rssitbuyer

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

Patrick Reymann — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses the rapidly maturing worldwide AI-enabled spend orchestration market, highlighting its evolution from early-stage education to mainstream enterprise adoption. The segment is now defined by agentic AI capabilities, robust workflow integration, and expanding platform breadth, with leading providers competing on full life-cycle coverage, embedded intelligence, and differentiated architecture. Venture investment, market convergence, and segmentation are intensifying competition, while buyers are shifting focus from viability to selecting the right platform for their organizational context. The study profiles key vendors, emphasizing strengths, challenges, and unique differentiators, and provides actionable guidance for procurement and finance leaders to evaluate platform depth, AI maturity, and vendor viability in a crowded, innovation-driven landscape.

"The spend orchestration space has proven itself. Now we are transitioning to differentiated offerings and market segmentation. The S2P space is responding, and the convergence of spend orchestration and S2P is inevitable," said Patrick Reymann, research director, Procurement and Enterprise Apps.

Accenture Q3 FY26: Solid profitability and cash flow as growth moderates; new moves in OT security and the mid-market

Lars Goransson, Douglas Hayward — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Agentic Commerce: Are AI-Generated Answers a New Gateway to Liability?

Heather Hershey, Roger Beharry Lall — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses a landmark Munich court ruling that found Google liable for false AI-generated answers, redefining AI outputs as authored claims rather than mere search results. This signals a shift in legal accountability for AI answer engines, with significant implications for agentic commerce and brand discovery. As AI-generated content becomes central to consumer interactions, organizations must prioritize source accuracy, audit exposure, and update indemnification terms, recognizing that the shield protecting platforms from liability may no longer apply when AI synthesizes and authors information.

"Brand leaders have been racing to appear in AI-generated answers. Munich adds a harder question: What happens when those answers are wrong, and who is left holding the liability?" — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications at IDC

Best Practices in Leveraging AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI for Retail Operational Workflows

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape identifies best practices for retailers seeking to apply agentic AI to operational workflows. It focuses on four common challenges: orchestrating fragmented retail data and processes, embedding AI into frontline work, using AI to improve inventory and fresh-product decisions, and governing autonomous actions in sensitive operational environments.

Retailers are entering a phase in which the competitive value of AI depends less on experimentation and more on operationalization. The issue is not whether retailers can build pilots, but whether they can connect agents to the data, systems, teams, and controls required to influence day-to-day decisions. Walmart’s development of Wally illustrates the emerging use of agentic capabilities for merchandising and inventory decisions. Marks & Spencer’s rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot illustrates how GenAI can improve frontline productivity and decision support. Carrefour’s use of AI for supply chain and fresh-product planning shows the value of advanced forecasting and optimization, while Amazon’s use of multimodal AI for fulfillment quality and compliance demonstrates the potential of AI-enabled operational automation. Together, these examples show how retailers are building the foundations for more autonomous and agentic operational workflows.

The practices discussed in this PeerScape show that agentic AI succeeds when it is deployed around clear operating problems, when users understand its role, when workflows include human oversight, and when retailers measure outcomes such as labor productivity, stock availability, waste reduction, faster decision cycles, improved customer service, and lower operational risk.

“Agentic AI’s real value emerges when it becomes part of the operating model, connecting signals, decisions, actions, and accountability across stores, supply chains, commerce, and customer service. Retailers should start with workflows where AI can reduce decision latency, improve consistency, and free teams from repetitive coordination work while keeping humans responsible for judgment, escalation, and customer impact,” says Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

IDC MarketScape: Middle East Managed Security Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Shilpi Handa — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates a group of managed security services providers operating across the Middle East. It reveals a market undergoing structural transformation, driven by accelerating sovereign delivery mandates, AI-driven disruption of traditional SOC operations, and rapidly rising buyer sophistication across government and critical infrastructure sectors. A small group of providers has invested decisively in proprietary platform development and sovereign AI delivery, creating competitive advantages that are structurally difficult for the broader market to close. The majority continue to deliver managed services on third-party platforms without a differentiated technology layer, a position that carries increasing strategic risk as AI commoditizes integration-led delivery and buyers demand independently verifiable performance metrics.

