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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Direct Spend 2026 Vendor Assessment

Patrick Reymann, Simon Ellis — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides insights into the worldwide AI-enabled direct spend market. Direct spend software is becoming a strategic control plane for manufacturers, connecting design, BOMs, sourcing, supplier collaboration, cost, quality, risk, and execution. In 2026, leaders differentiate through manufacturing-specific process depth, ERP/PLM integration, closed-loop collaboration, and governed AI — not generic RFx capability. Buyers should prioritize fit for their manufacturing model and clean master-data flows, measurable AI outcomes, and embedded sustainability and compliance. The market is shifting toward supervised agentic workflows, should-cost intelligence, multitier visibility, and convergence with product life-cycle and supply chain systems.

"Direct spend is no longer indirect procurement with longer lead times — it is the digital control plane linking product design, sourcing, supplier execution, and risk. The winners will pair manufacturing depth with governed AI and integration that works in production." — Patrick Reymann, research director, Procurement Applications and Agents

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic AI–Enabled Customer Service 2026 Vendor Assessment

Oru Mohiuddin, Michelle Morgan — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study discusses how agentic AI is reshaping customer service by converging previously fragmented contact center and ticketing systems into a single model, using intent recognition and orchestration rather than manual routing. Master agents will coordinate specialized AI agents via standards like MCP and A2A, drawing on a unified data layer and knowledge base for consistent context. This demands converged IT infrastructure, robust governance, and human oversight for critical actions. As AI handles more autonomously, human agents will focus on complex, high-touch work, reshaping workforce management and the competitive landscape around architecture rather than features alone.

“Agentic AI is breaking down the structural barriers that have long separated contact centers, ticketing, and case management, opening the market to a far more diverse range of players than we’ve seen before. The vendors that win this market will be the ones that get to agentic maturity first, at scale, without compromising on accuracy or security,” said Oru Mohiuddin, research director, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for Small Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates agentic marketing platforms available to small businesses and provides essential guidance for technology buyers in this segment. Small businesses have historically been caught between consumer-grade marketing tools that are too limited and enterprise platforms that are too complex to adopt without dedicated technical staff. Agentic marketing platforms are beginning to close that gap, offering AI agents that plan, execute, and adjust campaigns with limited manual intervention. This study defines the market, evaluates vendors serving small business buyers, and assesses how close current offerings come to genuine agentic capability, the ability to learn and adapt without manual reconfiguration, versus sophisticated automation carrying an agent label. IDC finds real, practical value available today, alongside real gaps small business buyers should weigh carefully, particularly around ongoing technical requirements and governance that works without a dedicated administrator.

"The small businesses winning with agentic marketing aren't the ones chasing the most sophisticated platform. They're choosing vendors that work out of the box, solve one clear use case, and prove value within weeks. This market is moving fast, and the vendors pulling ahead are building specifically for what small businesses need, not retrofitting enterprise tools for a smaller buyer." — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Content Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Amy Machado — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines how content services vendors are adapting as content shifts from a passive system of record to the context layer that AI — and, increasingly, AI agents — depend on to reason, retrieve, and act. IDC evaluates vendors on their ability to make enterprise content AI ready at scale. This includes enrichment and semantic retrieval, native agent access through emerging standards like MCP, governance built directly into the platform to manage AI's expanded risk surface, and content modernization built into the migration process itself.

"Content earns the label 'intelligent' when it stops being merely stored and retrieved and becomes the context layer that AI and automation depend on to reason, retrieve, and act reliably," says Amy Machado, research director, Content and Knowledge Discovery Strategies, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Customer Communication Management 2026 Vendor Assessment

Amy Machado — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape study represents a vendor assessment of the worldwide intelligent customer communications management (CCM) software market through the IDC MarketScape model. This year's assessment lands at an inflection point for the market: vendors are racing to embed AI into every layer of the platform, rather than treating it as a bolt-on content-generation feature. That shift is also reshaping the competitive landscape itself, as AI-assisted migration tooling meaningfully lowers the switching costs that have long protected incumbent vendors. This study evaluates CCM vendors on the strength and maturity of their AI and automation strategy, the rigor of their governance and compliance posture as AI takes on more autonomous work, and their ability to reduce the operational and administrative burden that has historically driven CCM's total cost of ownership.

