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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Insurance Customer Experience Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Inci Kaya — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates leading CX platform vendors serving the insurance sector, providing a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of their capabilities, strategies, and fit for a range of insurance use cases. Insurance is undergoing a fundamental transformation as customer experience (CX) becomes a primary driver of competitive differentiation, retention, and growth.

Our research finds that the most successful insurers are those that leverage modern CX platforms to orchestrate seamless, omni-channel journeys, unify customer data, and embed AI-driven automation and analytics throughout the policyholder life cycle. The vendor landscape is diverse, with solutions ranging from cloud-native, modular platforms to process-driven transformation partners. Leading vendors distinguish themselves through deep insurance domain expertise, robust integration ecosystems, rapid deployment models, and measurable business outcomes such as improved NPS, faster claims resolution, and increased digital adoption.

Insurance buyers should use this IDC MarketScape as a strategic guide to assess vendor strengths and challenges, align technology investments with business objectives, and accelerate their CX transformation. As a result, insurers can expect to identify partners that will help close the experience gap and help position carriers as differentiated, desirable brands.

"Customer satisfaction is no longer a byproduct of efficient operations; it's the outcome of intelligent, proactive engagement powered by next-generation AI." — Inci Kaya, senior research manager, Digital Strategies, Insurance Worldwide

Beyond the Prompt: The Hidden Data and Storage Implications of Generative AI

Adam Wright — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes the intersection of accelerating global data growth and the rise of generative AI. Drawing on IDC's Global DataSphere and Global StorageSphere forecasts and findings from IDC's 2026 Worldwide Data Utilization Survey, this document provides IT decision-makers with actionable guidance on adapting data infrastructure strategies to meet the demands of an AI-driven enterprise.

"The question IT leaders should be asking is not whether generative AI will increase their data volumes," says Adam Wright, research manager for IDC's Global DataSphere and Global StorageSphere. "Survey data makes clear that it will, and significantly so. The question is whether their infrastructure and governance strategies are built for this reality."

C-Suite Strategies to Maximize AI Factory Business Benefits

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation gives C-suite decision-makers the insight they need to guide strategic conversations about AI factory investment and operational priorities. AI factories industrialize the conversion of enterprise data into AI-driven intelligence, using purpose-built, co-engineered infrastructure stacks deployed across dedicated on-premises datacenter, edge locations, and public cloud services. Business-led governance, compliance, and cost controls are required to keep AI factory spending and operating models aligned with strategic business priorities and AI workload-specific performance, security, and ROI expectations. The growth of AI inference and agentic AI deployments will dramatically increase infrastructure operational complexity and scale. This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation also helps tech buyers get ahead of the curve by providing guidance on how to build and implement a robust AI factory strategy that delivers business benefits.

Choke Points and Loopholes: Why AI Export Controls Need a Different Playbook for Chips, Compute, Data, and Models

Alan Webber — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the structural mismatch between U.S. and allied AI export control policy and the technology it aims to govern. Chips, training compute, model weights, and training data are frequently treated as a single control regime, but each has a different physical nature, a different enforcement mechanism, and a different set of weaknesses. This document traces the unsettled legal status of the 2025 AI Diffusion Framework, the real state of allied coordination, the structural limits of model-weights controls, and an emerging vendor-continuity risk illustrated by a June 2026 hosted model access suspension. It closes with guidance for government buyers, Defense Industrial Base companies, allied governments, and frontier AI vendors navigating this environment over the next 12–24 months.

“Export control policy keeps describing model weights with the same vocabulary it uses for chips, and that vocabulary is borrowed credibility,” said Alan Webber, vice president, National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC. “A shipment of chips and a copy of a file are not the same kind of problem, and the strategy for controlling them can’t be the same strategy. The agencies and vendors that plan around that distinction will be the ones that aren’t caught flat footed when the current legal limbo resolves.”

Enterprise Software and AI: The Ambition Gap

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer presentation examines the quickly changing state of enterprise software in relation to AI. Buyers are investing in AI, including 72% already investing in enterprise software with embedded AI. However, there are a multitude of technology approaches to complete business processes, which adds complexity and incurs technical debt. Additionally, two-thirds of businesses already run AI agents. Buyers continue to purchase and build agents (roughly 25%–31% across 53+ business processes), trying AI to see how it works and how it fits their needs. Despite the use of AI in production, manual and semi-manual processes remain the largest process types among 53+ processes, representing roughly 32%–39% of the work on average. This gap needs to be closed in 2026 and 2027.

This report looks at how enterprise software and AI ambition is outpacing execution, AI momentum, 53+ business processes and technology usage (or lack thereof) across each process, why the gap persists, and what the focus needs to be in 2026 to close it.

Grocery and General Merchandise Retail: Converging Pressures and Distinctive Technology Priorities

Filippo Battaini — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective is the first in a four-part series on technology priorities in retail subverticals. Drawing on IDC’s 2026 Retail Technologies & Business Process Trends Survey, it shows how grocery and general merchandise convert shared pressures, cost inflation, digital-native competition, and rising customer expectations into different agendas (grocery focuses on supply chain visibility and traceability, and general merchandise on customer experience, loss prevention, and order management) and gives technology buyers segment-specific guidance for prioritizing vendor investment over the next two years.

