Why Does Everyone Want To Be An Operating System?

The appeal of the operating system concept is straightforward. It meets marketers’ need for technology and service ecosystems that can manage and coordinate workflows across people, process, tools, and AI agents rather than simply execute isolated tasks. And it gives providers facing the SaaS-pocalypse a stronger commercial narrative.

Many providers across the technology and services markets are already converging on the “OS” idea, positioning their offerings as the technology layer that coordinates data, content, workflows, decisions, and AI. Technological developments like open APIs, MCP servers, composable architectures, and agentic AI allow them to connect previously isolated systems and orchestrate workflows across them. But they are using the same label to describe very different offerings. WPP applies it to an agency platform spanning creative, media, strategy, production, and commerce, Zeta Global to enterprise intelligence and activation, Sanity.io to content, and Sprinklr to customer experience management.

Let’s not pretend this is entirely about technology. In an era of SaaS fatigue, slowing software growth, category saturation, and increasing pressure to demonstrate business outcomes, marketing partners are also desperate for differentiation and a stronger story than just another SaaS application or AI agent launch. Applications are replaceable. For the provider, pivoting to an “operating system” creates a (potentially) stickier value proposition: ownership of orchestration, strategic influence, and a seat above individual workflows.

Marketing’s Operating System Reflects Marketers’ Need For Orchestration

Marketers’ need for orchestration is real and growing. Some 73% of B2C marketers plan to increase their investments in marketing operations technology in 2026. And of the 85% of B2B marketing organizations that produced integrated campaigns, 90% agree that integrated campaigns delivered more value than separately executed programs and tactics.

AI has proven it can accelerate work, but translating efficiency into better business outcomes remains challenging. According to Forrester’s data, 21% of B2C marketers identify productivity as AI’s greatest benefit, compared with only 10% citing improved conversions and 9% citing new revenue opportunities.

Most marketing organizations already operate across sprawling ecosystems of applications, channels, agencies, data sources, and increasingly AI agents. Consider a retailer preparing its holiday campaigns: customer data, creative assets, media execution, and measurement may reside in separate systems and are often managed by different teams and partners. AI can improve each activity, but marketers need those activities to work together.

As marketing performance and AI spending come under greater scrutiny, providers that promise to coordinate data, workflows, decisions, and execution will become even more attractive to marketers. Yet less than half of B2C marketing and advertising decision-makers say they have formally defined and documented marketing processes. Orchestration depends as much on process and workflow design as it does technology integration, and the “operating system” trend predominantly addresses the latter.

OS Reality Requires More Than Technology

“Operating system” is emerging as a favorite phrase for marketing in the AI era, but it’s not immune to hype fatigue. Every week seems to bring another operating system launch, another orchestration layer, and another fleet of AI agents. But marketing cannot solve its orchestration challenges by simply adding another technology layer. Marketers must also redesign the operating model, including how people and AI agents divide work, how decisions move across teams, and how interconnected workflows are governed. Only then can they evaluate how any operating system offering would enhance, supplement, or complicate those marketing processes and workflows.

Three developments will determine whether “marketing operating systems” become a business reality or stay a product marketing fad:

  • Marketers rethinking org structures, workflows, and ways of working to integrate AI. For decades, marketing has responded to new channels and technologies with incremental evolution. As new opportunities emerged with digital marketing and social media, marketing teams expanded to manage more channels with more specialists, requiring more people and more coordination. With AI, marketing has reached a familiar decision point: add another layer onto the legacy model or reinvent the operating system? Forrester sees now as the time for marketers to transform and build the AI-enabled marketing organization.
  • Agencies assembling and operating systems for end-to-end orchestration. To date, agencies have maintained proprietary or white-label media activation and content development platforms developed in siloes and designed for point solutions. Agentic AI allows agencies to connect capabilities into into end-to-end advertising and marketing workflows powered by data, automatin, and human expertise. As a result, agencies can evolve into operators of integrated marketing systems. For example, WPP Open, Omni.AI or Stagwell’s The Machine use a universal UI, data graph, creative studios and media activation to bring employees and AI agents into shared workflows for strategy, content and execution.
  • AI agents for marketing reaching mainstream adoption. Technical innovation and increased marketing organizational readiness for agentic AI pave the way for marketing AI agents to develop into practical and productive tools. These agents comprise a marketing-specific implementation of agentic AI, specifically designed to autonomously execute multiple marketing tasks on a goal-oriented basis. Marketing AI agents will provide the technical and workflow interoperability and efficiency to deliver on the operating system’s promise to coordinate and govern data, insights, production, and execution.

What’s Next

Over the coming months, our research will explore:

Request a guidance session to learn more and explore how your organization should orchestrate people, technology, services, data, and AI agents to deliver business outcomes.

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