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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Customer Data Platforms for B2C Users 2026 Vendor Assessment

Tapan Patel — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors of customer data platforms (CDPs) focused on B2C users and use cases. The CDP today sits at the center of how brands serve customers across marketing, advertising, commerce, and service, and increasingly across the AI agents acting on each side of the customer relationship. Customer expectations for personal, in-the-moment experiences keep rising; paid media costs keep climbing; and consent rules at the consumer scale keep tightening. AI is augmenting marketing from predictive campaigns toward semiautonomous decisioning, and personal AI agents are starting to research and compare and, in the future, will transact on consumers’ behalf. The result is a CDP decision that needs a longer horizon and a wider set of stakeholders. This study examines the buyer dynamics shaping the B2C CDP market, the forward-looking trends reshaping how CDPs are consumed by humans and AI agents alike, the use cases B2C organizations are building toward, and the buyer-side advice that determines whether the investment delivers.

“The next phase of B2C personalization will depend on whether the brand’s customer data and context are trustworthy enough for humans and AI agents to act on with the same confidence,” said Tapan Patel, research director, AI-Enabled Customer Data and Analytics, IDC. “The CDP is the layer that makes that possible, and the buying organization’s discipline around data readiness, operating model, and outcome measurement will also determine how much of that personalization the customer actually experiences and cares about.”

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Quantum Computing 2026 Vendor Assessment

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of worldwide quantum computing vendors with commercially available offerings through the IDC MarketScape model.

"2026 marks an inflection point for the quantum computing industry. Although fault-tolerant quantum computing has not yet been fully realized, a growing body of empirical business and scientific results is beginning to validate the long-term commercial direction of the market," said Heather West, PhD, senior research manager and research lead, Global Quantum Computing Research, IDC. "As a result, vendors are increasingly competing not just as hardware developers, but as providers of broader quantum computing platforms integrating software, HPC, AI, cloud, and sovereign infrastructure capabilities."

Agentic Planning: Inside RELEX Live 2026

Ananda Chakravarty — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses RELEX Live 2026, an eye-opening event, hosted in Nashville, Tennessee, that drew hundreds of clients, partners, and analysts. We cover the announcements and excitement from the event, plus a bit of the uniqueness that RELEX brings to the table with their push into agentic AI for planning and retail operations. The event crystallized the move from rule-based and ML-assisted planning to agent-led, autonomous workflows.

“RELEX Live made one thing clear: In agentic planning, the agent is the easy part. Customers were refreshingly blunt, highlighting that the real bottleneck was the data you’ve neglected and the people you forgot to bring along,” says Ananda “Andy” Chakravarty, VP of Research, IDC Retail Insights.

Effective Agent Cost Management: A Practitioner's Framework for Planning, Sourcing, Implementation, and Operations

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective provides a comprehensive, practitioner-focused framework for effective AI agent cost management, emphasizing that every dollar of wasted spend is a governance failure. Covering planning, sourcing, implementation, and operations, it details actionable steps for budgeting, cost modeling, governance, and continuous optimization. The framework guides organizations to transform unpredictable AI costs into strategic, auditable investments by integrating financial discipline, technical controls, and cross-functional accountability throughout the AI agent adoption journey.

"Every dollar of wasted AI agent spend is a governance failure," according to Shari Lava, group vice president, AI at IDC. "Are you ready to turn unpredictable costs into strategic, auditable investments?"

HPE Discover 2026: From AI Infrastructure to the Agentic Enterprise

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

HPE Discover 2026 marked a meaningful step in HPE's shift from an AI infrastructure provider to an enterprise AI operating platform. The event centered on operationalizing AI at scale through a more unified architecture spanning GreenLake, Private Cloud AI, networking, storage, security, and financial services. HPE positioned GreenLake Intelligence as an emerging control plane for agentic operations. Private Cloud AI also expanded its focus to governance, data readiness, and production AI workflows. Networking emerged as one of the most strategically significant themes of the event. Following the Juniper acquisition, HPE is positioning networking as both an enabler of AI infrastructure and a beneficiary of AI-driven automation. Self-driving networking was another major theme, reinforced by deeper Aruba–Juniper integration across campus, datacenter, edge, and AI Factory environments. HPE also sharpened its infrastructure economics story through Morpheus, VMware migration offers, HPE Financial Services (HPEFS), and new ecosystem partnerships. Collectively, the announcements position HPE around governance, autonomous operations, networking intelligence, sovereignty, and AI-era economics.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Sustainability Strategy Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Dan Versace — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a comprehensive analysis of the global sustainability strategy services market, highlighting a pivotal shift from compliance-driven engagements to sustainability as a lever for enterprise value creation, operational resilience, and capital allocation. This transformation is propelled by evolving buyer demand, regulatory complexity, and the rapid maturation of AI technologies, fundamentally reshaping service offerings, delivery models, and commercial structures.

