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Agentic Orchestration Fills the Chart: Media Networks Reach Maturity in Grocery Retail

Alex Holtz, Ornella Urso, Filippo Battaini, Margot Juros — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how grocery retail media — the most mature, highest-revenue commerce media vertical IDC has studied — is confronting agentic AI shopping assistants that plan and build a shopper’s cart directly, ahead of the sponsored search inventory that the category has monetized for a decade. Confirmed, disclosed programs at Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing, Albertsons Media Collective, and Instacart’s Carrot Ads already generate billions of dollars a year through named DSP integrations and clean room infrastructure; Walmart’s Sparky, Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping, and Kroger’s Google Gemini–built assistant are the next front, arriving with no disclosed advertising layer built around them yet. This document details what is confirmed to exist, what remains an open question, and what operators, brand advertisers, agencies, and technology vendors need to do differently over the next 24 months.

“Agentic shopping assistants like Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping are built to finish the purchase decision before a sponsored placement ever gets a chance to compete — the same upstream interception challenge we’re already watching AI concierges create in travel, arriving in the one vertical that has monetized shopping the longest,” says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies, IDC.

“Grocery retail media didn’t just arrive first — it built the DSP integrations, clean rooms, and identity infrastructure that every other vertical is still trying to replicate. The next test isn’t scale; it’s whether this infrastructure can be extended to cover a cart an AI agent builds before a shopper ever sees a sponsored placement,” says Filippo Battaini, research manager, IDC Retail Insights.

IDC PlanScape: GRC Optimization to Tame Agentic AI

Christopher Tozzi — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

"To a significant extent, agentic AI is just the latest in a series of technological disruptions that have pushed enterprises to rethink fundamental aspects of their new GRC strategies over the past decade," says Chris Tozzi, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "Still, the unique challenges that AI agents present require unique GRC solutions that extend beyond conventional governance controls and automation techniques."

Nobody Owns AI Guardrails, and That’s Why the Fights Are Just Starting

Alan Webber — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective lays out the vocabulary and ownership structure behind AI guardrails for defense, intelligence, and allied government AI adoption and uses the current dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic as a live precedent for how these disputes now surface directly in contract negotiation. It provides guidance for vendors, for defense and intelligence agencies across the United States, NATO, and Five Eyes, and for civilian national governments adapting defense-derived practices to different risk and disclosure contexts. Three questions of categorical limits versus operational discretion, guardrails as a negotiable contract term, and jurisdictional fragmentation across allied requirements remain open.

“No single vendor owns the AI guardrail stack, and that gap is exactly why the fight over AI safety has moved out of engineering and into contracts and legislation,” says Alan Webber, program vice president for Defense, National Security, and Intelligence at IDC. “Sovereignty, governance, and guardrails all depend on each other, and treating any one of them as a fixed spec instead of an ongoing negotiation is how organizations end up governing systems they don’t actually control.”

The Unknowns of Intelligent Risk: Risk and Uncertainty Management in AI-Driven Economies

Sam Abadir — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective argues that AI-related cost and governance risk in financial services behaves differently than the macroeconomic risks institutions already know how to manage. Approval controls exist at launch. Almost nothing watches spend afterward. Tech leaders building AI risk governance and vendors selling into it both need to account for that gap.

“The institutions in this data are not short on AI risk controls,” says Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Financial Crime, and Compliance, IDC. “They are watching the wrong end of the process. The approval gate is crowded. The moment the spending actually happens is not.”

What to Buy Next: A Maturity Framework for Adopting Agentic AI as Digital Labor in Government

Samuel Young, Alan Webber — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explains how government technology leaders can decide what to purchase next when adopting agentic AI as digital labor. Government agencies face a recurring budget-cycle challenge: Capability is advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, and the most advanced agent on the market rarely fixes the real constraint. IDC's six-pillar maturity framework for adopting agentic AI as digital labor provides a way to diagnose that constraint as a single dependency chain rather than a set of separate purchases. Paired with guidance for federal, state, and local leaders, it offers technology leaders a sequenced path from digitized services and data foundations through integration and workforce readiness to agentic AI running in production.

