What Happened:
In Late September, OpenAI teased a new AI Sales/Marketing agent called Tailor Assist, designed to scale "hyper-personalized" sales follow-up for inbound leads. The tool uses internal and public knowledge to qualify leads, select the best product fit, and draft custom emails to offer assistance.
Martech stocks dropped sharply following the announcement, with HubSpot falling 13%, Klaviyo declining 18%, and Braze dropping 12% in the days following the September 29 release.
The demo sparked debate among investors and marketing leaders over whether AI agents will augment existing marketing automation platforms, or displace the interface layer that teams use to execute lifecycle, CRM, and sales workflows.
Our Take:
Tailor Assist is part of a coordinated push by OpenAI into vertical business applications. The company also demoed a sales agent that enriches lead data through deep research and schedules meetings autonomously, while AgentKit (launched in October) provides a Zapier-like visual interface for building custom AI workflows.
The market reacted sharply, with several martech platforms declining sharply following the announcement:
The demo notably relied on SendGrid for actual email delivery, and there's no indication it supports SMS, push notifications, or in-app messaging. To reach parity with established lifecycle platforms, Tailor Assist would need to continue building out features and capabilities. Marketing professionals took to LinkedIn to share what those would be.
Michael Burton, CEO of marketing consultancy Stitch shared in a post that replacing a platform like Braze would require:
“Carrier partnerships, global messaging infrastructure, SOC 2 and HIPAA-level compliance, enterprise permissions, SLAs, legal agreements, and a massive customer success organization. That’s a 7–10 year build with hundreds of millions in spend. The probability is <5%.”
But while Burton emphasized infrastructure, others pointed to a different kind of disruption forming. Martech analyst Scott Brinker responded in a comment:
“The risk to major martech platforms is…the potential loss of value in their user experience layer, as people turn to AI products like ChatGPT as the interface to accomplishing much of their work, treating the martech platform as more of a behind-the-scenes set of support services.”
Brinker continued:
“...the battle for the user interface is just getting started. Martech platforms may still win use cases. But it's going to be a battle.”
Time will tell whether Tailor Assist remains an internal experiment or signals that OpenAI intends to compete more directly in this category.