Five key trends define the current market landscape: the repositioning of sustainability from compliance to value, the ubiquity and integration of AI in sustainability workflows, the crystallization of two delivery archetypes (pure-play strategy advisory and integrated tech-led services), regulation as a demand engine rather than the end goal, and the evolution of commercial models toward outcome-based and risk-reward pricing. Vendors are increasingly embedding sustainability KPIs into core business metrics; leveraging generative and agentic AI for disclosure, scenario modeling, and regulatory horizon scanning; and offering platform-based solutions for continuous compliance and operational support.

Vendor differentiation now centers on delivery model, technology depth, sector specialization, and commercial flexibility. The assessment profiles leading global firms — including Accenture, Atos, Bain & Company, BCG, Capgemini, CGI, Deloitte, EY, Fujitsu, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey, NTT DATA, PwC, Schneider Electric, and TCS — detailing their strategic direction, depth of capabilities, proprietary platforms, and sector-specific expertise. Each vendor’s strengths and challenges are evaluated, with guidance for buyers to match delivery archetype to internal readiness, assess AI maturity, plan for procurement complexity, and validate industry and geographic specificity.

The market rewards vendors that connect environmental ambition to financial outcomes, operationalize through AI-enabled platforms, and sustain transformation via managed services. Vendor selection is less about who offers sustainability services and more about which archetype, sector depth, technology stack, and commercial structure best fit the buyer’s transformation agenda. The assessment underscores the importance of starting with the business question, aligning vendor selection to organizational readiness, and being deliberate about scope, scale, and commercial structure.

In summary, the sustainability strategy services market is at an inflection point, with leading vendors positioned to drive enterprisewide transformation by integrating sustainability into core business strategy, leveraging advanced technology, and delivering measurable outcomes. Buyers are advised to prioritize value creation, technology integration, and sector-specific expertise when selecting partners for their sustainability journey.

“Sustainability strategy is no longer a compliance checkbox; it’s the new engine of enterprise value, capital allocation, and operational resilience. In 2026, the winners will be those who embed sustainability into the P&L, harness AI as a core enabler, and transform ambition into measurable business outcomes,” said Dan Versace, senior research analyst on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Business Services at IDC.

IDC TechBrief: AI-Enabled IT Service Management

Snow Tempest — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC TechBrief on AI-enabled IT service management highlights the technology’s outcomes as well as adoption considerations for achieving those outcomes and reducing risk.

“IT service is a top area where organizations are implementing AI, but they need to plan and prioritize to get it working effectively and achieve their goals,” said Snow Tempest, research manager, IT Service Management, IDC.

Publicis to Acquire LiveRamp: Data Co-Creation Becomes the Foundation for Agentic Identity Management

Gerry Murray, Douglas Hayward, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Publicis’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp is the decisive move in the holdco identity arms race, combining Epsilon’s deterministic identity graph with LiveRamp’s secure co-creation infrastructure to establish a structural competitive advantage in identity management for humans and agents. Brands, independent agencies, publishers, and retail media networks must reassess vendor dependencies.

“By combining Epsilon’s deterministic identity spine with LiveRamp’s secure co-creation infrastructure, Publicis has turned data sharing from an industry utility into a structural competitive advantage, and that changes the economics of the entire adtech ecosystem,” says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC.

Assessing Role Insecurity with Agentic AI in the Supply Chain

Simon Ellis, Stephanie Krishnan — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective argues that the central challenge of agentic AI in the supply chain is not job insecurity but role insecurity. It identifies four directions in which supply chain roles will shift: risk leader, opportunity leader, agent orchestrator, and network architect.

These roles map to the stages of IDC’s MaturityScape for integrated global supply chain execution; they do not arrive in sequence but formalize as organizations climb the scale. For technology buyers, the implication is that role redesign must be addressed as deliberately as the agentic systems themselves, with pilots tied to specific role directions and outcomes measured against the P&L. “Agentic AI isn’t about diminishing the value of supply chain expertise; it’s about shifting where that expertise resides. The discussion around agentic AI often fixates on job loss, but the real challenge lies in defining what the remaining jobs will look like,” says Stephanie Krishnan, associate VP for Supply Chain, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Operational Technology Security Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Cathy Huang — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study on worldwide operational technology (OT) security services vendor assessment for 2026 evaluates how a maturing, regulation-driven market is reshaping who can credibly deliver OT security services and what buyers should verify before committing to a provider.

Five forces are defining the 2026 competitive landscape. Regulatory deadlines in Europe and the Gulf are converting discretionary OT security spending into compliance obligations, and sovereignty, where the SOC runs, who staffs it, and whose threat intelligence informs it, has become a second-order procurement criterion. The OEM versus independent divide, accelerated by the EU Cyber Resilience Act, is redrawing how buyers structure multivendor programs. IT/OT convergence, OT security talent scarcity, AI in the OT SOC, and the shift to outcome-based contracting are separating providers with early structural bets from those still building capacity.

The assessment profiles 21 vendors against these forces, identifying Leaders based on their ability to operate at the intersection of regulatory depth, sovereign delivery, and demonstrated OT-native engineering capability.

“OT security buying in 2026 is being shaped less by what providers can do and more by the structural bets they made years ago in talent pipelines, in-country delivery, and OT-native engineering,” said Cathy Huang, senior research director, Worldwide Security Services, IDC.