This summer Chado hosted an Agentic App Challenge designed to demonstrate a defining shift in the marketing industry: the rise of AI-enabled martech agencies that can move beyond campaign delivery and begin building the tools, systems, and products needed to execute modern growth strategies.

Chado defines itself as a martech agency, but the company believes that definition will soon become the norm rather than the exception. Just as the internet helped trigger a new industrial age by changing how businesses communicated, sold, measured, and scaled, AI is now creating another major shift in how work gets imagined and built. For marketing, the implications are especially significant.

Before AI, marketing agencies typically developed the strategic idea, identified the data and technology required to execute it, searched for existing platforms that came close to what was needed, and then shaped the final approach around the limits of available tools. Agencies that embrace AI can now begin to reverse that order. They can shape tools around the idea, instead of shrinking the idea to fit the tool.

The Agentic App Challenge invited participants from a range of non-coding backgrounds to submit a functional, agentic coded app. For Chado, the competition was not only about finding a winning product. It was a practical signal of the role marketing agencies will increasingly play: not just as paid media, communications, and strategy specialists, but as product thinkers, product builders, and owners of the systems that make marketing work.

To judge the competition, Chado brought together a high-profile panel made up of John Ellul, Co-Founder of Veracloud; Andre Schembri, Director of Engineering at KVLR Code; Roderick Bartolo, Founder of Born Digital; and Chado Founder Andrew Farrugia. The calibre of the panel reflected the ambition behind the initiative, bringing together perspectives from technology, transformation, engineering, leadership, and commercial growth.

"Martech is not just a buzzword that combines marketing and technology," said Matt Chetcuti, CMO of Chado. "It describes where the industry is going. Within the next decade, we believe every serious marketing agency will define itself, or at least part of what it does, through martech. AI changes the centre of gravity. Agencies are no longer limited to choosing the closest existing platform. We can now create the tools our strategies need."

The judging panel included Roderick Bartolo, whose experience spans risk, data, AI, and digital transformation, including leadership of data science teams and national-scale technology programmes. Andre Schembri brought a practical engineering perspective, with a focus on how AI systems are built, tested, and made useful in real business environments.

John Ellul added a senior external perspective on innovation and applied technology, while Andrew Farrugia represented Chado's focus on commercial AI adoption and practical agentic systems.

"The significance of this initiative is that it moves the conversation from AI theory to working practice," said Andrew Farrugia, Founder of Chado. "Marketing has always depended on ideas, execution, and measurement. What is different now is that agencies can start owning more of the product layer that connects those things. The challenge created a clear standard: ideas matter, but functional systems matter more."

The winning submission was called Chadata, created by Kirsten Saliba. The app is a marketing performance dashboard that connects paid ads, email, social, CRM, and other client marketing channels into one live portal. It uses AI to translate campaign data into actionable insights, helping agencies communicate performance clearly and helping clients understand the value they are receiving.

Kirsten described the app as: "Chadata turns marketing reporting from a monthly chore into a continuous proof of value. While many reports bury clients under vanity KPIs and disconnected data, Chadata connects paid ads, email, social, CRM, and other marketing channels into one live dashboard, then uses AI to surface the meaningful metrics that actually move the needle. The agency and the client stay focused on the numbers that matter, not noise."

For Chado, the challenge was less about a single winning app and more about what the initiative proved. AI-enabled marketing work can now be built, tested, judged, and improved through practical product challenges. By bringing together a respected judging panel and setting a functional build standard, Chado aimed to show that the future of marketing agencies will not be limited to campaigns, content, and reports. It will increasingly include the creation of the tools and systems that make better marketing possible.

About Chado

Chado is a martech agency helping businesses turn strategy, creativity, data, AI, and execution into practical systems for growth. Chado works across marketing, automation, reporting, and agentic workflows to create commercial value through both marketing expertise and technology-enabled execution.