbed to 1,211. In 2026, additions dropped to 1,488 while removals reached 1,367.

Read the last figure slowly. Additions exceeded removals by 121 products across the entire landscape. Four years earlier the gap was 1,932.

That is not a slowdown in a growing market. That is a market arriving at net zero. For the first time in the period tracked, the martech landscape is approximately as likely to lose a product as to gain one.

What is actually happening underneath

A flat net number can hide two very different stories. It could mean the market has matured and settled. It could also mean a lot of products are dying while a smaller number of new ones arrive.

The removals figure tells you which. Removals rose from 263 in 2024 to 1,367 in 2026, a fivefold increase in two years. Products are not sitting still. They are exiting.

The additions figure tells you the other half. New product launches roughly halved between 2023 and 2026. Fewer companies are choosing to enter, or fewer are surviving long enough to be counted.

Put together, the landscape is doing what markets do when the easy expansion phase ends. The number of participants stops climbing, the weaker positions get cleared out, and what remains consolidates into fewer, larger holdings.

Buyers stopped switching, which is the more interesting signal

If the supply side were the whole story you could file this as a vendor problem. It is not, because buyer behaviour moved in the same direction at the same time.

MarTech reported in July 2026 that marketing automation replacement rates fell from 31.1% in 2024 to 19.4% in 2025. The pullback was broad rather than concentrated in one category. CRM replacement showed the same pattern.

Replacement rate is one of the more honest numbers in this industry, because it measures what teams did rather than what they said in a survey. A team that rips out a marketing automation platform has committed budget, migration hours and political capital to that decision.

That number falling by more than a third in a single year means something changed in how teams evaluate. Either they are satisfied, or they have concluded that switching costs more than the improvement is worth.

The utilisation number suggests it is not satisfaction

MarTech's July 2026 analysis put martech spending on track to exceed $215 billion by 2027, against industry-wide utilisation of approximately 49%.

Roughly half of what organisations have already purchased is not being used.

Those two facts sit awkwardly together. Spending is projected to keep climbing while half the existing capability sits idle, and switching has slowed to two thirds of its previous rate.

The most plausible reading is that teams are not staying put because their tools are working. They are staying put because the cost of moving has become the dominant variable, and because a stack that is half-used is also half-understood. You cannot confidently replace a system when nobody is entirely sure what it currently does.

This is the same underlying condition described in the gap between adopting AI and actually running it, viewed from the market side rather than the individual team side. Integration difficulty at the team level produces switching paralysis at the market level.

Why AI changes the shape rather than the size

The obvious counter-argument is that AI should be reversing this. A genuinely new capability layer ought to trigger a wave of new products and a wave of replacements.

MarTech's landscape review in July 2026 found nearly 1,500 tools renewed across the year, with AI shifting differentiation away from rule-based feature sets. That is real movement, but note what it describes. Renewal, not replacement. Existing products adding an AI layer rather than new products displacing old ones.

That distinction matters commercially. When differentiation moves from features to model quality, the advantage shifts toward whoever already holds the customer relationship and the data. Incumbents can add a model. Challengers cannot easily acquire an installed base.

Which is exactly the condition that produces consolidation rather than disruption, and it explains why a technology this significant is coinciding with a landscape that is shrinking rather than proliferating.

The events industry is running the same play

None of this is confined to software, and event professionals will recognise the pattern from their own market.

The first half of 2026 attached over £4bn of deal value to B2B event assets, with CloserStill at £1.35bn, Emerald and Questex at $2bn and Hyve at $1.8bn. Independent shows are increasingly competing against portfolio operators rather than against each other, a shift covered in more detail in the consolidation of the exhibition industry.

The mechanics are the same as in martech. Scale buys data, tooling and cross-promotion that a single show cannot fund alone. The advantage compounds toward whoever already holds the audience relationship. Smaller independent participants get acquired or squeezed.

Two industries, the same structural moment, roughly the same quarter.

The removal you should actually plan for

There is a version of this that stops being a market story and becomes an operational one, and it happens the year a tool you depend on becomes part of the 1,367.

Most teams have never costed that scenario. A vendor sunset is not a licence renewal decision, because the decision has already been made for you. What follows is a migration on someone else's timeline, usually with an export format that loses something, and usually in the middle of a quarter you had planned for other work.

Event teams carry more of this exposure than most marketing functions, because the systems are further from the centre of the martech landscape and closer to the edge where consolidation bites first. Registration platforms, badge printing, session scheduling, lead capture and matchmaking are all narrower categories with fewer participants than email or CRM. A category with eight vendors handles two exits very differently from a category with two hundred.

The practical version of this is not a prediction about which vendors survive. It is knowing, for each system that touches your attendee data, how you would get that data out and how long it would take. Teams that can answer that in an afternoon are in a different position from teams that would need to open a support ticket to find out.

That question costs nothing to answer while the vendor is healthy, and it is very expensive to answer for the first time after the sunset email arrives.

What this asks of an operations team

If you accept that the expansion phase is over, several habits stop making sense.

Waiting for a better tool becomes a weaker strategy than it was three years ago. When 1,488 products arrive in a year rather than 2,904, and 1,367 leave, the probability that the ideal replacement is about to appear has genuinely fallen.

Utilisation becomes more valuable than acquisition. If half of your existing stack is unused, the highest-return project available is almost certainly inside what you have already bought rather than in the next purchase. That is unglamorous work and it does not have a procurement path, which is precisely why it stays undone.

Vendor durability becomes a real evaluation criterion. In a market removing over 1,300 products a year, whether a vendor will exist in three years is a legitimate question to put in an RFP, and most event teams do not currently ask it.

And the integration question moves ahead of the feature question. In a consolidating market you are not choosing the best tool. You are choosing which ecosystem to be inside.

What we watch instead

The tools an event team runs are less interesting to us than which decisions still require a person. That framing is set out in what an AI-native agency actually is, and a consolidating landscape makes it more useful rather than less.

When the market was expanding, the answer to most operational problems was to buy something. When the market is flat, the answer has to come from how the existing pieces are wired together and who owns the calls between them. That work does not appear on any landscape chart.

If you are rebuilding an event marketing stack this year and want a second opinion on which parts are worth keeping, book a call and we will walk through it with you.