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Ad Holding Companies Are Redefining Their Role in the Marketing Ecosystem

Gerry Murray — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses ad holding companies that are redefining their role in the marketing ecosystem. Major advertising holding companies are fundamentally transforming their business models from traditional media buying and creative services to AI-driven systems integration, proprietary identity data, and autonomous agentic execution.

“The agency’s role is no longer defined by media buying or creative talent. It’s being redefined around AI-powered platforms. The new competitive moats are data, identity, orchestration, compression, and activation,” according to Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents.

IDC ProductScape: Worldwide Observability and AIOps Platforms, 2026

Shannon Kalvar — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC ProductScape offers a comprehensive guide on the key functionalities of observability and AIOps platforms, featuring products from vendors ranging from Amazon to Zoho. The status of each functionality is categorized as fully supported, partially supported, partner provided, road map, or not supported, aiding technology purchasers in quickly identifying which vendors align with their changing requirements.

Digital and AI Business Scorecard, 2025–2026: Empowering Enterprises to Achieve Business Outcomes

Martina Longo, Xiao Liu — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides IDC's Digital and AI Business Scorecard analysis, based on survey data from 1,729 senior IT and business leaders worldwide. The Digital and AI Business Scorecard evaluates the correlation between levels of business outcome improvement and levels of digital business model, data and AI, operational processes, and organizational capabilities to calculate an overall status assessment, and then differentiates leading enterprises from their peers based on these capabilities and as overall digital businesses.

AI is driving a global wave of business reinvention. Organizations are moving beyond traditional digital transformation (DX) to redesign business and operating models with AI at the core, reshaping processes, accelerating decision-making, and creating new sources of value. However, many organizations continue to struggle with measuring the business impact of AI and other digital initiatives, balancing short-term efficiency gains with long-term growth ambitions, and establishing clear ROI frameworks and use case prioritization models.

"This year's Scorecard analysis reveals that organizations across the globe still have significant margin for improvement across all four key capabilities," says Martina Longo, research manager, AI-Fueled Business Strategies at IDC. "While the average worldwide score of 43 places most organizations in the developing stage, leading organizations have decisively pulled ahead through integrated architectures, robust data governance, and enterprisewide process standardization that create compounding advantages across every capability dimension."

"Agentic AI is fast becoming the clearest differentiator of digital and AI maturity," adds Xiao Liu, research manager, AI-Fueled Business Strategies at IDC. "Nearly three-quarters of leading organizations worldwide are already investing significantly in agentic AI, compared with fewer than 20% nascent organizations. The gap that will only widen as foundational data and architecture advantages compound over time."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Life Sciences R&D Strategic Consulting Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Nimita Limaye — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Health Insights study is a refresher of the life sciences R&D IDC MarketScape, which has a specific focus on strategic consulting in the life sciences R&D space. This document seeks to compare major service providers with each other based on criteria that should be important to life sciences companies when considering the selection of a strategic consulting partner to help provide guidance for strategic, operational, and tactical transformation issues within the R&D space. The IDC MarketScape assessment of strategic consulting outsourcing in life sciences R&D was previously performed in 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021, and 2023.

"The life sciences strategic consulting market is undergoing a fundamental reset — driven by the convergence of agentic AI, mounting execution pressure, and a sharply more demanding buyer. Organizations are seeking business transformation partners that can close the AI-to-value gap, navigate regulatory complexity, and align their commercial models to client outcomes. The firms that can bridge a blend of scientific depth, digital fluency, organizational change capability, and a willingness to share risk will define the next era of strategic consulting," said Dr. Nimita Limaye, research VP, Life Sciences R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC Health Insights.

MCP Is the Most Important Infrastructure Standard for Marketing in the Era of Agentic Buyers

Gerry Murray — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly become the foundational infrastructure standard for scaling AI agent deployments in marketing and commerce. By solving integration fragmentation, MCP enables real-time access to enterprise data and tools, transforming personalization, campaign optimization, and agentic shopping. CMOs must prioritize MCP readiness to remain competitive in the evolving agentic economy.