"AI is now touching nearly every part of the CCM platform, including authoring, personalization, admin, migration, and orchestration," said Amy Machado, research director, IDC. "That's exactly why governance cannot be an afterthought. Buyers need to know who approved what, where their data went, and whether the AI enforcing their compliance rules are transparent and auditable."

Agentic Orchestration Tries It On: The Opportunity for Media Networks Confronts a Reckoning in Fashion and Luxury Retail

Ornella Urso, Alex Holtz — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

“Real retail media programs exist at Saks Global, Nordstrom, Ulta Beauty, Selfridges, Mytheresa, and FARFETCH, but none has the DSP-branded, self-serve vertical infrastructure that travel and grocery retail media have already built — a gap that is simultaneously the category’s biggest limitation and clearest opportunity,” said Ornella Urso, research director, IDC Retail Insights.

“Retail and commerce media networks are set to outpace social as the fastest-growing share of worldwide advertising spend through 2030, and fashion, luxury, and prestige beauty retail is the largest unclaimed pool in that shift,” said Alex Holtz, research director, IDC Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies. “The operators that stand up agentic orchestration now — clean first-party data, self-serve buying, measurement a brand advertiser will accept — will monetize demand they already generate. Those that wait will keep renting audiences they already own.”

Beyond the Label: A Buyer’s Guide to Forward Deployed Engineering in Cybersecurity

Shilpi Handa, Yogesh Shivhare — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective helps technology leaders evaluate and structure engagements involving forward deployed engineers (FDEs) in cybersecurity, a delivery model now used by nearly every leading provider, even where the label itself is not. Drawing on primary research with 10 leading cybersecurity vendors, systems integrators, and services providers, this document offers buyers practical guidance on screening providers, structuring multi-provider engagements, negotiating pricing and contract duration, and assessing switching-cost risk before signing.

“Buyers keep asking whether a provider has an FDE. That’s the wrong question,” says Yogesh Shivhare, senior research manager, Security and Trust, IDC. “Half the market doesn’t use the term at all, even though the underlying capability is now nearly universal. The right question is who owns the outcome, how long the engagement runs, and what happens when it ends.”

Enterprise Quantum Computing Use Cases: From Quantum Opportunities to Enterprise Business Value

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation identifies quantum-relevant use cases across key industries, including manufacturing, finance, energy,healthcare and life sciences, government, telecommunications, and aerospace and defense. For each industry, the presentation examines where quantum computing is being applied or evaluated today, the enterprise use cases showing the greatest potential, and the maturity of current initiatives. It provides enterprises with a framework for distinguishing near-term opportunities from longer-term developments and identifies how organizations should prepare for the continued evolution of hybrid quantum-classical computing.

Flexibility as a Continuous Grid-Operating Capability

Gaia Gallotti, Jean-François Segalotto — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation examines why flexibility is becoming a continuous grid-operating capability rather than an occasional demand response tool.

The presentation explores how accelerating electricity demand, increasing penetration of variable renewables, and more localized network constraints are changing the operational and economic requirements of power systems. It highlights the growing importance of flexibility for reliability, capital efficiency, and affordability.

It then examines how these pressures are materializing across different markets, including large-load interconnection constraints in the United States and Europe, tight system margins in Great Britain, and periods of excess distributed solar generation in Australia.

The presentation also considers the technology implications for utilities, including the evolving role of Grid DERMS in orchestrating grid-support services, the need for more interoperable IT and operational architectures, and the distinct but coordinated roles of ADMS, Grid DERMS, and Edge DERMS.

This study concludes with recommendations for utilities to treat flexibility as a continuously available operational capability, strengthen interoperability across grid and edge platforms, build a clear customer value proposition into flexibility programs, and coordinate technology decisions across the broader grid management architecture.

Red Hat AI 3.5 Extends AI Governance and Cost Controls Across Hybrid Infrastructure

Matthew Flug — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Red Hat has released Red Hat AI 3.5, an update to its AI portfolio centered on pre-deployment safety verification, resource controls for shared GPU infrastructure, agentic operations, multi-tenancy, and native observability with token-level cost attribution. The release reflects a change in what buyers expect from AI platforms, as the operational discipline applied to production infrastructure now governs how AI workloads are evaluated, isolated, and managed.