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Agentic Orchestration Checks In: The Opportunity for Media Networks Has Arrived for Travel and Hospitality

Alex Holtz, Dorothy Creamer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how agentic orchestration and the rise of travel and hospitality media networks are reshaping advertising as streaming fatigue drives budgets toward new, data-rich environments. With the emergence of programmatic access to first-party travel data, operators such as Marriott, United, and Booking.com are pioneering closed-loop, high-intent advertising surfaces. The report details the architectural, operational, and measurement challenges and opportunities as travel media networks formalize, offering a blueprint for stakeholders to capture non-endemic brand demand and sustainable growth.

"As streaming fatigue pushes advertising budgets into new territory, travel and hospitality emerge as the next frontier for commerce media," says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies, IDC. "The closed-loop infrastructure that transformed retail is now poised to redefine how brands reach authenticated, high-intent audiences across journeys. The question isn't if this shift will happen — it is who will own the loop, and how quickly they will build before the market consolidates."

"In travel, agentic AI is the new gatekeeper of intent, identity, and experience," says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, hospitality and travel digital strategies, IDC. "The brands and operators who master orchestration across loyalty, mobility, and marketplace data will unlock a flywheel of value that outperforms every channel they know. The window to build is open now, but the architecture you choose will determine your destiny."

Agents at Work: Salesforce CNX26 and What the Agentic Platform Looks Like in Production

Dorothy Creamer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses Salesforce Connections 2026 (CNX26) and what the agentic platform looks like in production. At CNX26, Salesforce demonstrated an agentic enterprise platform spanning marketing, commerce, and service on its Customer 360 foundation. The June release for Agentforce Commerce and the acquisitions of Cimulate and Contentful extend that scope for retail, hospitality, and travel operators, adding composable commerce, intent-aware search, and enterprise content on a unified architecture. The primary challenge for buyers is not platform selection but the data readiness and organizational work that must precede deployment.

“Salesforce built its CNX26 presence around a unified story for agentic commerce backed by live production evidence. This refresh provides a pathway for intent-aware search, dynamic content, and composable storefronts, giving retail, hospitality, and travel operators a credible entry to the conversational, contextual commerce experience guests increasingly expect,” says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Strategies, IDC. “What the platform does not provide is a shortcut around data quality. The strategic message for hospitality and travel operators is clear: Get your guest and transaction data unified, because the platform is ready to use it.”

Certinia Acquires Moonnox, Creating Digital AI Value: Professional Services Automation Platform with AI Architected at the Core

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Today, Certinia, an AI-powered Professional Services Automation (PSA) vendor, announced it has acquired Moonnox, an AI-native services delivery platform purpose built for the professional services sector. This combination of both an AI-powered PSA vendor and an AI-native services platform enables Certinia to bring even more value with its systems of records of PSA, Financial Management, and Customer Success Cloud Services, through the extension of Certinia's AI System of Action, called Veda, enabling Certinia to become a platform that powers AI-native services with AI architected as the core customer delivery mechanism.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Order Orchestration and Fulfillment Applications for Retail and B2C 2026 Vendor Assessment

Ornella Urso — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape provides a vendor assessment of worldwide AI-enabled order orchestration and fulfillment applications for retail and B2C and B2C for 2026. Order orchestration and fulfillment has become a competitive capability rather than a routine process, and modern software aims to help retailers manage its complexity across capture, promising, orchestration, fulfillment, and returns. Retailers continue to rebuild operations and technology to handle the scale and complexity of omni-channel demand. The most persistent gap remains real-time, network-wide inventory visibility, while composable architecture has become a baseline expectation, and AI, including agentic AI, is moving from road map toward early production with uneven maturity.

"The costs of shipping, last-mile delivery, and returns have made channel-by-channel decisions too slow and too expensive to sustain. In response, retailers are aligning operations around order management as a real-time coordination layer, where each order is sourced and fulfilled against a single picture of demand and inventory", says Ornella Urso, research director, IDC Retail Insights. "Order orchestration and fulfillment have become a key lever that increasingly moves margin and service outcomes, between customer engagement and operations to serve customers consistently and profitably. One more, AI (and agents) is central to this shit."

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Organization in ANZ, 2026

Xiao Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI has moved from the periphery of the technology agenda to the center of enterprise strategy, yet scaling AI remains challenging. Many organizations continue to struggle to translate investments into measurable business value, and the rapid rise of agentic AI is adding a new layer of complexity to deployments. The AI-fueled organization is one in which strategy, governance, people, and technology are orchestrated so that intelligence is embedded across the operating model rather than confined to isolated pilots, supporting the full spectrum of AI technologies, including descriptive, interpretive, predictive, generative, agentic, and physical AI.