"Most agentic AI projects arrive in the wrong order. Agencies buy the agent first and hope the data, the process, and the trained staff show up later," says Samuel Young at IDC. "Flip that order and the same purchase looks completely different."

Fujitsu’s July 2026 Executive Analyst Day: Executing on the Fujitsu Management Vision 2035, from MONAKA Silicon to Sovereign Orchestration

Lars Goransson, Linus Lai, Andrea Siviero — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents highlights from Fujitsu’s Executive Analyst Day 2026 held across three days (July 14–16). The event covered Management Vision 2035, Fujitsu’s AI strategy (Kozuchi, Takane, and the AI-Driven Software Development Platform), its international and Uvance business, global delivery, and its MONAKA processor and quantum computing road maps. The biggest takeaways for IDC are threefold: Fujitsu’s move to own every layer of a named Sovereign Orchestration stack from silicon to consulting; its restructuring of Uvance and global delivery around named verticals and service lines, backed by the GK Software acquisition and Wayfinders consulting; and dated proof points, chiefly a 1,024-qubit quantum system in 2026, a MONAKA CPU ship date of 2027, and firm 2030 and 2035 revenue-mix and mainframe-retirement targets against which execution can be measured well before 2035.

“Fujitsu is betting that owning the stack from silicon to consulting will matter more than its services breadth as enterprise AI moves from pilots to production,” said Linus Lai, group vice president at IDC. “The strategy is coherent; the open question is whether execution and investments in its international businesses will keep pace with the targets Fujitsu has set for itself.”

Critical External Drivers Shaping Global IT and Business Planning, 2027

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation describes the critical drivers — important external forces — that will shape the global business ecosystem and influence enterprise IT and business strategies for the next 12–24 months and beyond. The 2026 drivers were identified, developed, and reviewed by a cross-functional international analyst team at IDC. This year’s document reveals 20 interrelated critical drivers that coalesce around four major themes: AI maturity and economics, reestablishing operational foundations, shifts in geopolitical infrastructure, and systemic and emerging risk. These 20 drivers provide the foundation for the development of IDC FutureScape predictions for 2027.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Revenue Orchestration Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Michelle Morgan — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors against inclusion criteria and market trends for unified revenue orchestration software. It highlights the shift from stage-based pipeline management to signal-driven workflows and agentic AI taking bounded action, with buyer evaluation moving toward execution proof rather than feature counts.

"Agentic AI is pushing revenue orchestration platforms past the point of dashboards and summaries," says Michelle Morgan, senior research manager for IDC's AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service, and Contact Center Strategies. "The real test isn't what an agent can do; it's what a buyer can verify. Vendors that can show closed-loop outcomes, not just autonomy claims, are the ones worth watching."

IDC PlanScape: DevSecOps

Nick Kirtley — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PlanScape discusses DevSecOps.

"DevSecOps is seen as a go-to practice applying security within DevOps teams across the organization. However, there are challenges involved, preventing teams from adhering to required levels of security across all teams. There are measures that CISOs and CIOs can take to ensure that teams improve their uptake and adherence to security processes and tooling," says Nick Kirtley, adjunct research advisor, IT Executive Programs (IEP), IDC.

IDC Survey Spotlight: Is Agentic AI Cost Governance Keeping Pace with Adoption?

Rick Villars — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines whether enterprise cost governance for agentic AI is keeping pace with adoption. Drawing on IDC’s July 2026 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey (FERS Survey) Wave 4, it finds that agent workflows are now in production at nearly every enterprise, yet two-thirds of organizations overspent their agent budgets over the past year, and most organizations that rate their own cost governance as mature are among them. This disconnect between self-assessed maturity and actual budget outcomes is the central finding: Governance is being built after scale arrives rather than ahead of it.

The IDC Survey Spotlight argues the gap will widen as agent sophistication, not merely agent count, scales through 2030, and points technology leaders toward three priorities: assigning single-owner accountability for agent spend, funding real-time cost visibility before scaling further, and correcting the sequencing that leaves the deepest adopters the least governed.