It’s that time of year again - when office Slack channels slow down (thanks office holiday parties), email sends drop like the temperature outside, and Marketing Ops leaders everywhere dare to dream about real vacations. But before we collectively power down our dashboards, it’s worth pausing for a moment of introspection.

When a global organisation like The Associated Press (TAP) wants to modernise its Marketing Operations, the goal isn’t just new tools, it’s creating clarity, compliance, and consistency that scale.

These are the five shifts that we genuinely believe will move the needle in Marketing Operations in 2026... not vague futurism, but the disruptive, systemic changes already brewing under the surface.

When Progress acquired ShareFile, they faced a classic challenge in Marketing Operations: How to migrate an entire marketing automation system into an existing production platform without disrupting campaigns, losing data, or compromising compliance.

The future of Marketing Operations is not “AI everywhere.” It’s humans and AI working together, each doing what they do best. Nail the operating model, and AI stops being a novelty. It becomes the infrastructure behind campaigns that are smarter, faster, and actually work.

For Norstella’s marketing team, reporting had become a scavenger hunt. Data lived across multiple systems, filters didn’t align, and every “simple” question about performance meant another round of manual pulls, spreadsheets, and late nights reconciling mismatched numbers.

Playing it safe can be the very thing stopping teams from evolving. While the world around them accelerates... new tech, new data expectations, new pressures from sales and finance... many teams are still working with agencies that deliver “maintenance,” not momentum. And all the while, there are consultancies out there that operate on a completely different level.

For Dash Solutions, marketing is more than sending campaigns. It's about driving measurable impact in a competitive healthcare disbursements market. Despite a solid Account-Based Selling (ABS) foundation, the company was facing a familiar challenge: Marketing and sales often targeted the same accounts independently, account prioritization was inconsistent, and pipeline attribution was limited. Teams were spread thin, chasing the same prospects, and struggling to understand wh

Marketing Operations leaders occupy one of the most challenging roles in modern marketing. They are the glue that holds strategy, technology, and execution together, responsible for ensuring campaigns run smoothly, data flows accurately, and the marketing engine generates measurable impact. But today, MOPs leaders face a unique pressure that feels almost relentless: The pace of innovation.