In our past the Thomson Reuters marketing technology (martech) stack was overly complex and unwieldy due to siloed ownership, democratized funding availability, frequent acquisitions and divestitures. This led to: platform redundancies, increased expenses, poor adoption due to a lack of comprehensive use cases; inability to visualize the comprehensive stack and understand critical dependencies; unsatisfactory ownership and management of the end-to-end martech stack.
Over the past few years our journey to simplify began with centralizing resources into an enterprise marketing operations team. TR also consolidated software spend and governance with internal IT, with a shared data lake and visibility across all stakeholders. Technology capability owners now oversee business processes and relevant platforms; a more holistic and supported model than portfolio owners who managed only top-tier platforms and vendors. With help from Sojourn Solutions and using CabinetM, TR created a detailed directory of capabilities, applications, and integrations. Finally, TR developed and instituted a scorecard to evaluate platform performance to inform long-term stack management.
Now that we have streamlined and optimized our stack and created a holistic view of the entire stack, we are ready and well-positioned to consider the introduction of AI. We are actively embedding AI features into marketing and sales activities. Early testing of M365 Copilot, plus exploring AI functionality in existing and proprietary platforms, is spurning a rapid upskill of internal resources. Future plans bring a renewed focus on conversation automation powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). Traversing generative AI, chat, conversational intelligence, appointment scheduling and automated messaging is expected to demonstrably improve TR’s engagement with potential (and current) customers via meaningful conversations capitalizing on interest and demand for TR products and services.
As we explore AI functionality, we will continue in our quest to streamline our marketing technology stack, aiming to increase efficiency and achieve better consolidation and optimization of our martech tools.
Notes on the stack:
Each platform is included in a single layer only, regardless of how it might apply across the full journey. The layers are marketing technology landscape categories via cheifmartec, Scott Brinker: Advertising and Promotion, Content and Experience, Social and Relationships, Commerce and Sales, Data, and Management.