"When a buyer agent arrives at your storefront, it needs real-time pricing, product data, and current promotions in milliseconds. CMOs that build low-latency, MCP-connected data infrastructure now will be closing deals with agentic buyers. CMOs that fail to prepare will watch their digital commerce revenue shift to a channel in which they cannot compete," says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC.

Red Hat Summit 2026: Uniting the Enterprise AI Stack from Infrastructure to Agents

Jim Mercer — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Red Hat Summit 2026, held in Atlanta, May 12–13, delivered a collection of announcements primarily focused on delivering a stack for running enterprise AI. The company used the event to assert its role as the open platform standard for the agentic AI era, much like it positioned itself during past Linux and Kubernetes technology cycles. Key themes included the general availability (GA) and advancement of Red Hat AI 3.4, the deepening of the NVIDIA partnership, a sweeping set of agent governance capabilities, OpenShift virtualization momentum, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as the trusted AI execution layer, a new RHEL Long Life add-on, hardened images, and an assortment of digital sovereignty announcements. Altogether, the event made the case that Red Hat is not merely responding to AI's rise but actively engineering the enterprise foundation upon which it will run.

ServiceNow Knowledge and FAD 2026: Customer, Partner, and Market Expansion — AI Adoption Is the Focus

Stephen Elliot, Snow Tempest, Melinda-Carol Ballou, Adam Reeves — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

ServiceNow recently held its Financial Analyst Day and Knowledge 2026 customer and partner event in Las Vegas with a record 25,000 attendees. The company set a subscription revenue target of over $30 billion by 2030 and a 2026 AI ACV target of $1.5 billion. ServiceNow announced over 20 AI specialists across IT, CRM, HR, and security and risk workflows; 30 new integrations in the AI Control Tower, ServiceNow Otto (a new AI experience), and ServiceNow Action Fabric (headless workflow execution); and plans to aggressively expand its fast-growing ($1+ billion ACV) security and risk and CRM customer footprints. Adoption is the customer and partner focus as the company announced a 100 day "AI go live" guarantee and a free year of AI Control Tower. Customers and partners must define their Ai strategy, placing AI at the center of their process and workforce reengineering work to optimize business outcomes. In 2026, the slope of AI improvement will compound AI results and quickly create large competitive moats.

CIO Peer Perspective — Agentic AI's Impact on the Services Industry

Teodora Snoddy, Jennifer Hamel — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Today, many service providers are offering agentic AI platforms to their customers. To explore the impact of this shift, Jennifer Hamel, senior research director at IDC, shared the latest data and insights in conversation with our CIO Research Advisory Board. It became clear in the discussion that providers have work to do to improve clarity regarding their services and gain the confidence of CIOs. The primary challenge is not technology; it is trust.

"As service providers fundamentally rethink how they deliver, they are moving toward product disciplines, new commercial models, and a real focus on demonstrable outcomes. It is taking a bit longer for CIOs to rethink how they will engage with service providers in an agentic AI world," says Jennifer Hamel, senior research director, IDC.

Cisco FY 3Q26: Record Revenue, AI Infrastructure Surge, and Campus Refresh Drive Double-Digit Growth

Chris Barnard, Brandon Butler — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

On May 13, 2026, Cisco announced earnings for its fiscal third quarter of 2026, which generally coincided with the first calendar quarter of 2026. Cisco delivered a record fiscal third quarter, with double-digit top- and bottom-line growth that exceeded the high end of guidance, fueled by broad-based demand across AI infrastructure and campus networking.

IDC PeerScape: Best Practices for Enterprise Asset Management in Utilities

John Villali — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape outlines five key best practices that distinguish leading utilities in EAM adoption and maturity.

"AI-enabled enterprise asset management is rapidly becoming the operational backbone for utilities navigating grid modernization, aging infrastructure, and rising reliability expectations. Organizations that successfully embed AI into EAM workflows, integrate IT and OT data, and align asset strategies with measurable business outcomes will be best positioned to improve resilience, optimize assets, minimize operations and maintenance costs, and drive long-term value from their asset portfolios," says John Villali, senior research director, IDC Energy Insights.