In building an app that let’s you search all your work information in one place, and a 20,000 person artificial intelligence community, Avi Eisenberger, Samiur Rahman, Mark Philpot and I have taken the time to consider what might come next.

Over the past few years, well-known venture capitalists like Tom Tunguz have written about the explosion of niche software tools used across marketing, productivity, design, sales, and engineering categories.

The majority of their articles consider impacts that companies experience, but less thought has been given to the impact on the individuals who have to juggle all the tools.

Meanwhile, the number of marketing tools alone has grown by 3233% over the past 7 years and is showing no signs of stopping.

Today, all information workers rely on dozens of apps to do their jobs.

They (and the companies they work for) benefit enormously from using the best tool for their every need: emailing, calendaring, storing files, building spreadsheets, checking off to-do’s, writing notes, filing support tickets, and doing job-function specific tasks.

Unfortunately, the same handful of tools that helps people do their job effectively also causes them to suffer. People stress over the thought of missing out on important information and feel a lack of control when their work is scattered across a bunch of tools.

Yet, the tools create too much value to justify a call for a consolidation of them into a single platform that does a little bit of everything. Someone will need to make it easier for individuals to see, search, and stay on top of all their work from one starting point. It’s the only way you’ll have a chance of becoming the workplace superhero we all know and love: a deliberate ass-kicker who understands, juggles, and masters all the tools her job requires.

Let’s start by looking at the tool explosion from the eyes of a company.

The Benefits of the App Explosion

There are 5,381 available marketing services in 2017. The number might sound overwhelming, but the benefits from all the niche tools are too great for us to return to a world where employees depend on monolithic software (think IBM) that is decent at everything but not great at one thing.

The market is able to support all these tools since they make it possible for teams to achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible. Organizations within companies now have the power to build a “tech stack” of the best individual tools needed to handle their responsibilities and nail their big, hairy, audacious, goals.

Companies win as a result.

For example, a marketing team can use Google Analytics to measure website performance, AdRoll to retarget, Optimizely to optimize conversions, HubSpot to manage customers and prospects, Mixpanel to analyze funnels, Intercom to communicate with customers, and to top it all off, Salesforce to manage customer and campaign data.

Other teams build their own tech stacks too — not just marketing. If you’re an engineer, a designer, a salesperson, or anything in between, you already know that your job requires you to juggle a handful of products.

As long as this differentiation is substantial, we will continue to see fragmentation. A marketer who uses a best in class marketing automation solution to attain their lead and meeting numbers is not going to give up that piece of software without a fight. — Tom Tunguz

All of this isn’t to say that the tool explosion has been easy on companies — it hasn’t.

But, the most painful issues have been sorted out. It was once impossible to use insights from one tool to better serve customers in a separate tool. MuleSoft, Zapier, IFTTT, Segment, Datadog and mParticle came to the rescue to make data integration across tools simple. They make it easy for companies to collect all their customers’ data, and send it to any other tool it needs to be.

Now all tools across a company’s tech stack can talk to each other. Companies benefit by building a single, robust record of all their customers, and it includes data from every single one of their tools. The app explosion created two major question marks for companies, but now they can be answered:

“Does our customer data have to live in separate silos?” No. “Do I have to look in 10 places to see and use all my customers’ data?” No.

The tool explosion has been great for companies, but it hasn’t been as kind to individuals.

The Individual Costs of the App Explosion