“Grocery and general merchandise retailers are reading from the same macroeconomic script, but writing distinctive technology playbooks; vendors who treat the two segments identically will misjudge both,” says Filippo Battaini, Research Manager, IDC Retail Insights.

IDC MarketScape: U.S. Care Coordination Application 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jennifer Eaton — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates U.S. care coordination vendors on the strategies and capabilities that move past record keeping, regulatory checklists, and manual workflows. Care coordination continues to change, pushed by the need to deliver care that is more efficient, more effective, and organized around the patient rather than the visit. That pressure has grown as value-based payment moves from voluntary pilots to models that carry real financial risk, tying an organization's margin to the outcomes and total cost of the populations it manages. U.S. healthcare organizations are responding with a new generation of care coordination technology built to manage complex patients, use limited clinical staff and resources well, raise the quality of care, and improve the experience of both the end user and the patient.

"Care coordination has crossed from a documentation problem to a decision problem. The data finally moves; the question now is whether the technology can turn it into the right action, at the right moment, for the right patient." — Jennifer Eaton, research director, IDC's Health Insights

IDC MarketScape: U.S. Patient Engagement and Enablement Technology Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jennifer Eaton — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses the U.S. patient engagement and enablement technology market and the vendors that serve it. Patient engagement has moved from a set of add-on tools to a working part of how providers and payers manage cost, quality, and the relationship with the people they serve. Three forces are driving that shift. Patients now expect the digital convenience they get from other industries. Value-based and outcomes-based payment ties revenue to results that depend on reaching and activating patients. And new interoperability rules, together with more capable AI, are putting more usable data within reach while raising expectations for how quickly and clearly organizations communicate with patients and members. Digital access, remote monitoring, multichannel outreach, education, and AI-driven personalization are becoming standard rather than distinguishing features, and the organizations that succeed are the ones that use them to reach people through the channels they actually use.

The study evaluates vendors on the capabilities and strategies that serve both providers and payers while delivering the consumer-grade experience patients expect. It gives technology buyers a factual basis for comparing solutions, separating shipped capability from road map, and matching a vendor's orientation, whether payer rooted, provider facing, or consumer first, to their own populations and goals.

"Healthcare organizations can no longer treat patient engagement and enablement as a siloed, 'one size fits most' effort aimed at marketing and brand loyalty, and they cannot start and stop with a care encounter or an enrollment window. Engagement has to be continuous, proactive, personalized, and grounded in data that follows the person across their care. The tools and the data to do this now exist, and federal policy is pointing the same way, so the question for 2026 is not whether to build data-driven, whole-person engagement but how quickly an organization can. Patients need it, deserve it, and increasingly expect it." — Jennifer Eaton, research director, IDC Health Insights

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Contact Center–as-a-Service Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Michelle Morgan — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study explores the evolution of CCaaS from basic call distribution to advanced, AI-driven orchestration platforms. It highlights the shift toward agentic AI, enabling autonomous workflows and broader customer experience integration. This document evaluates vendors based on capabilities, strategy, and market share, offering guidance for buyers on architectural framing, use case alignment, and AI governance to ensure successful deployment and measurable outcomes.

“The real disruption in contact centers isn’t AI itself,” says Michelle Morgan, research manager, AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service and Contact Center Strategies at IDC. “It’s how agentic platforms redefine what must be orchestrated, measured, and governed across the entire customer journey. Individual AI capabilities are, at this point, table stakes. What changes is the operating model underneath them: When an agent can initiate actions, hand off across systems, and make judgment calls that used to require a human, the unit of work shifts from a single interaction to a chain of them. That shift is where most contact center leaders’ existing governance frameworks start to show their age.”

IDC PeerScape: Service Transformation, Data Integration, and Sovereignty Practices to Optimize AI Success in National Civilian Governments

Massimiliano Claps — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape examines three government entities at the frontier of these converging trends:

The Republic of Kazakhstan, which is deploying AI capabilities, spanning national data lakes, sovereign large language models (LLMs), and citizen-facing agentic services, to deliver proactive public services at a national scale
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has institutionalized a global data-sharing architecture for tsunami detection, enabling real-time open data exchange across national warning centers, international partners, and private sector suppliers
The European Space Agency (ESA), which is deploying cloud-native, AI-augmented Earth observation (EO) platforms built on sovereign infrastructures that create digital twins of the planet to support climate policy, disaster preparedness, and environmental decision-making.

Government CIOs across all mission areas will find transferable insights in the practices documented in this IDC PeerScape: the importance of data integration as a prerequisite for intelligent decision-making and agentic AI; the architectural choices that preserve sovereign control without sacrificing technological capability; and the governance models that make cross-boundary data sharing both trustworthy and operationally effective.

"Siloed investments in digitization are no longer sufficient. Forward-looking governments are achieving mission outcomes by investing in integrated data architectures, sovereign AI infrastructure, and open-ecosystem platforms that enable intelligence at scale." — Massimiliano Claps, research director, IDC Government Insights