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Digital Business Professional Services in the Age of Agentic Work: Ecosystems, Talent, and Operating Models

Erin Hichman — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how AI is fundamentally reshaping digital business professional services, driving a rapid transition from labor-led models to AI-augmented, platform-driven, and agentic delivery. Providers that can industrialize AI responsibly and demonstrate real business impact will capture a disproportionate share of transformation spend. For buyers, evaluating partners on platform maturity, governance, and operating model is critical to long-term success.

"Very soon, AI-native delivery will be the competitive norm—organizations that act now to embed AI into their core operations and partner with providers who can deliver at scale will set the pace for the industry." — Erin Hichman, research manager, Digital Transformation Professional Services, IDC

Digital Infrastructure Maturity Leaders Prioritize Hybrid Architectures for AI Readiness

Simon Piff, Mary Johnston Turner — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation summarizes the results of IDC's recently completed digital infrastructure maturity assessment, examining the relationship between business outcome improvement and mission-critical digital infrastructure investment and operating model choices. The analysis is based on a worldwide survey of 600 digital infrastructure decision-makers conducted in September 2025.

The assessment defines digital infrastructure maturity leaders as the top quartile of organizations, as measured by reported levels of year-over-year business outcome improvements linked to digital infrastructure investments in 2025. Leaders demonstrate several important traits that set them apart from less mature organizations, including:

Laser-focus on anticipating AI requirements and optimizing digital infrastructure for workload-specific demands, with 80% of leaders citing AI as either the most important or a very important factor driving their overall digital infrastructure budget and technology decisions for the coming year
Strong reliance on hybrid architectures that rely on integrated public cloud and on-premises digital infrastructure resources optimized for the needs of different workloads (Fully 64% of leaders describe their current overall digital infrastructure strategy as hybrid.)
Prioritization of investments that directly improve data management, quality, compliance, and sovereignty

The assessment framework provides detailed comparisons of how leaders compare with less mature organizations across a range of digital infrastructure decisions and offers tech buyers an important opportunity to assess their own maturity and refine existing digital infrastructure investment road maps.

Industry Personas Handbook: Worldwide Grocery Retail, 2026

Filippo Battaini, Cristiano Quattrini — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation is IDC's Industry Personas Handbook, designed to provide technology vendors with a better understanding of their buyer personas in the global retail grocery sector. It aims to answer the following questions:

Who are the key personas I need to address with my offering (products and services), marketing messages, sales campaigns, and sales activities?
What are their strategic priorities and day-to-day responsibilities?
What are their major operational pains and strategic challenges?
What KPIs drive decision-making and investment priorities?

Cisco Q2 FY26: Accelerating AI Infrastructure and Campus Networking Refresh Drive Strong Results

Chris Barnard, Brandon Butler — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

From Technology Provider to Orchestrator of Autonomy: The CIO's Framework for Industrializing Agent Vetting

Serge Findling — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

By 2027, G2000 enterprises will experience a 10x surge in agent deployments and a 1,000x increase in token/call volumes, transforming agent vetting from an emerging practice into a mission-critical CIO responsibility. Without formal vetting frameworks, up to 20% of G1000 organizations will face lawsuits, substantial fines, and CIO dismissals by 2030 due to inadequate agent governance. Yet only 35% of CIOs will successfully implement agent life-cycle management by 2029.

This IDC Perspective provides a five-pillar framework, 90-day implementation road map, and strategic guidance to help CIOs capture the 20% competitive advantage in innovation, speed, and service excellence.

"The agent vetting framework represents the essential first step for CIOs to evolve from technology providers to orchestrators of autonomy — balancing innovation velocity with governance rigor in an era where autonomous entities outnumber human decision-makers," says Serge Findling, adjunct research advisor with IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).

Should Procurement Application Consumers Build or Buy?

Patrick Reymann — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective explores the renewed build-or-buy debate for procurement applications in light of agentic AI and low-code platforms such as Claude Cowork, the Claude Cowork Legal Plug-in, OpenClaw, and Microsoft Power Apps with Copilot. It argues that although these tools make it easier to prototype and tailor procurement workflows, building is only the simplest step in a much larger journey. Operating a production-grade system still demands rigorous security, compliance, uptime, mobile-ready UX, and real-time support, all of which commercial suites have spent years hardening. The piece suggests a hybrid approach: buy a stable, well-governed platform for core records, workflows, and integrations, then selectively build on top where the organization's procurement processes are genuinely distinctive or fast-changing. Ultimately, the key question is not whether something can be built, but which parts of the lifecycle the organization is prepared to own versus delegate to a vendor.

"AI may make it easier to build procurement tools, but it does not make them easier to run; the real decision is which responsibilities you will own and which you will offload to a platform," says Patrick Reymann, research director, Procurement and Enterprise Applications, IDC.

The AI-Fueled Future of the Industrial Sector

Jeffrey Hojlo — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective looks at the AI-fueled future of the industrial sector. AI usage is immature in the industrials — construction, manufacturing, and energy — according to IDC's February 2025 AI-Fueled Organization MaturityScape Benchmark Global Survey (n = 1,534) research and conversations with end users in these respective industries. Actual experimental usage of GenAI, agentic AI, NLP, ML, predictive, and so forth is prevalent, but there is often no unifying organization, foundation, or governing set of processes. This document explores AI progression and maturity, sharing the top use case opportunities and guidance for success.

"It is only a matter of time before AI takes off in the manufacturing and industrial sector because the potential value-add is simply too high. That is, the ability to more rapidly automate production processes and data flow, as well as augment workforces that are challenged with resource and skills gaps. Leading organizations consider investments in AI as part of an overall digital transformation strategy," said Jeff Hojlo, research vice president, Industrial Ecosystems and Business Network Strategies.

The Analyst Replaces the Auditor — Compliance Workforce Modernization

Sam Abadir — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how compliance is evolving from episodic review toward continuous, analytics-based supervision. It explores the implications for operating models, technology architecture, and workforce roles, and outlines how institutions can modernize compliance to support AI-driven decisioning, third-party delivery, and system-speed execution without increasing risk or regulatory exposure. As financial institutions automate more decisions and embed compliance into digital operations, traditional audit-centric oversight models are struggling to keep pace.

"Automation and AI have compressed the distance between decisions and outcomes in financial services, exposing the limits of compliance models built on periodic review," said Sam Abadir, research director for Risk, Compliance and Financial Crime at IDC. "As controls move into live operations, assurance must shift with them. The future of compliance is not faster audits but continuous supervision that allows analysts to detect, interpret, and intervene before issues become material."

Zoho Analyst & Customer Conference 2026Zoho Analyst and Customer Conference 2026

Kevin Permenter — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Zoho convened customers, partners, analysts, and developers to present its vision for a unified cloud platform designed to simplify business operations through embedded AI, integrated workflows, and regionally controlled infrastructure. Sessions emphasized reducing application fragmentation, lowering implementation complexity, and improving operational visibility. The event targeted midmarket and enterprise organizations, with particular relevance for finance leaders seeking to modernize systems while maintaining cost discipline and governance.

ZohoDay 2026 – CX functionality gains traction as Zoho surpasses one million customers

Roger Beharry Lall, Oru Mohiuddin, Wayne Kurtzman — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT