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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#808: Resident Expert: Bill Staikos on the market activity in 2025 MarTech & CX platforms and what 2026 will bring
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I'm Alexander Fairweather, raised by one of the world's great creative geniuses, John Chamberlain, on his famous foam couches. Now I'm on the couch again with today's boldest creative minds for conversations that will spark your creativity and give you the courage to create something new. On the couch. Launches May 19 with John Gray of Ghetto Gastro, whose food will make you rethink who belongs at the table. Season 1 Daniel Arsham, Alexander Wang, Annabelle Seldorf and more. Subscribe wherever you stream and follow along at John Chamberlain Estate.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in.
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As a marketing or CX leader, you often spend so much time on the strategies and tactics that keep your brand growing that it's difficult to keep up with what's going on in the background background with the platforms and the companies behind them. While agility requires a flexible technology stack, it also requires a leadership mindset that can distinguish market noise from genuine strategic opportunity and filter out the hype to understand the shifts that can impact customers and the bottom line. The ability to pivot your people, processes and platforms in response to major market shifts is no longer a nice to have, but rather a competitive advantage. Today I'm excited to Talk with our 2026 resident expert on the CX and Martech platform landscape. We're going to focus on the business and business opportunities that mergers, acquisitions and big moves in the market provide to these platforms customers. Our focus today is going to be a recap of market activity in 2025 with an eye towards what to expect in 2026. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Bill Stakos, Founder at B Customer Led. Bill, welcome to the show.
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Bill Stakos
Super excited to be here. Thanks for having Me on Greg.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this and certainly love that you're a resident expert here. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself for those that aren't familiar and your role at Bcustomerled?
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Bill Stakos
Yeah, so I've spent over 20 years as an operator leading and building customer led programs and teams largely in financial services. Have spent time on the SaaS side as well as started my consulting company B customer led about six months ago. And we help organizations kind of rethink their operating model around the customer. That includes tech, that includes governance, that includes sort of organizational structure, talent, et cetera. So it's been an exciting kind of run so far and yeah, last year was a doozy and I think this year is going to be one too. On the tech side at least.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well yeah, then let's dive right in. And what themes did you see in 2025 and maybe how is 2020 relative to prior years?
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Bill Stakos
Yeah, so I think there are like three kind of big themes or so in 2025. But if we kind of like zoom out a little bit on this, right. Like yeah, it, it was organizations not just buying kind of features or rounding out platforms. I think it really was about defensibility. Right. So how do you, like, how do you think about trusted benchmarks? How do you think about vertical data? How do you think about the operational loop turning insights into real action whether in the marketing side or on the sort of core experiential side. So when I think about like defensibility, I think about like the big sort of major sort of event was the Qualtrics acquisition of Press Ganey. Even had Press Ganey buying or Press G forced a Qualtrics bought you, you know, you had in moment in there before Qualtrics even stepped in. And like I think that's a really strong example of a private equity business seeing an opportunity to really kind of create a moat and buy up sort of a marketplace. I think that really impacted the market. I think other notable examples might be just like private equity rebuilding the tech stack through rollups. And I think we saw obviously the Thoma Bravo acquiring Varint and then sort of bringing it together with Calabrio to create a larger automation platform. Everstone majority stake in Wing Wing Ify, excuse me, you know, they combined Wing of Fire with a B Tasty that created sort of a scaled experiment, experimentation and optimization platform. And then three, I think really importantly, I think the context center automation moved from more innovation to really thinking about core economics and that's what that play is really about. So you got nice acquiring cognigy, conversational and agentic AI vendor. You had RingCentral acquiring Community WFM, so building kind of workforce management into the contact center offering. And finally, I think you also saw a lot of consolidation and. Right. Sizing at the same time. And I think that was important because you just, you have a lot of, just market environment, market dynamics impacting the marketplace and you saw a lot of that happening.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So one of the things I noticed you didn't explicitly mention was AI or, you know, just let's, let's slap some, some AI on it or whatever. Well, you know, certainly there was plenty of that.
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Bill Stakos
Yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
For all the hype and all the, all the talk about it, you know, what, what were you. How much of some of this was driven by the need to kind of shore up AI capabilities?
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Bill Stakos
I think that, look, I think that the AI conversation was obviously a big theme, like the variant, the nice acquisition. Like those were very AI centric and kind of rounding out those platforms. You know, they're not, they're not building it on their own. They can just go buy it. And certainly the market or the rate environment certainly was getting better yet reduced sort of or lower share prices or valuations on a lot of these companies. Even Orlando Bravo came out, I think just this week, talking about reduce share, reduced valuations is making the market for private equity very attractive again, interestingly, on the AI side, yet a lot of VC money flowing into the space. I'm sure you saw that as well. And you know, everyone's trying to pick the right pink pony. Right. So like everyone's kind of like trying to like get the dollars flowing. And certainly investors are very eager to, to try and capitalize on that. So you had not only so the VC kind of piece filling some of the gap on the private equity side, but now private equity now coming back and saying, wait, there's a lot of good opportunity for us here. And now you really see them starting to invest in different ways. Either direct investment, privatizing companies, but also from the perspective of rolling up companies in their portfolio.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Were there any surprises or maybe even missed opportunities? Looking back at 2025, I think the
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Bill Stakos
press, Ganey Forsta and Qualtrics move that surprised a lot of people. One, because it creates a new playbook, so to speak. Right. I think the winning vendors will not only defend themselves with new features, but they're also defending themselves with benchmarks, vertical data. I mean, like, think about the healthcare play. There For Qualtrics, they've basically locked down the health care space. So I think that was a bit of a surprise and sort of rethinking the way certainly the broader vendors are thinking about the marketplace. I think how aggressively private equity is, is kind of shaping the tech stack. Again, I think that is a bit of surprise. And you know, we saw that in some of the transactions that I mentioned. And I think some of the missed opportunity is there are too many buyers that still treat M and A as an excuse maybe to buy more tools and not an opportunity subtract. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that and what that would mean. But I think that there's a lot of opportunity as a buyer, if you're seeing this M and A activity, you really need to think about what does it mean for me and then how do I take advantage of that? Because I think that there really is a lot of advantage for buyers right now in the marketplace place too.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, let's, let's go there then. And you know, from a, from a cmo, from a C suite level, you know, what, what should they be doing? I mean, obviously things are going to continue to change into 2026 and beyond, but, you know, what should they be doing knowing directionally what's been happening over the last 12 months or so?
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Bill Stakos
So I'm always a proponent and I'm counseling enterprises right now. First and foremost, I think you really have to look at what are the success metrics that you've got in place with that vendor, not only how are you successfully leveraging it to achieve your goals inside the company, but then even from a shared scorecard perspective, maybe with that vendor or with that partner. So, you know, thinking about, you know, at least, you know, my, my real space is, is customer experience, broadly thinking about like Insight Velocity, operational impact and tracking these metrics and not sort of your traditional uptime or runtime. Right. Okay. Those are kind of table stakes at this point, I think. Number two, I think you can treat the consolidation as a contract moment. Right. And not necessarily a press release moment. I think a lot of people were clearly caught by surprise on the Qualtrics deal. But that being said, I think that there's real opportunity for your source and your procurement team, other leaders and the owners or the economic buyer of that capability to say, okay, big transaction, I'm going to look, you know, I might be coming up for renewal as an example. Here's an opportunity for me to take advantage of the fact that there's a Lot of change happening and a lot of transition going on at this organization. So I think that really puts the buyer in a really good position to think about, think about it as a contract moment. I think the third right move also is how do you rationalize the tech stack, particularly given the consolidation. A lot of enterprises are using multiple capabilities, some with overlap. So as you've got this consolidation happening, or even the privatization plays happening, or even sort of thinking about that investment in AI, I think it's a really good opportunity to kind of map out, right. All the technology that you're buying. How does it relate to the problems as a business that you're trying to solve? How does it accelerate your strategy as a business? And then how are all these systems connected, not only to each other, but also to your data and also to your front lines, frankly, the people on the ground making decisions every day and rethinking that architecture with your CIO partners and other teams internally and business owners. I think there's like these moments right now create a lot of opportunity for that. And you should bring the vendors into that conversation.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Bill Stakos
I mean, they're your partners, after all. And I think that they can be critical in helping you understand that. Now if they can't be, I think you've got your answer in terms of where you rationalize or right size sort of capabilities.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
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Bill Stakos
But nonetheless, I think there's a really good opportunity to kind of start to rethink that. And finally, I would say, you know, building sort of like the CFO friendly automation map. And what I mean by that is if you think about conversational AI as an operating program with containment targets, quality targets, a plan for human escalation in there, even I think the fastest teams are connecting automation and outcomes associated with automation back to root cause. So the organization can actually think about like why was the work existing in the first place? And tying those business outcomes to the capabilities is really critical. And that goes obviously back to the success metrics I was talking about. A lot of CFOs are focused on growth, but they're also really focused on is this platform, is this capability helping me drive the business outcomes that we need to be driving as a business? And that can be growth, revenue, that can be efficiency, that could be lowering risk, and in many cases even proving the culture or the organization by putting these tools that empower people every day. So I think procurement gets sharper. I think we're seeing teams, right size, using fit for purpose tools for very specific needs, as well as keeping sort of like the core backbone where governance really matters. And I think smaller players are coming into the mix certainly. But you know, those core big platforms are becoming more meaningful as sort of the backbone in that broader tech stack in that architecture.
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Greg Kilstrom
To your point about, you know. Right. Sizing, you know, I was at Treasure Data is their CDP world in Las Vegas last fall and you know, one of the, the figures that struck me, they I'm going to butcher the exact numbers so I won't even bother, I'll put a link in the show notes or something. But what struck me they had somebody from Forrester talking and they said this within the last year or so was the first year that, you know, the number of platforms keeps growing and the, that Martech super graphic keeps, you know, getting crazier and crazier. But this was the first time where the average number of platforms used per company actually decreased. This was talking specifically about martech, but you know, I think it can apply to, you know, more, more broadly. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting phenomenon when, you know, we talk about tool sprawl and all this stuff. And that's real, you know, trust me. And I'm sure you experience it as
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Bill Stakos
well, but as a buyer and as a seller.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, right, right. But you know, the fact that these companies are, you know, the average number of platforms actually went down, you know, seems like a trend worth, you know, worth looking into as well.
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Bill Stakos
Look, I think if you look at the last, let's say couple of years in the market environment, one, there's just a lot of uncertainty in the market still is today on some level. A lot of that uncertainty, frankly is also driven by AI.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Bill Stakos
Like I'd say 2024, the pendulum really swung towards and sort of like just the mind share swung towards AI. How are we investing? What are we doing? Let's bring in solutions and let's test. I think 2025 and I really actually saw a really big shift in the spring of 2025. I don't know kind of what happened, but I think like companies start to wake up to the fact that one, this is harder than it sounds or looks, two, our data really needs to be in much better shape, three, this is super expensive and four, I think, you know, the kind of foundational thinking around, oh boy, it's just not kind of a plug and play thing and let it run like I put in a prompt, the chat GPT, it's much more complicated than that.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Bill Stakos
The conversation really started swinging towards growth and identifying sort of opportunities for Efficiency. So totally understand that data. And I agree with it. And it's not just Martech, but it's, it's happening across SaaS. I think generally you also have sort of these big consolidations that are happening part of the, part of the, sort of the driver for that. And I think that that tech stack rethinking or Right. Sizing or you know, figuring out like how does this all connect and be meaningful and being intentional about that. I think the CIO function in a lot of these big organizations and mid sized companies frankly are starting to take a harder look and you know, putting a sharper pencil to the architecture diagram because of that. So which I think is a good thing. I think it's a good thing for the marketplace. I think it's a good thing for buyers, you know, forces vendors to also rethink how they are positioning their platform differently and relative to some of these changes in the market, which I think is healthy.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well. And so looking forward to the year ahead. You know, this show's going to run in early February. So you know, we're at the beginning of the year still. You know, one of the things that I'm seeing, you know, related to AI and certainly Agentic is the buzzword of, you know, I would say the last few months. And you know, again, as with all the AI stuff, I think some of the hype's justified at least, but not necessarily all. But you know, what I'm seeing is there, there seems to be a number of players that are trying to be the hub of Agentic and all that and you know, everybody can't be the hub. Right. There's got to be some spokes out there and, and stuff. Is that what you're seeing in, you know, as, as well and you know, how does, how does this kind of play out? Are there going to be like two or three players when all, all is said and done or is this, is this going to stay competitive like this for, for a while?
