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Diligent Institute Launches the First Edition of General Counsel Risk Index, Setting a New Standard for Legal Risk Intelligence

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Diligent Institute's General Counsel (GC) Risk Index marks a pivotal advancement in the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) market, establishing Diligent as a data-driven authority on enterprise legal risk. With two-thirds of GCs reporting expanded risk responsibilities and AI adoption remaining uneven, the Index delivers timely, peer-validated intelligence that strengthens board decision-making and supports GRC investment. IDC views the Index as a durable competitive differentiator — provided Diligent safeguards its methodological independence and research credibility as the benchmark scales.

Industry Market Trends: Americas Manufacturing, 2026

Jonathan Lang, Carlos Gonzalez, Nigel Wallis, Heriberto Roman — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation aims to provide technology vendors with an overview of the key business trends shaping the manufacturing industry in 2026. The document offers a foundation of industry knowledge to:

Develop a compelling narrative that resonates with manufacturing clients
Align products and service offerings to manufacturing priorities
Show manufacturing clients how technology implementation contributes toward the achievement of their goals
Design short-, medium-, and long-term approaches to working with manufacturing clients

Technology vendor executives in marketing, sales, product strategy, market intelligence, and channel management can leverage the insights from this document as a starting point to organize their activities.

"Manufacturers across the Americas are entering a new phase where AI and advanced automation are necessities. Technology investment is increasingly about enabling agility, resilience, and sustained operational excellence in a structurally uncertain environment." — IDC Manufacturing Insights Team

Databricks' MCP Marketplace Brings Real-Time Data Foundation for Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Tapan Patel — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Databricks' Model Context Protocol (MCP) Marketplace enables any MCP-compatible AI agent to query live enterprise data through a standardized open protocol, reducing the custom integrations; extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines; or engineering overhead. For marketing and customer experience teams, this means that AI agents can access current customer behavior, purchase history, predictive scores, and live external signals directly from where the data lives, thereby collapsing the latency between insight and action that has historically limited real-time marketing automation.

SAP Doubles Down on Data: Acquisitions of Dremio and Prior Labs Accelerate Unified Data and AI Platform Vision

Stewart Bond, Marlanna Harrington, Megha Kumar, Mickey North Rizza — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

SAP has announced definitive agreements to acquire two companies: Dremio, a data lakehouse federation and query engine built on Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris, and Prior Labs, a European AI research lab specializing in tabular foundation models. Both transactions are subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, and are expected to close by 3Q26. Together, the acquisitions are designed to extend SAP's Business Data Cloud (BDC) from a harmonized SAP-focused platform into a broader, high-performance data platform capable of querying any data in place and running AI-driven predictions on structured tabular data. IDC views these moves as a deliberate effort to close the gap between enterprise data sprawl and production-ready agentic AI, addressing both the access layer (Dremio) and the intelligence layer (Prior Labs) in a single strategic step.

SAS Innovate 2026: Expanding CX Decisioning Capabilities and Creating New Opportunities for the Next 50 Years

Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

SAS Innovate 2026, set against the company's 50th anniversary, paired a strong historical narrative with a forward-looking push to evolve the company's analytics legacy into a pragmatic, governed, and agentic AI strategy. The event leaned heavily on SAS' long-standing rigor in statistical computing, distributed analytics, and governance as the foundation for the company's current AI cycle, positioning the company as a stable alternative to more hype-driven approaches. SAS emphasized measurable outcomes, particularly for marketing teams under pressure to scale personalization within complex, regulated environments and taking an industry-specific go-to-market approach. Rather than centering on a single launch, the key signal was a unified architecture spanning SAS Viya products, including Intelligent Decisioning, AI Navigator, and CI 360, aimed at managing the operational complexity of real-world AI deployment. However, broader adoption will depend on SAS' ability to translate this depth into more intuitive marketer experiences, clear pricing models for AI agents, and well-defined, role-based agent workflows that align with day-to-day martech and CX operational needs.

Industry Market Trends: Americas Government, 2026

Ravikant Sharma, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina, Heriberto Roman — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Americas Government Market Trends 2026 report aims to provide technology vendors with an overview of the key business trends shaping the government industry in 2026. The report offers a foundation of industry knowledge to:

Develop a compelling narrative that resonates with government clients
Align products and service offerings with government priorities
Show government clients how technology implementation contributes to achieving their goals
Design short-, medium-, and long-term approaches to working with government clients

Technology vendor executives in marketing, sales, product strategy, market intelligence, and channel management can leverage the insights from this report as a starting point to organize their activities.

“Government technology priorities in the Americas are shifting from fragmented digital initiatives toward sovereign, resilient, and AI-enabled digital infrastructure. The next phase of transformation will be defined not only by technology adoption, but by governments’ ability to operationalize AI, secure critical systems, and modernize legacy environments at scale,” says Research Director Ravikant Sharma, IDC Government Insights.

Klaviyo 1Q26: Autonomous CRM Powers Record Revenue and First Profitable Quarter as a Public Company

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Link highlights the results from Klaviyo's 1Q26 financial results announced on May 5, 2026, for the period ending March 31, 2026. Klaviyo's autonomous B2C CRM strategy is gaining momentum, delivering record operating margins and strong revenue growth and accelerating international expansion as brands consolidate customer engagement on AI-native platforms.

IDC Market Glance: Voice of the Customer Applications, 1Q26

Oru Mohiuddin, Michelle Morgan — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document that provides a concise current-state view of the voice of the customer (VOC) applications market, outlining the key segments and subsegments organizations use to capture, analyze, and act on customer feedback and experience signals so business and product leaders can assess market and partnership opportunities and understand competitive positioning.

Microsoft Customer Insights and Agent 365: An Emerging Architecture for Agentic Mesh for CX

Gerry Murray — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Microsoft moved Conversational Journeys from public preview to general availability (GA) with SMS support on April 27, 2026. Then on May 1, 2026, it brought Microsoft Agent 365 to general availability as the enterprise control plane for observing, governing, and securing all AI agents across an organization. Together, these two releases move Microsoft's agent strategy from "build and deploy" to "build, deploy, and manage at scale."

Writer Launches Event-Based Autonomous Agents: A New Threshold for Enterprise AI Execution

Gerry Murray — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The simultaneous release of Connector Profiles, Writer Agent Profiles, AI Studio Observability, a Datadog Logs Plugin, and Bring-Your-Own Encryption (BYOE) Key indicates that Writer is building the governance and auditability infrastructure that regulated enterprises require before they can deploy autonomous agents at scale. It is a strong strategic bet that positions Writer ahead of the adoption curve in markets where data control and audit trails are prerequisites for any AI investment.