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Agentic Commerce Across the Payment Ecosystem

Aaron Press — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how major card networks — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover/Capital One, JCB, and UnionPay — along with noncard players such as PayPal and emerging stablecoin and pay-by-bank rails, are building the infrastructure required for AI agents to discover, authorize, and complete purchases on a buyer’s behalf. It compares each player’s issuing, network, and merchant-acceptance solutions, highlights payment authorization and fraud prevention as the most difficult and consequential steps in the agentic commerce life cycle, and assesses the state of interoperability across competing standards, including AP2, ACP, UCP, TAP, and APOP.

Aaron Press, research director for Worldwide Payment Strategies at IDC, said, “Payment will be the most difficult part of the agentic commerce equation. Banks, networks, and merchant processors will have to work together to ensure consistent, trusted transactions. If any part of the ecosystem falters, the entire process will grind to a halt.”

IDC Survey: Spending Strategy for Retail Merchants and Planners

Ananda Chakravarty — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines the spending strategy for retail merchants and planners.

As retailers plan next year’s technology budgets, they are sequencing investment across the data and analytics layer, inventory and assortment planning, pricing, and the visual merchandising tools that support in-store and online selling or omni-channel selling, deciding which capabilities to fund first and which to defer.

This IDC Survey explores how organization size, revenue scale, geography, luxury positioning, and buyer role shape these sequencing decisions and where a strong top-line spending figure may still conceal a meaningful minority pulling back. This survey draws on 980 worldwide respondents, with regional breakdowns for Asia/Pacific, North America, Latin America, and EMEA and industry-specific perspectives for retail verticals with sample sizes of 70+ respondents, including food and general merchandise, online and catalog, drug stores, apparel, home furnishings, miscellaneous retail, and hospitality and dining.

The document further assesses how spending behavior differs by company size, by IT versus line-of-business buyer role, and by luxury market positioning and identifies which merchandising categories face resistance tied to the category itself rather than to any single market.

Consumer AI 2026: Generation and Gender Perspectives

Greg Ireland — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation leverages IDC survey results to show how the use of AI and AI assistants is affected by and differs across age and gender. Consumers are highly engaged with AI, but consumer age is a key factor in how AI is used. This IDC Market Presentation explores the dynamics of AI usage through the lens of the following generational cohorts: Adult Gen Z, younger millennials, older millennials, Gen X, and boomers.

Consumer AI 2026: The Frequency Effect

Greg Ireland — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation leverages IDC survey results to show how the use of AI and AI assistants is affected by, and differs across, how frequently consumers use AI. In addition to age, frequency of use is a key determinant in how consumers engage with AI. This IDC Market Presentation explores how daily users drive the usage and current and future monetization of consumer AI.

U.S. Wholesale Fixed Voice Market: Traditional Model Sunset Accelerated by Irreversible Structural Shifts

Jitesh Bhayani, Denise Lund, Daniela Rao — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines the structural drivers behind the ongoing decline of the U.S. wholesale fixed voice market and provides strategic guidance for service providers to migrate customers and traffic from legacy switched networks to intelligent, IP-based platforms.

“The U.S. wholesale voice market decline is accelerated by a structural change. Wholesalers need to move traffic and customers off legacy switched infrastructure and onto intelligent, IP-based platforms,” says Jitesh Bhayani, vice president, Worldwide Telecom Research, IDC.

IDC PlanScape: Defining the Opportunity for Hospitality and Travel Media Networks

Dorothy Creamer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PlanScape defines what a media network is for a hospitality or travel operator, explains why the category has become important, identifies the stakeholders who must fund and govern it, and lays out a phased path to grow the bottom line by selling advertising, both to outside brands and to the operator's own on-property and brand-owned ancillaries, products, and services. None of this works without the first-party data that an operator already holds. This data is the targeting engine behind every ad sold through the network, whether the buyer is an outside brand or the operator's own spa or restaurant, and it is what turns advertising from an interruption into a personalized offer a guest is more likely to welcome.

