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IDC Market Glance: Embedded Finance, 1Q26

Jordan Steele — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The IDC Market Glance visually depicts a concise current-state view of the embedded finance ecosystem. It is a taxonomy document that defines the market's major segments and subsegments and highlights representative vendors to help technology suppliers and services providers assess competitive positioning, adjacency, and partnership opportunities.

Agentic Commerce Reality and the Last Mile of Human Customer Experiences

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses the importance of agentic commerce. Agentic commerce is beginning to reshape the buyer journey, but in uneven and uncomfortable ways: discovery is rapidly shifting to intent-driven, zero‑click, and agent‑curated results; experiences are becoming highly personalized yet less brand led; transactions are faster but leave accountability murky; fulfillment is quietly optimized rather than reinvented; and post‑purchase may end up as the last real arena for human-differentiated customer experience.

"Agentic commerce is often marketed as a simple story of the inevitability of smarter AI. That's far from true. This is a business soap opera about the dynamics of power, profit, and control," says Heather Hershey, research director of AI-Enabled Digital Commerce at IDC. "The progression of agentic commerce will be asymmetrical across various regions and domains. The result: the need for complex, new operational, and narrative strategies that appeal to humans and agentic AI interfaces concurrently."

Google's Gemma 4 Brings On-Device AI into the Multimodel Architecture Conversation

Arnal Dayaratna — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Google's Gemma 4 extends open-weight AI further into the practical deployment environments where software is built and used. The family spans mobile, browser, desktop, wearable, and edge scenarios through smaller E2B and E4B variants and the LiteRT-LM runtime, while larger models are available on Google Cloud through Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine. Multimodal and multistep AI behavior is becoming more portable across execution surfaces that were previously constrained by model size, latency, and hardware limits. Google is treating Gemma 4 less as a side release for the open model community and more as a distributed deployment layer spanning edge and cloud environments simultaneously.

Physical AI: Engineering Services Enabling the Next Industrial Revolution

Abhishek Mukherjee, Mukesh Dialani — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Physical AI is transforming industrial operations by embedding advanced AI into physical assets, enabling autonomous, intelligent action in complex environments. This shift drives productivity, safety, and resilience across sectors, but success depends on deep domain expertise, robust integration, and disciplined engineering. Engineering service providers are critical in bridging technical gaps, orchestrating technology, and ensuring sustainable, enterprisewide deployment, positioning physical AI as a core driver of competitive advantage in the next industrial revolution.

"Physical AI is not just automating tasks; it is redefining the boundaries of what machines and humans can achieve together. As advanced intelligence is embedded into the very fabric of industrial assets, the next industrial revolution will be won by those who master the art of seamless integration, resilient engineering, and human-machine collaboration. The future belongs to enterprises bold enough to bridge the execution gap and turn complexity into competitive advantage." — Abhishek Mukherjee, research manager, Digital Engineering and Operational Technology Services, IDC

Top 5 CPaaS Trends for 2026

Courtney Munroe, Melissa Holtz-Fremeijer — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores the top 5 CPaaS trends in 2026, which will be an amazing year for CPaaS platforms. Most companies are implementing sophisticated agentic AI orchestration, along with the provisioning of important new channels such as RCS and voice capabilities. However, ease of use and security are also important; enterprises are buying assurance as much as capability.

According to Courtney Munroe, research vice president, Worldwide Telecommunications Research, IDC, "Platforms that minimize operational ambiguity, abstract regulatory complexity, and demonstrate consistent execution enable internal teams to focus on business outcomes rather than platform risk." Vendors that fail to meet this bar are increasingly filtered out early in enterprise procurement cycles regardless of price or feature claims.

Retailers Move Toward Unified Decisioning at NRF

Ananda Chakravarty — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how merchandising remains critical as retailers shift from agentic AI hype to practical, real-world application across stores, online, back offices, and distribution. At NRF 2026, the focus moved from point solutions to unified decision-making powered by integrated data, processes, and systems. Retailers are adopting holistic, systems-based approaches by combining AI/ML and modular capabilities to optimize operations and drive end-to-end outcomes.