“The Middle East managed security services market has reached a maturity threshold where service portfolio breadth and regulatory alignment are necessary but no longer sufficient conditions for competitive success. Buyers are applying a new level of technical rigor to provider evaluation, scrutinizing platform ownership, AI automation performance, and the architectural depth of sovereign delivery commitments. Providers that can answer these questions are establishing durable advantages; those that cannot are find that the market is moving faster than their current strategic positioning anticipated,” said Shilpi Handa, associate research director, Security and Trust at IDC

IDC Public Sector Insight — IDC’s Education Digital Resilience Framework 1.0

Matthew Leger, Ruthbea Yesner — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation introduces IDC’s Educational Digital Resilience Framework. Educational institutions face mounting pressure from enrollment declines, funding uncertainty, staffing shortages and turnover, AI disruption, and cyberattacks. Meeting these pressures deliberately, instead of reacting to each shock as it lands, has become a defining challenge for the sector. However, few institutional leaders can see the full picture of the systems, people, and third parties their operations rely on, leaving them exposed to failures they never anticipated and unable to respond quickly when one occurs.

This IDC framework treats resilience as a property of the operating model itself, built into how an institution runs rather than filed away as an emergency plan, and it gives leaders across IT and non-IT roles a structured way to develop it. It teaches readers how to map their dependencies across five dimensions of resilience, identify the concentration risks and single points of failure that matter most, and move their institutions from constant firefighting toward the capacity to adapt to — and in time, act ahead of — disruption.

The Human Test: What Magnifica Humanitas Reveals About Enterprise AI Governance

Bjoern Stengel — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (May 2026), which applies the Catholic Social Doctrine to artificial intelligence, arguing that AI must serve human dignity as its first purpose, with efficiency and innovation as outputs of getting this right, not as its organizing principle. Cross-referenced with IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey (n = 1,570), the letter's diagnosis tracks with the governance gaps that buyers themselves name: Responsible AI governance is fragmented, the efficiency-first value case risks commoditizing workers, and agentic AI deployment is outpacing the oversight structures required to keep it accountable. This IDC Perspective extracts seven actionable recommendations for technology buyers navigating the responsible AI mandate.

"The encyclical is not asking technology buyers to become theologians. It is asking them to govern AI as if the people affected by it matter — which, as the survey data shows, is increasingly what regulators, investors, and employees are asking too. The governance gap is not a values gap; it is an operational gap that technology users need to address." — Bjoern Stengel, lead, Global Sustainability Research and Practice at IDC

The Road to AI Value: Engineering the Infrastructure, Data, and Software Delivery for Scaled Enterprise Outcomes

George Mironescu — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation, delivered on June 16, 2026, at the IDC-IBM Executive Day in Bucharest, delves into why organizations must rethink how they engineer their infrastructure, data, and software delivery to turn AI ambition into measurable enterprise value. AI now dictates the IT delivery agenda, yet too few projects deliver outcomes — and agentic AI remains stuck in piloting. Success is not about adopting more tools; it is about building integrated, scalable, value-driven foundations.

This presentation explores:

Why production-ready AI demands a recalibration of infrastructure, data, and delivery
What the key prerequisites and strategic road map look like to scale AI responsibly
The leadership imperatives needed to break down silos, embed guardrails, and prove value

Build a Secure, Portable, and AI-Ready Operating Model for the Federal Government

Alan Webber — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explains how federal agencies can build a secure, portable, and AI-ready operating model. Federal agencies face a defining modernization challenge: AI adoption, cloud complexity, zero trust mandates, and evolving threats are converging simultaneously. IDC’s Seven-Layer Reference Model for secure AI-enabled cloud provides a framework for addressing these pressures as a unified architecture rather than disconnected workstreams. Paired with a six-phase implementation road map, it offers federal technology leaders a sequenced, actionable path from mission alignment and data governance to responsible AI deployment, continuous compliance, and institutionalized improvement.

“Federal agencies cannot AI their way out of a data governance deficit or security their way out of a fragmented architecture,” said Alan Webber, program vice president, National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC. “The agencies that will successfully deploy AI at mission scale are the ones that treat cloud, data, security, and compliance as a single integrated operating model and invest in the foundations before they invest in the applications.”

Digital Organizational Design for Strategic Value

Alizabeth Calder — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how today's CIO faces unparalleled pressure to transform not only their organization but how the business of IT operates to bring strategic value. How we organize the digital functions and how our teams work in the ecosystem of the business and the industry can make or break not only our success as a CIO but the success of our organization. The new and critical imperative for the CIO of the future is to deliver strategic value. We must urgently move away from traditional structures that no longer serve our strategy and build a digital function that is responsive and effective.

"The need to be intentional on what needs to be different is a critical touchstone for digital organization design," says Alizabeth Calder, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).

"Gone are the days when we can make modest structure changes or do tweaks. We must bring foresight to the business of IT, to serve for today and where the digital capability and investment need to go. We must be proactive, helping the rest of the C-suite see the next and future risks and opportunities. We owe our peers insight and action to elevate the investment and risk conversations for the next level of strategic value for the business. If we don't provide a clear strategy for future value, we will be stuck responding to what our peers think they know rather than being active participants enabling strategic value."