As a marketing consultant, I’ve watched AI move from “shiny new toy” to daily reality faster than most predicted. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: for many conventional, siloed organisations, AI isn’t solving problems — it’s exposing them at lightning speed.

Two recent pieces perfectly capture this tension. Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist cartoon post “Misalignment at Speed” nails the organisational reality, while Scott Brinker’s deep-dive “Build vs. Buy Is the Wrong Question for Martech AI” reframes the technology strategy debate. Together, they offer a timely wake-up call for marketing leaders.

The Marketoonist Warning: AI Speed + Silos = More Noise, Not More Results

Tom Fishburne recently shared a William Blair report describing enterprise AI adoption as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Nearly every organisation is dabbling, but few have orchestrated it strategically.

He cites a 2025 MIT report showing that 95% of enterprise Generative AI pilots failed to deliver meaningful ROI or scale beyond experimentation. The culprit? Not the tools themselves, but strategic misalignment.

Fishburne quotes Hugh Derrick: when you layer “AI-driven speed” onto misaligned systems, you don’t magically become more effective — you simply get faster at being inconsistent. And in big, complex organisations where 30% of senior leaders already blame silos for productivity stagnation and two-thirds describe their companies as overly complex, that speed just creates more noise.

It’s the classic silo syndrome on steroids. Marketing runs its own AI experiments for content. Sales builds agents for lead qualification. Ops automates reporting. Everyone moves faster, but the left hand has no idea what the right hand is prompting. The result? Fragmented customer experiences, duplicated effort, and zero competitive edge.

Fishburne highlights a truism that AI has not changed: technology doesn’t fix broken structures — it amplifies them.

Scott Brinker’s Insight: Build vs. Buy Is No Longer the Right Question

At the same time, Scott Brinker (chiefmartec.com) dropped a must-read preview of the State of Martech 2026 based on a survey of 208 marketing and martech leaders across ~70 specific AI use cases.

His core argument? “Build vs. buy” is the wrong question. AI has collapsed the cost of custom development so dramatically that the old binary no longer applies. The real pattern emerging is hybrid by design.

Key takeaways from Brinker’s research:

• Multiple solutions in parallel are the norm. Teams use embedded AI in existing SaaS platforms (e.g., your MAP or CRM), adopt specialist AI-native tools for creation tasks (copy, visuals, competitive intel), and build custom agents for proprietary data and processes.
• The stack is stratifying, not consolidating. AI-native tools dominate “creation” layers (prompt-driven ideation). Incumbent platforms own orchestration and execution. Agentic CDP-style platforms are emerging as an alternative layer that reasons directly over your first-party data.
• B2B vs B2C behaviour differs. B2B teams go broad (adopting AI across more use cases because they’re often under-resourced). B2C teams go deep — buying off-the-shelf for 80% of needs but building custom solutions for the 20% that matters most to brand voice, guardrails, and differentiation.

Brinker’s conclusion is liberating: stop obsessing over one-size-fits-all vendor lock-in or heroic in-house builds. Focus on orchestrating a portfolio of capabilities that fits your specific context.

The Real Challenge: Silos Make the Hybrid Strategy Almost Impossible

Here’s where the two pieces collide — and why they matter so much for marketing teams right now.

Marketoonist Fishburne shows us that conventional siloed organisations amplify AI’s downsides. You can’t effectively “orchestrate a portfolio” when departments don’t talk, data is trapped, and strategy is misaligned at the top. Brinker shows us the opportunity: a flexible, layered martech stack that blends buy, build, and embed. But that opportunity only materialises if you first fix the organisational operating system.

In other words, AI capabilities don’t break silos — they make silo problems painfully visible (and expensive).

What Smart Marketing Leaders Should Do Differently

If you’re leading marketing or martech in 2026, here are the practical shifts I’m recommending to my clients:

1. Start with problems, people, and principles (not “AI-first”). Borrow from the Marketoonist’s referenced HBR thinking: be problem-centric, people-first, and principle-driven.
2. Build cross-functional AI governance early. Create a small tiger team (marketing, sales, ops, data) that owns the portfolio orchestration Brinker describes. Don’t let every department run their own experiments unchecked.
3. Adopt a stratified stack mindset. Buy infrastructure and orchestration layers you trust. Use AI-native tools for rapid creation. Build custom agents only where proprietary advantage or brand control demands it.
4. Measure alignment before you measure ROI. Track whether AI initiatives are reducing (or increasing) cross-team friction. If pilots are failing at 95%, the first fix isn’t better prompts — it’s better organisational alignment.
5. Reimagine teamwork, not just tasks. As Ethan Mollick’s P&G study (cited in related Marketoonist posts) shows, AI works best as a teammate. That requires new management structures, not just new tools.

The organisations that win won’t be the ones with the most AI tools. They’ll be the ones that use AI to finally break down the silos that have held them back for decades.

At Mackey Enterprises, we’re helping marketing teams do exactly that — turning AI from a source of noise into a genuine competitive advantage. If your organisation is feeling the pain of misalignment at speed, let’s talk.

What’s your biggest AI challenge right now — the technology, the silos, or the strategy? Drop a comment or reach out. I’d love to hear how you’re navigating the build-vs-buy (or rather, orchestrate-the-portfolio) reality in 2026.

Mitchell Mackey Marketing & Business Optimisation Consultant Hobart, Tasmania | mitchellmackey.com.au Driving B2B success in the AI era.