The ’90s are back! Like crop tops, oversized blazers, baggy jeans, Lauryn Hill, and partying like it’s 1999, we’re reviving marketing operations technology with a remixed name: marketing operations management solutions (MOMS). But these aren’t your frumpy mom jeans of the ’90s; these are a sleeker deconstructed 2026 version (and now with AI!). Forrester defines MOMS as:

Technology that enables marketers to manage financial planning and budgeting, projects, workload planning and production, content planning and production, assets, and performance analytics.

Today’s marketers buy piecemeal tools based on individual use cases. As such, the MOMS market consists of fragmented solutions with a diaspora of capabilities to meet multiple needs. MOMS continue to play a behind-the-scenes but critical and mighty role within martech ecosystems, bridging customer insights to marketing strategy to brand engagement to plan optimization. And like those stalwart mom jeans, marketers use MOMS to demonstrate marketing value and ROI, improve marketing efficiency, and centralize marketing plans and activities.

A (requisite) note about AI: Like every technology, MOMS aren’t immune to the AI hype. For marketing operations, AI has the potential to accelerate workflow automation, ease intelligent planning, optimize creative briefs, and support autonomous orchestration, but marketing departments must first overcome their reluctance to embrace wholesale marketing operations. Marketers should enforce a centralized marketing operations system with defined, optimized, and documented internal processes and workflows to spur AI readiness. Otherwise, new AI capabilities and agents will not only fail to provide their promised value but will amplify the dysfunction, automating bad decisions and scaling inefficiency.

Check out our latest report, The Marketing Operations Management Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, for an overview of 24 vendors and how their unique value propositions support a plethora of marketing operations functions’ needs. This report examines marketing use cases across a broad spectrum, including:

  • Financial planning and budgeting.
  • Spend management and reconciliation.
  • Workload planning and management.
  • Project management.
  • Content planning and production.
  • Content distribution.
  • Asset management.
  • Marketing ops and performance analytics and reporting.

Nostalgia, questions, comments, concerns? Schedule a guidance session or inquiry with Katie Linford and Jessica Liu!