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IDC Market Glance: EMEA AI-Ready Workforce, 3Q26

Leonardo Freitas, Amy Loomis, Ph.D. — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document intended to visually depict a concise current-state view of the EMEA AI-ready workforce ecosystem. It groups providers into three segments (software, services, and hardware) and nine subsegments that follow the employee life cycle, including talent acquisition, core HR, AI platforms and agents, and governance. This EMEA edition keeps the worldwide structure and definitions and adjusts vendor selection to the region.

Wearables and Connnected Devices: From Fitness Trend to Health Infrastructure

Silvia Piai — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation examines how consumers are adopting wearables, remote monitoring, and mood-tracking devices, and what that behavior means for providers and medtech/digital health vendors navigating an increasingly connected consumer health journey.

Wearables and remote health monitoring (RHM) are moving beyond the adoption question. Comfort with device-enabled care is now comparable with other virtual-care modalities, and health-related wearable use is established rather than niche. The next challenge is what happens after adoption. Remote monitoring is used routinely, often weekly, yet much of the data still sits outside clinical workflows. Satisfaction depends on control, fit with daily life, and clear information. Consumers are also broadly willing to share device data for care when the value exchange is clear.

Drawing on IDC's 2026 Connected Health Consumer Survey, this presentation examines what these shifts mean for providers, medtech, and digital health vendors as connected care becomes a more continuous part of individual health journeys and clinical care.

"Device adoption is only the first step," said Silvia Piai, research director, Connected Health and Medical Devices Digital Strategies at IDC. "The real opportunity is to make the data consumers generate useful in care by turning routine monitoring into relevant insight, clinical action, and sustained engagement. That is where adoption starts to translate into value."

Google Breathes New Life into Wristband Fitness Trackers with Fitbit Edge

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

IDC Survey: Canadian Consumer Wireless Services Survey, 2026 — Indicators on Consumer Mobile Service Trends

Praveen Datta — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey provides insights on tech mobile service provider share, consumer satisfaction, and recommendation likelihood, intentions, mobile plan length, and contract type, as well as usage of data plans on tablets, laptops, and wrist wearables. IDC Canada's consumer research group conducts annual surveys of 2,000 Canadian consumers to understand the current and future adoption plans for variety of consumer services and related products. The goal of these surveys is to identify/measure Canadian consumer interest, ownership, usage, satisfaction, and future potential for consumer services.

This year, the survey for mobile services was fielded in August/September 2026. This presentation outlines consumer perceptions and the current state of the markets in Canada pertaining to mobile phone service providers, consumer satisfaction with and likelihood to recommend mobile carriers, intentions for their subscription plans by year, age group, and carrier brand. It also explores the length of time consumers have had their plan, the subscription type they have, and whether it is part of a bundle by carrier brand. In addition, this presentation explores whether consumers own cellular-enabled tablets, laptops, and smartwatches/wrist wearables; whether they subscribe to data plans for those devices; and who their service provider is for those data plans. This presentation highlights survey data associated with the consumer responses mentioned previously.

Cuts by various demographic and service factors (age group, region, and others) are shown where relevant. However, there is more data available from the survey than what is presented here. Those interested should reach out to their IDC representative for more information.

IDC Survey: Retail Store Operations, North America —Frictionless Retail, Loss Prevention, and Employee Engagement

Filippo Battaini — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey analyzes findings from IDC's 2026 Retail Technologies and Business Process Trends Survey, focusing on physical store operations, frictionless retail, loss prevention, and employee engagement. It helps readers understand the top business priorities and competitive challenges facing retailers in North America in 2026; identify the most urgent store operations pain points (including shrinkage and inventory accuracy); analyze initiatives addressing frictionless customer experience and loss prevention; map two-year technology investment plans across RFID, computer vision, mobile tools, cybersecurity, and edge computing; examine frontline workforce empowerment strategies; and assess the adoption and planned use cases of agentic AI in store operations contexts.

IDC Survey: Retail Technologies and Business Processes Trends for Customer Experience and Commerce in the Luxury Sector, 2026

Ornella Urso — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how luxury retailers are prioritizing investment in artificial intelligence (AI), data infrastructure, customer experience (CX), and commerce technology in 2026. It is based on responses from 105 luxury and high-end retail technology decision-makers, taken from a worldwide sample of 980 respondents to IDC's 2026 Retail Technologies and Business Processes Trends Survey. The results cover digital transformation priorities, AI execution barriers and budgets, agentic AI strategies, commerce and omni-channel investments, loyalty and personalization, store operations, supply chain, and IT architecture.

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.