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AT&T 2Q26 Results: Accelerating Growth, Record Convergence, and Capital Discipline

Jitesh Bhayani — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AT&T reported second-quarter 2026 consolidated revenue of $31.6 billion, up 2.3% year-over-year (YoY), adjusted EPS of $0.65, up 20.4%, and adjusted EBITDA of $12.3 billion, up 5.2%, for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39.1%. The company added more than 1 million Advanced Connectivity customers across fiber, fixed wireless, and postpaid phone in a record quarter for combined fiber and fixed wireless net adds and accelerated its planned 2026 share repurchases to approximately $10 billion.

Samsung Pushes AI-powered Experiences on New Smartwatches and Smartglasses at Unpacked July 2026

Ramon T. Llamas — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its Unpacked event in London, Samsung introduced its Galaxy Watch 9, Galaxy Watch Ultra2, and teased its upcoming AI smartglasses. The common thread across them was how artificial intelligence has become a key ingredient to the experience with the smartwatches analyzing health and fitness data to provide actionable advice and the smartglasses capturing and organizing memories. IDC believes Samsung's announcements highlight the company's capabilities and strategy to bring AI front and center and create more personalized experiences while meeting and beating the competition at their own game.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Order Orchestration and Fulfillment Applications for Retail and B2C 2026 Vendor Assessment

Ornella Urso — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape provides a vendor assessment of worldwide AI-enabled order orchestration and fulfillment applications for retail and B2C and B2C for 2026. Order orchestration and fulfillment has become a competitive capability rather than a routine process, and modern software aims to help retailers manage its complexity across capture, promising, orchestration, fulfillment, and returns. Retailers continue to rebuild operations and technology to handle the scale and complexity of omni-channel demand. The most persistent gap remains real-time, network-wide inventory visibility, while composable architecture has become a baseline expectation, and AI, including agentic AI, is moving from road map toward early production with uneven maturity.

"The costs of shipping, last-mile delivery, and returns have made channel-by-channel decisions too slow and too expensive to sustain. In response, retailers are aligning operations around order management as a real-time coordination layer, where each order is sourced and fulfilled against a single picture of demand and inventory", says Ornella Urso, research director, IDC Retail Insights. "Order orchestration and fulfillment have become a key lever that increasingly moves margin and service outcomes, between customer engagement and operations to serve customers consistently and profitably. One more, AI (and agents) is central to this shit."

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Are the Hidden Costs of Disconnected Guest Experience and Data in Restaurants?

Dorothy Creamer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the hidden costs of disconnected guest experience and data in eating and drinking establishments. Drawing on IDC’s 2026 Retail Technologies and Business Processes Trends Survey, it finds fulfillment friction, data privacy, and weak loyalty topping operators’ urgent commerce challenges. IDC argues that unified commerce platforms, governed guest data, and closed-loop loyalty are essential to converting personalization ambition into sustainable retention.

IDC Survey: Early Adopters of Functional Agentic AI in Media and Entertainment, 2026

Alex Holtz, Nigel Wallis — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how early adopters in media and entertainment organizations are approaching the six core agentic sourcing models, ranging from consuming embedded and prebuilt agents as delivered to customizing them, developing internally, and outsourcing development. It also looks at how the sector's preference for validation and creative control determines which initiatives reach production.

In addition, it evaluates how media organizations define strategy and road maps, who owns investment decisions, how governance is centralized, and which performance metrics and business benefits drive prioritization. It identifies the operational, data, talent, and governance factors that constrain scalable agentic adoption across the enterprise.

IDC worldwide surveys with a combined 2,951 respondents captured the views of early adopters involved in agentic AI strategy, adoption, and governance as their organizations advanced from experimentation toward production-scale deployment. A dedicated subsample of media and entertainment respondents (n = 133) was extracted to enable focused examination of sourcing approaches, governance models, and adoption patterns that distinguish the sector from the broader market.

"In a sector where content, rights, and distribution leave little room for error, media treats sourcing as a portfolio of bets rather than a single wager — running build, buy, and customize approaches in parallel at near-equal rates. Validation comes before commitment: the sector pilots more and explores less than the rest of the world, working to prove that general-purpose agents fit its specialized, high-stakes workflows before moving them into production," said Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies.

