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Google Breathes New Life into Wristband Fitness Trackers with Fitbit Edge

Ramon T. Llamas — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC Market Glance: Consumer AI, 3Q26

Tom Mainelli — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance maps the consumer AI ecosystem across four layers: foundation models, AI hardware, AI interfaces and platforms, and AI-native applications, giving executives and product teams a current-state view of how the market is structured and where they fit competitively. IDC’s take is that AI assistants are becoming the front door for discovery and shopping; on-device AI is reshaping everyday workflows across PCs, phones, and wearables; AI companions are emerging as a distinct segment beyond productivity; and memory shortages are creating a cost floor that will slow access to affordable AI devices.

IDC Survey: The Customer Is Already Buying — What Large Energy Consumers Want from Their Energy Supplier

Gaia Gallotti, Roberta Bigliani — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presents results from IDC's 2026 Worldwide Energy Transition Survey, curated specifically for the energy supplier and energy retailer audience across both regulated and liberalized energy markets. The survey covers 1,135 large organizations in 17 countries across manufacturing, buildings and facilities, transportation and logistics, construction, retail, and datacenters, measuring investment direction, drivers, commercial models, external partnerships, and the outcomes these organizations have achieved from their energy transition initiatives.

Rather than repeating IDC's existing buyer-facing and vendor-facing readouts of this data, this presentation isolates the questions and segment cuts that speak directly to what a supplier or retailer should sell, to whom, and on what commercial terms, covering the buying signal, the commercial models customers already use, and where the largest unmet opportunity and proven payoff sit.

Two customer segments, datacenters and transportation and logistics, are called out individually wherever their behavior diverges meaningfully from the full base of large energy consumers.

IDC TechBrief: AI-Powered Shopping Assistants in Conversational Commerce and the Compression of Retail Purchase Paths

Ornella Urso — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI-powered shopping assistants are compressing the discovery-to-decision stage of the retail purchase path from a multi-day, multi-tab search process into a single conversation, while the final checkout step has proven far harder to compress and mostly still resolves back to the retailer. That unevenness is, on balance, reassuring: The part of the relationship retailers worry most about losing has largely stayed with them.

The less visible shift is what happens to brand trust once a third party starts narrating the product. An assistant's judgment can already override a brand's own claims often enough to change outcomes, the mechanism by which that happens is largely invisible to the brand, and the retail systems built to serve human browsers do not map cleanly onto agent behavior in inventory, fraud, session state, or the org chart. None of these are reasons to wait. They are reasons to treat conversational commerce as a brand-trust and architecture program with a conversational interface attached, sponsored jointly by ecommerce, data, legal, and marketing leadership, rather than a chat/video interface with a data problem underlying it.

IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides an overview of the results from IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards. This award program recognizes the leading CX vendors in each application market that receive the highest customer satisfaction scores based on IDC’s CX Path Survey.

IDC’s CX Path Survey is a global survey of over 2,500 organizations across all geographic regions and company sizes, where customers are asked to rate their vendor on more than 30 different customer satisfaction metrics.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Is 5G Changing What Consumers Do on Their Mobile Devices?

Jason Leigh, Jitesh Gera — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the impact of 5G on U.S. consumers’ on-device activities. The analysis finds that while video-related uses — streaming, recording, sharing — have ticked up slightly in the past year, use cases such as AR/VR that stand to benefit from 5G’s performance have regressed in consumer interactions.

“To date, 5G vendors and mobile operators have not done a good job of showing why 5G matters to the typical consumer — a lot of rhetoric, but few experiential opportunities,” says Jason Leigh, research director, 5G & Wireless Services. “The inability to distinguish between 4G LTE and 5G for the consumer curtails opportunities to monetize the network. Greater collaboration between mobile vendors and app developers is essential to innovate around the user experience and ensure that 5G and the upcoming 6G investments will drive a return on investment.”

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Drives SMBs to Select a Trusted Provider for Their Overall Connectivity Strategy?

Daniela Rao — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight provides insight into the top reasons driving European midmarket SMBs (100–999 employees) to choose the most trusted connectivity provider. The results are based on IDC's August 2026 worldwide Future Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey, European SMB subsample.

"The choice of the primary connectivity provider is driven by trust built through a long-term relationship and the involvement of top management, to ensure that services align with the company's strategy and network reliability requirements," said Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, Worldwide Telecom and Unified Communication at IDC.

IDC Survey: SMB Communications Services Survey, 2026 — Bundled Services

Daniela Rao — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey explores the key adoption drivers and preferences of telecom bundled services among U.S. small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), based on findings from IDC's 2026 SMB Communications Services Survey, collected in August 2026.

What We Saw: U.S. Consumer and Office Print Activity, 2Q26

Geoffrey Wilbur — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective provides an update on office and consumer printer shipment activity in the second quarter of 2026 for the United States.

"Printer and MFP shipments fell dramatically in 2Q26 in the U.S. In the second quarter, the Middle East War and related energy price shocks caused businesses and consumers to restrain print device spending, while unrelated supply chain disruptions reduced shipments to below already-weak demand. While supply chain issues seem to have been resolved, geopolitical events, a struggling U.S. GDP, and uncertainty around memory shortages are expected to continue to suppress print hardware spending for the rest of 2026, offering an opportunity for performance above the long-term trend in 2027 if existing supply and demand drivers improve," says Geoffrey Wilbur, research manager, Imaging, Printing, and Document Solutions, IDC.

From Rooms to Experiences: 2026 Trends in Workplace Technology

Gala Spasova — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Presentation sets out the trends shaping workplace collaboration and design in 2026, each with its drivers, indicators to watch, and IDC recommendations.

AI is moving through the workspace in three waves: First, it enters the meeting room, then it moves into the managed estate, and finally into the building itself. In 2026, agentic AI is leaving pilots, offices are filling again, and organizations are redesigning facilities around intelligence, management, and experience. The latest product wave, seen at InfoComm 2026, confirms how quickly this is becoming a reality.