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Bill Stakos
So I think I'm going to burst some folks bubbles and hopefully I'm not going to burst yours on this, Greg. You know, I think the agentic kind of thing for 2026 is not going to pan out and I might be going against the market on that a little bit, but I think they're going to continue to be some small investments and pilots, so to speak. But when you look at the data and what's going on, you've got, you know, and I think might be there's data out there even right now. And I can give it to you and put it in the show notes maybe. Yeah, there's like 15% of CIOs are saying they don't really trust agents being autonomous in their organization. Right. You've got CEOs similarly saying I'm not really seeing the value. You've got CEOs saying go forth and let's go do this and we're, we're AI fied and we're going forward. But then on the ground a lot of people are using their own Personal Tools, LLMs to kind of do work. They're not really being truthful still about how they're using AI. And I think frankly there's a lot of fear around Agentic and what does that mean? So there's a really big disconnect when you look at the data, what's happening. So at some point I think we will see the proliferation of agentic really coming to the fore. I think the headlines are not going to meet up with sort of like the real story essentially. Now that being said in the contact center 100% that that will be the story and there will be a lot of efficiency again, kind of going back to the core economics of Agentic and how that can really transform your contact center, your service center. I think absolutely we're going to see that play out. You will continue to see consolidation in the marketplace. You know that number that you kind of highlighted earlier, I think that number is going to continue to go down and also I think that we will continue to see organizations just right size and really look for that roi. And a couple more things I might add there. One, you know, you and I have talked about synthetic data a lot. I think 2026 is the year of synthetic data. Companies are starting to wake up to the fact that it is a great compliant and kind of low risk way to kind of test and learn in an organization that has meaning for companies in health care, financial services or other highly regulated industries. So I think that's going to be a bigger story in marketing, in research, in more broadly. And I think that's going to start to flow into sort of the data side of the organization as well. And then finally I think sort of like the capital market add on, I think you're going to see a lot of, you know, more, even more VC money coming into the AI space and buying up these or investing in these smaller companies that are frankly starting to take market share from kind of the big players that you would consider in our respective discipline. And yeah, I'm excited for that. It'll be interesting how it all shakes out. But yeah, I think the consolidation play, I think the right sizing will continue. I think the contact center from a core economics perspective is going to continue to evolve and certainly be kind of like the breeding ground for agentic and how that rolls out then more broadly in the business and then just sort of the money flow will continue.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Well, Bill, looking forward to following the, the trends here with you this year. So we'll check back in with you next quarter and, and see how things are going, see how things are shaping up.
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Bill Stakos
I think that, you know, quarter by quarter we're going to see a lot of interesting stuff start to play out. I think there'll be more privatization as well of organizations and the private equity, big private equity players will continue to, to buy up those SaaS companies. So we'll have a lot to talk about. Quarter over quarter.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I believe it. Yeah. Nice. Well, Bill, thanks again for joining. And one last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Bill Stakos
Great question. Look, I keep a running dialogue of sort of the big moves. I talk to operators as well as leaders at these vendors pretty consistently. You know, I try and keep sort of a short list of proof questions and I use AI to do a lot of the research and digging for me and you know, that has really helped and I've got sort of a system in place and kind of help keep me up to date in terms of what's going on. And yeah, that's been super helpful and really has helped me scale into sort of my thinking around this space.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, love it.
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Bill Stakos
Great to be here. Thanks so much Greg.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, thank you. Well, again I'd like to thank Bill Stacos, founder at B Customer Led for joining the show. You can learn more about Bill and B Customer Led by following the links
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in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more at Television and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S T R O M the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Bill Stakos
He is the most unpredictable vote on this court.
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