"Every hospitality and travel operation is already sitting on vast amounts of valuable guest and traveler data," says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Strategies, IDC. "This very data is often untouched or ineffectually used to drive revenue for properties and operators. A media network offers the potential to leverage this data twice: once to sell an outside brand's ad and once to sell the operator's own spa appointment or dinner reservation. Most travel and hospitality organizations have not decided who inside the organization owns the opportunity. Brands must build for these opportunities while recognizing the importance of organizational ownership along with the technology decisions that need to be made."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment

Ananda Chakravarty — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors in the worldwide retail merchandise financial planning market. Merchandise financial planning is a decades-old discipline that moved from manual spreadsheets to codified top-down/bottom-up reconciliation built around preseason, in-season, and postseason cycles, with OTB and WSSI tracking. That model has hit its limits, and MFP has begun a dramatic shift toward AI and forward-looking agentic models that run continuously and holistically. For buyers, the harder work is outside the software selection. Retailers need to evaluate their internal planning considerations to determine how to leverage upcoming capabilities in data, AI, and workflows that exceed those of standard spreadsheets. This usually means change management and new ways of working. However, the end results will provide the necessary edge to maintain a modern retail operation and plan accordingly.

“Retailers able to make the transition to leveraging compute technology — whether it is heuristic or more advanced AI — will come away with advantages over those resorting to manual engagement and merchant-only perspectives,” says Ananda Chakravarty, VP Research, IDC Retail, Hospitality, and Media Insights.

IDC Survey: Status of Supply Chain 2026 — Key Findings and Implications from the Retail Technologies and Business Processes and Global Supply Chain Surveys

Ornella Urso, Ananda Chakravarty — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey combines IDC's June 2026 Worldwide Supply Chain Survey and IDC's March 2026 Retail Technologies and Business Process Trends Survey to examine how retail organizations are building agile, data-driven, and customer-centric supply chains. This presentation discusses retailers' strategic priorities and near-term and long-term supply chain agenda, the omni-channel and disruption response challenges they face, and where they are directing project funding and technology investment. It then turns to supply chain orchestration, risk and resilience, and the state of AI adoption across traditional, generative, and agentic AI, benchmarking retail against the broader cross-industry pattern and closing with practical guidance for retail supply chain and technology executives.

Amazon Business Reaches $60 Billion in Annualized Sales: What It Means for Government and Education Buyers

Ruthbea Yesner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Amazon Business reached $60 billion in annualized gross sales in 2Q26, serving more than 11 million organizations worldwide and adding 1.8 million new organizations in the first half of the year alone. Amazon Business is evolving from procurement convenience to strategic platform for public sector organizations, with AI-powered tools, expanded selection, dedicated delivery, and Prime Business benefits bundling cybersecurity, payroll, accounting, and AI productivity.

"Government and education buyers should not interpret this announcement as simply a commercial scale story. The AI tools, delivery infrastructure, and Prime Business benefits expansion represent a deliberate platform play, and the public sector customer base is now substantial enough to support institutional evaluation at the strategic level." — Ruthbea Yesner, group vice president, IDC Worldwide Public Sector

Industry AI and Cloud Path: Media and Entertainment Banner Book

Nadia Ballard, Frank Della Rosa, Alex Holtz, Eric Newmark, Mickey North Rizza — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table banner book includes data for the media and entertainment industry from IDC’s 2026 Industry AI and Cloud Path (IAICP) program.

IAICP provides insights into the adoption, utilization, decisioning, value creation, and strategic planning surrounding AI (including agentic AI and generative AI) and cloud, by industry, for 25+ different industries, including financial services (banking, insurance, and capital markets); energy (oil and gas and utilities); government (national/federal/civilian, state/provincial/local, and national security/military/defense); education (K–12 — U.S. only, higher education); healthcare (payers and providers — U.S. only); life sciences (pharma, biotech, and medical devices); manufacturing (discrete and process); transportation, retail, hospitality, and foodservice (including commercial travel); and media and entertainment.

Covered topics include:

Generative AI: The use, impact, and value creation of AI within each industry, including 200+ industry use cases
Cloud: Each industry’s journey to the cloud, adoption levels, migration strategies, drivers and inhibitors, budgeting trends, purchasing preferences, buying channels, vendor ratings and advocacy scores, behavioral trends, and cloud adoption and buying intentions for 300+ industry-specific applications and workloads.

IDC’s 2026 Industry AI and Cloud Path program also includes in-depth customer satisfaction ratings on 6 major cloud service providers’ delivery of these technologies across 18 metrics by industry