This IDC study presents the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released in May 2026 and spanning 1,900 organizations worldwide, of which 108 are based in ANZ. It is the updated edition of IDC’s inaugural 2025 benchmark (IDC #US53271725, March 2025) and applies the framework set out in the 2026 definition report, IDC MaturityScape: AI-Fueled Organization 2.0 (IDC #US54450625, April 2026). The most significant change this year is the elevation of governance to a distinct fourth dimension alongside strategy, people, and technology, recognizing that trust, risk management, and responsible AI practices have become prerequisites for scaling AI. The benchmark assesses enterprise maturity across five stages and these four dimensions, intended to guide line-of-business (LOB) leaders, C-suite executives, and the IT and data organizations that enable the AI agenda, helping them locate where they stand against peers and prioritize the moves that most accelerate progress. Key findings in this benchmark study are:

About 3.9% of organizations in ANZ have reached the most mature optimized stage, and 15.1% have progressed to the two most advanced stages (managed or optimized) overall, both above the worldwide averages of 3.1% and 12.8%. ANZ is one of the stronger-performing regions in the study, but becoming an AI-fueled organization remains a sustained journey rather than the product of a single deployment.
Six out of 10 organizations in ANZ (60.5%) remain in the two least mature stages, ad hoc and opportunistic, close to the worldwide figure of 61.3%, underscoring that even in a comparatively advanced region, considerable foundational work in strategy, technology, and data still lies ahead before AI can deliver enterprise-wide value.
ANZ’s mean maturity score of 2.46 edges above the worldwide mean of 2.43 and sits well ahead of the wider Asia/Pacific average of 2.35, making ANZ one of the more mature regions in the study. The region’s relative strength is concentrated in governance, where ANZ posts a mean of 2.58 and 21.5% of organizations reach the managed or optimized stages, the clearest signal that ANZ organizations have treated trust, risk, and responsible-AI practices as a foundation for scaling. The broader pattern still holds; however, the majority of organizations remain in the early stages, and the gap between AI’s trajectory and most organizations’ execution persists.

“Australia and New Zealand are among the more mature markets worldwide, with a particular strength in AI governance that gives the region a credible foundation to scale on. The challenge now is to convert that governance maturity into broader execution across strategy, talent, and technology, so that AI moves beyond pockets of excellence to enterprise-wide impact. Those that align business priorities with a coordinated AI road map will be the ones to turn experimentation into measurable business value,” says Xiao Liu, research manager, AI-Fueled Business Strategies at IDC.

Reinventing Public Service Through Human-Centered Digital Innovation: City of Sydney

Xiao Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how the City of Sydney, a multiple winner at the 2025 IDC Future Enterprise Awards in Australia, is reinventing public service through human-centered, trustworthy digital innovation. Across three award-winning initiatives, a safe, fast GenAI Knowledge Retrieval Chatbot; the CityConnect digital services ecosystem, which has digitized 84 services and processed 322,000 requests in its first year; and a Social Media Platform that lifted first response performance from 60% to 93%, the City embeds AI, design, and governance in everyday service delivery. Led by CIO/CTO of the Year Dr. Tom Gao, its approach pairs lean, agile delivery with responsible AI guidelines and inclusive change management. The study offers actionable insights for public sector and other risk-aware organizations pursuing safe, measurable, AI-enabled transformation.

“The City of Sydney shows that the public sector can lead in applying AI to real human needs. By starting with low-risk, well-governed use cases and proving value fast, the City turned institutional caution into a competitive advantage, building the trust, literacy, and platforms that make safe, customer-facing AI possible,” says Xiao Liu, research manager, AI-Fueled Business Strategies, IDC Asia/Pacific.

Unisys: Charting a Course Through Platform Modernization, Security, and the Future of Work

Amy Loomis, Ph.D., Peter Marston — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how AI adoption has crossed a threshold. Midmarket organizations are past pilots, returns are measurable, and the conversation has shifted from whether AI delivers value to who governs this value and how. This shift is rewriting what enterprise buyers expect from managed services providers, and it is the context in which Unisys made its case at its June 2026 Global Analyst and Advisor Event.

This document also examines how Unisys is responding across four solution areas. In Digital Workplace Services, the move to experience-level agreements and an AI-embedded operations dashboard addresses the activation gap between AI access and AI usage directly. In Cloud, Applications, and Infrastructure, the Unisys Intelligence Accelerator framework positions the company as an enterprise orchestrator rather than an infrastructure operator, with a delivery model built around agentic AI and proprietary automation rather than hyperscaler credentials alone. In Enterprise Computing, ClearPath Forward's cloud-native subscription model removes the capital expenditure barrier that has kept mission-critical clients on the sidelines of modernization. And across all of it, security is embedded rather than bolted on, with post-quantum cryptography readiness and risk quantification capabilities that are more advanced than Unisys' current market visibility suggests.