"Retailers want their inventory data to correspond to pricing and to their financial planning, supply chain, and even online order management. To accomplish this, data and merchandising must become unified, not just in terms of a single source of data but a propagation of decisions across all aspects of the business — that's unified decision-making," says Ananda "Andy" Chakravarty, research vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

Beyond Customer Data: The Context Foundation AI Agents in CX Are Missing

Tapan Patel — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines why AI agents deployed across customer experience (CX) functions like marketing, sales, advertising, digital commerce, customer support, and field service systems require dedicated context foundation beyond unified customer data. It defines the three architectural foundations — knowledge graphs, semantic definitions, and context management — that enable agents to reason over shared context, coordinate actions across functions, and make autonomous decisions. The document provides guidance for both business and technology buyers evaluating context readiness for AI agents in CX.

“Customer data platforms gave us unified profiles, but that foundation alone is not sufficient for AI agents to make autonomous decisions,” said Tapan Patel, research director, AI-Enabled Customer Data and Analytics, IDC. “AI agents need a next layer — one that provides detailed understanding into CX relationships, shared business logic across functions, and runtime context that reflects customer intent, life-cycle stage, and prior actions to deliver real value.”

IDC Survey: SMB Communications Services Survey, 2025 — AI Adoption in SMB Communications

Jason Blackwell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI investment is moving from exploration to structured deployment:

Generative AI is now the top SMB technology investment priority, with agentic AI emerging as well, confirming that SMBs are moving beyond passive evaluation toward structured spending plans and operational deployment in the next 12–18 months.

Competitive advantage is increasingly tied to customer engagement and data-driven decisioning:

SMBs are now viewing GenAI to reshape how they engage customers and use data to inform decisions, reframing AI from an internal efficiency tool to a growth and differentiation lever embedded within communications, collaboration, and analytics-driven workflows.

Execution readiness determines the pace of scale:

Although interest is high, scaling AI remains difficult due to challenges like regulatory and data‑governance requirements, cost control, and limited in‑house expertise. This underscores the need for secure‑by‑design solutions and well‑defined ROI models and marketing.

AI monetization will flow through bundled, managed connectivity models:

Broadband remains the anchor service in the SMB relationship, but strategic influence over AI/AIOps road maps is consolidating with cloud providers and integrators, pressuring telecom and cable providers to evolve toward integrated, managed, and consultative service models to protect wallet share and relevance.

Meta's Newest Commerce Strategy: Partnering with Shopify, Payments, and AI to Close the Transaction Loop

Roger Beharry Lall, Heather Hershey — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Friction is the enemy of impulse. Frictionless checkouts almost always convert better than the alternatives. That's exactly what Meta is partnering to tap into via the strategies announced at Shoptalk on March 24, 2026. Meta wants to reduce or eliminate redirection off its platform for the completion of purchases to compress the customer journey to maximize impulse-driven opportunities.

Beyond Stripe, Meta is building out a broader payments ecosystem that gives merchants flexibility at checkout. Initial rollouts center on Stripe and PayPal, both of which power the current one-tap, in-app transaction flow. Additional integrations with Adyen are already planned, with merchants able to select their preferred provider at the point of purchase.

Stripe brings modern, developer-centric infrastructure; PayPal contributes global wallet reach and consumer familiarity; and Adyen extends enterprise-grade acquiring and international coverage. The result is a flexible checkout architecture where Meta owns the interface and optimization layer, while payment execution is distributed across specialized partners. Beyond this, Shopify is providing a layer of commerce orchestration to the table that makes for a more complete offering for catalog management, checkout, fulfillment, and reporting.

Interestingly, Meta shut down its own native checkout (Facebook/Instagram Shops) as of mid-2025, moving buyers back to merchant sites to complete the transaction. The aforementioned partners are essentially building what Meta stepped away from.

This IDC Link will focus on Meta, Stripe, and Shopify, since those three companies have been the center of the announcements to date.

Digital Advertising Market Review, 2026

Alex Holtz — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The IDC Perspective on the Digital Advertising Market Review, 2026, highlights the transformative impact of AI, generative AI, and agentic AI on digital advertising strategies, campaign management, and measurement. The report underscores rapid growth in platforms like CTV, mobile in-app, and retail media networks, driven by advanced personalization, automation, and ecosystem partnerships. As the market shifts toward autonomous, data-driven workflows and cross-platform integration, organizations embracing these innovations will gain a competitive edge.

"In 2026, digital advertising is no longer just about reaching audiences it's about AI-driven orchestration, where autonomous agents, predictive analytics, and immersive platforms converge to create hyper-personalized, closed-loop campaigns. As technology and partnerships redefine the rules, the winners will be those who embrace agentic AI and composable ecosystems. Are you ready to compete in a market where machines are your new media strategists?" — Research Director Alex Holtz, IDC Worldwide Media & Entertainment Digital Strategies