What Retailers Need to Know about Embedded Finance in Payment and Commerce/POS Platforms

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how embedded finance is reshaping the role of payment and unified commerce/point-of-sale (POS) platforms in retail. As financial services become increasingly integrated into checkout, loyalty, marketplace, seller, and store operations, retailers must move beyond viewing payments as a transaction-processing function. Embedded finance creates opportunities to improve conversion, increase customer retention, support marketplace sellers, accelerate payouts, monetize ecosystems, and strengthen loyalty propositions. However, it also introduces new challenges around regulation, fraud, data governance, operational resilience, partner dependency, and customer trust. Retail technology buyers should therefore treat embedded finance as a strategic commerce capability that requires cross-functional governance, clear use case prioritization, strong platform evaluation, and measurable business outcomes.

“Embedded finance is changing the strategic role of payment and POS platforms in retail. These platforms are no longer simply where transactions are accepted; they are becoming the infrastructure through which retailers can deliver affordability, loyalty, seller services, faster payouts, and new financial experiences. The opportunity is not just to add more payment options but to embed financial value into the retail journey in a way that improves customer trust, operational efficiency, and ecosystem monetization. To succeed, retailers must balance innovation with governance, compliance, data control, and brand responsibility,” says Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

IDC Survey: Telco Network Infrastructure and Cloud Priorities in META, 2026

Tolga Yalcin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey explores how META telecom operators are prioritizing network infrastructure, cloud, AI, and sovereignty in 2026, benchmarked against global peers as part of IDC’s Worldwide Telco DX Network Infrastructure and Cloud Survey. Key themes include the region’s approach to AI deployment in network operations, edge and MEC adoption, data sovereignty as a baseline infrastructure requirement, and a preference for owning and controlling full-stack infrastructure over public cloud migration — alongside an accelerating push toward virtualization, cloudification, and satellite connectivity.

A CMO’s Guide to Google’s 2026 CX Strategy

Gerry Murray — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses Google’s 2026 CX strategy, which ushers in agent-driven commerce, integrating AI-powered agents, Universal Commerce Protocol, and persistent shopping experiences. Google aims to mediate and monetize the customer journey. CMOs must adapt by enhancing product data, enabling real-time decisioning, and redefining brand roles within Google’s ecosystem to ensure visibility, seamless interoperability, and consistent customer experience across both Google and owned channels.

“In the era of agentic shopping, first-mover brands that adapt to the new rules of agentic commerce will gain structural share advantages,” says Gerry Murray, director of Enterprise Applications and Agents at IDC. “Product visibility through commerce AEO will be equally or more important than brand visibility via content AEO.”

IDC Survey Spotlight: As Agentic AI and GenAI Commerce Solutions Top Hotel Operators' Investment Agenda, What Will Ultimately Determine Which Operators Turn That Ambition into Competitive Advantage?

Dorothy Creamer — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight looks at how hotels face an agentic commerce sequencing problem as investment plans outpace infrastructure.

Major hotel brands are racing to apply agentic commerce capabilities, but worldwide plans for agentic commerce are outpacing the data and infrastructure investments those capabilities depend on. And herein lies the issue. Hotels want agentic commerce as a salve for losing bookings to other channels — a familiar problem they faced when online travel sites emerged. The risk now is not being surfaced at all to potential guests who are shifting their discovery funnel into AI-led channels. This means investments in data modernization and the systems to support that discovery will be more important, but currently, the trend is tipping the other way.

"Hospitality operators must tread a careful line," says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Transformation Strategies, IDC. "Planning for the future requires a well-calibrated balance and sometimes the patience to make sure that systems are built properly, which requires scalability, security, reliability, and redundancy. While agentic commerce investments are warranted, prevailing wisdom tells us that failure rates will increase if the appropriate infrastructure investments are not made."

Market Forecast: U.S. SMB Communications Services Forecast, 2026–2030

Daniela Rao — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation analyzes and forecasts the revenue for the U.S. small and medium-sized business (SMB) communications services market. The presentation provides IDC's definitions of SMB and telecom voice and data categories, and it presents a detailed forecast, beginning in 2025 and extending through 2030.

"Small and medium-sized businesses understand the necessity to invest in technologies and services that address their operational challenges, but they will continue to have limited resources. Telcos targeting SMBs should design new value-creating propositions rooted in their networks, ecosystems, AI, and analytics capabilities to address the pricing challenges with services geared to remove friction between SMBs' daily operations and digital transformation road map." — Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, Worldwide Telecom and UC, IDC