"Cloud gave organizations the infrastructure to work differently. AI is now defining what that work actually looks like," said Amy Loomis, PhD, group vice president, Future of Work, IDC. "The providers that understand both layers, and can securely govern the experience in between, are the ones employees and enterprises will rely on."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Managed Detection and Response Service for Midmarket 2026 Vendor Assessment

Yogesh Shivhare — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a vendor assessment of MDR service providers worldwide through the IDC MarketScape model. For this study, IDC evaluated a group of MDR service providers with operations and customers worldwide, with a deliberate focus on the needs of midmarket organizations, which IDC defines for this study as organizations with up to 2,000 employees. Of the group of providers evaluated, the majority actively participated through a structured request for information process, with provider briefings and customer references, while two providers were assessed based on IDC's knowledge of their security services offerings and secondary research. Providers were measured in terms of current capabilities and future strategies for delivering MDR services to midmarket and enterprise customers worldwide. As noted in the inclusion criteria, all providers evaluated in this study have the organizational scale, technical depth, and service breadth to serve customers well beyond the midmarket segment.

Yogesh Shivhare, senior research manager, Security and Trust at IDC, says, "The managed detection and response market has entered a new phase of maturity, one defined less by whether providers can deliver effective threat detection and more by how they do it and what they stand behind. This study reveals a market where artificial intelligence architecture, financial accountability, and the depth of proprietary threat intelligence have become the primary axes of differentiation. MDR remains one of the most compelling security investments available to midmarket organizations, offering access to SOC capabilities, threat intelligence programs, and incident response expertise that would be prohibitively expensive to build internally. But the gap between leaders and the broader field is widening, and buyers that treat MDR as a commodity purchase will increasingly find that the details of how a service is structured, measured, and backed determine whether it delivers on its promise."

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Organization in North America, 2026

Giulia Carosella — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

"IDC's 2026 MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Organization 2.0 confirms that North American organizations lead in AI maturity. Yet a confidence-capability gap persists: Many organizations that see themselves as AI leaders are running well ahead of what they have actually built. Closing that gap is an operating-model and governance challenge, not a technology one," says Giulia Carosella, Senior Research Manager, WW AI-Fueled Business Strategies at IDC.

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Organizations in EMEA, 2026

Lapo Fioretti — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI has moved from the periphery of the technology agenda to the center of enterprise strategy, yet scaling it remains challenging. Many organizations continue to struggle to translate investments into measurable business value, and the rapid rise of agentic AI is adding a new layer of complexity to deployments. The AI-fueled organization is one in which strategy, governance, people, and technology are orchestrated so that intelligence is embedded across the operating model rather than confined to isolated pilots, supporting the full spectrum of AI technologies, including descriptive, interpretive, predictive, generative, agentic, and physical AI.

This IDC study presents results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released in May 2026 across 1,900 organizations worldwide (of which 583 are in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). It is the updated edition of IDC’s inaugural 2025 benchmark (IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Organization Worldwide, 2025, IDC #US53271725, March 2025) and applies the framework set out in IDC MaturityScape: AI-Fueled Organization 2.0 (IDC #US54450625, April 2026). The most significant change this year is the elevation of governance to a distinct fourth dimension alongside strategy, people, and technology — a recognition that trust, risk management, and responsible AI practices have become prerequisites for scaling AI. The benchmark assesses enterprise maturity across five stages and these four dimensions to guide line-of-business leaders, C-suite executives, and the IT and data organizations that enable the AI agenda. It helps them locate where they stand relative to peers and prioritize the moves that most accelerate progress. Key findings in this benchmark study are:

Only 2.4% of organizations in EMEA have reached the most mature Optimized stage, and just 11.9% have progressed to the two most advanced stages (Managed or Optimized) overall. Becoming an AI-fueled organization is achievable, but it is a sustained journey rather than the product of a single deployment.
More than six out of 10 organizations (62.8%) remain in the two least mature stages (Ad hoc and Opportunistic), underscoring how much foundational work in strategy, governance, and data still lies ahead before AI can deliver enterprisewide value.
Nearly half of EMEA organizations (48.7%) are concentrated in the Opportunistic stage, making it by far the most common level of maturity. Most EMEA organizations at this stage have set an AI strategy and run structured experiments around a few high-return use cases, but delivery lags that ambition: talent remains the main barrier, governance is still fragmented, and gains stay confined to incremental efficiency rather than growth. These organizations remain in a selective, experimental phase rather than scaling AI enterprisewide. The sharp drop from Repeatable (25.3%) to Managed (9.5%) points to a critical bottleneck: many organizations are moving beyond ad hoc experimentation, but far fewer succeed in institutionalizing AI into managed, enterprisewide operations.

“IDC’s AI MaturityScape Benchmark shows that in EMEA, the biggest challenges companies face in becoming AI-driven are related to people, a well-defined AI strategy, and the technological infrastructure of data quality and legacy systems. Addressing the gaps in these areas is essential to stay competitive,” said Lapo Fioretti, EMEA research lead, AI-Fueled Business Strategies, IDC.