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IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Life Sciences Organization Worldwide, 2026

Nimita Limaye, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released worldwide in May 2026, drawing on a life sciences subsample of 112 organizations out of 1,900 organizations surveyed.

“Life sciences, the sector that once resisted technology, now leads the world in AI governance. Irony lies in the fact that its greatest strength can’t rescue it from its greatest weaknesses. Data foundations don’t care how mature your policies are, while technology debt and a lack of interoperability slow down progress,” says Dr. Nimita Limaye, research VP, Life Sciences R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC.

IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides an overview of the results from IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards. This award program recognizes the leading CX vendors in each application market that receive the highest customer satisfaction scores based on IDC’s CX Path Survey.

IDC’s CX Path Survey is a global survey of over 2,500 organizations across all geographic regions and company sizes, where customers are asked to rate their vendor on more than 30 different customer satisfaction metrics.

Amazon unBoxed 2026: Amazon Ads Agent Merges the Console and DSP and Puts AI in the Planning Seat for Advertisers of All Sizes

Roger Beharry Lall, Allyson Leavy — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its unBoxed 2026 conference in San Francisco (September 28–30, 2026), Amazon Ads repositioned and expanded its offering. It merged the Ads Console and Amazon DSP into one AI-led platform named Amazon Ads Agent, which now includes Full-Funnel Campaigns and DVA+, which help advertisers by using Amazon's models to choose channels, audiences, and bids. It also extended advertising into Alexa for Shopping conversations and local services through Branded Conversations and Sponsored Services. With these updates, Amazon puts the AI interactive brief ahead of the complex advertiser dashboard or bid desk as the main interface, opening streaming and programmatic media to midmarket and smaller buyers.

Braze Forge 2026: Building a Martech Stack for the Future of Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Braze used Forge 2026 to show that it is positioned as the execution layer for agentic marketing, with the journey builder as one piece of it. Decisioning Studio Go, Operator building full Canvases, and Agentic Standards for QA move decisioning and campaign checking from marketers to AI agents. Operator Connect and the Braze MCP Server let agents in Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot call Braze directly. CMOs should now judge engagement platforms on decisioning quality, the scope of actions agents can take, the governance around them, and access to enterprise data, in addition to channels and orchestration.

Agentic Orchestration Checks In: The Opportunity for Media Networks Has Arrived for Healthcare

Alex Holtz, Nimita Limaye — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how agentic orchestration and the rise of health media networks are reshaping advertising as reimbursement pressure, concentrated therapeutic economics, and the loss of modeled health audiences push pharmacies, payers, PBMs, and digital health platforms toward compliant first-party data monetization. With operators such as CVS Media Exchange, Walgreens Advertising Group, Optum, GoodRx, and the point-of-care networks building closed-loop, high-intent advertising surfaces, this document maps the category into three archetype stacks and details the architectural, regulatory, and measurement challenges that determine who can credibly participate. It offers a blueprint for stakeholders to capture therapeutic and non-endemic demand while separating advertising decisioning from coverage and clinical judgment as agentic assistants reach the point of care.

"Healthcare has the highest-intent first-party data in commerce media and the least room for error in activating it," says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies, IDC. "The closed-loop infrastructure that transformed retail, then travel, and then financial services is now arriving in pharmacies, plans, and digital health platforms — but here, the institution selling the ad may also control the formulary, the prior authorization, and the fill. The question isn't whether this market forms. It is whether operators build the disclosure and governance architecture now, while agentic care navigation is small enough to design."

"Healthcare's next margin frontier isn't a new service line — it's already sitting in the data. For pharmacies, plans, and digital health platforms, first-party assets represent a high-margin revenue opportunity that is reimbursement independent, clinically non-dilutive, and self-reinforcing as measurement closes the loop," said Dr. Nimita Limaye, research vice president, IDC Health Insights. "What separates sustainable advantage from short-term extraction is architecture: institutions that embed consent, de-identification, and disclosure into the core product — not the compliance stack — will compound. The ones that don't will discover that advertising revenue earned at the cost of patient trust carries the steepest hidden price in the industry."

Hightouch Reframe 2026: Bringing Warehouse-Native Data and Context to Agentic Marketing

Tapan Patel — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its Reframe 2026 Chicago event, Hightouch argued that large language models (LLMs) need a marketing harness consisting of customer data, brand context, tools, and governance. Its Agentic Marketing Platform (AMP) consists of three products: the Agentic and Composable CDP, which run background agents that find and rank marketing opportunities; Lifecycle Studio, which drafts and configures life-cycle campaigns for marketer approval; and Ad Studio, which creates on-brand ads and paid media campaigns. For campaigns across all products, Hightouch has also built review agents that check campaigns before people sign off.

AMP moves Hightouch into a crowded agentic marketing market where incumbent platforms bundle their own agents, and CMOs cannot afford separate agents from several vendors doing the same jobs. To compete, Hightouch must integrate with a growing set of systems that hold context and capabilities and show incremental gains in business outcomes from agent-driven marketing workflows.

Industry Market Forecast: Worldwide Agriculture and Fishing, 2026 — Digital Transformation Spending Guide

Roberta Bigliani, Gaurav Verma, Nigel Wallis, Jose Ignacio Diaz — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This Industry Market Forecast provides tech vendor product managers and market intelligence leads with an overview of agriculture and fishing digital transformation (DX) spending and highlights how agriculture and fishing organizations are investing in industry-specific use cases during 2026.

By looking at the size of the worldwide and the top growing use cases, technology vendor executives can better evaluate areas for investment in products or services development, sales and marketing campaign prioritization, and market penetration.

Used in combination with the other Industry Intelligence reports, this document can help technology vendors to gain competitive advantage.

“Agriculture and fishing are entering a new phase of digital maturity. Capital discipline governs how money gets committed. Margins in both sectors are thin enough that every dollar of digital spending has to trace to something countable: yield per hectare, catch per trip, fuel and water saved, and an operation that keeps running through a bad season. Hardware still absorbs close to $6 of every $10 spent in this market. The payback sits in the software and service layer that makes that equipment earn its keep. This is where the buying conversation has moved,” says Roberta Bigliani, group VP, IDC Insights.

Classiq's Fault Tolerance Engine Brings Hardware Reality into Quantum Application Design

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Classiq's Fault Tolerance Engine brings architecture-aware resource estimation into the quantum application development workflow, letting developers assess the physical resources and error-correction requirements of a logical program. As fault tolerance turns hardware constraints into a design-stage concern, IDC believes tools that let developers and enterprises assess feasibility early will shape which quantum applications are worth pursuing.

DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Reaches Stage C: From Road Maps to Hardware Verification

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) advancement of Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM, and IonQ to Stage C of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) shifts the central question in quantum computing from whose road map is most compelling to whose hardware holds up under independent government testing. Because QBI is hardware focused, Stage C is not a certification of commercial success, and IDC believes the software ecosystem that makes that hardware useful will matter just as much to the vendors, buyers, and investors weighing which approaches can deliver utility-scale value.

From SaaS Seats to Coworker Outcomes: New Metrics and Pricing Models for Automated Marketing

Gerry Murray, Tiffany McCormick, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Synopsis

This IDC Perspective examines how agentic AI coworkers are displacing seats, sessions, and feature adoption as measures of marketing software value. It introduces a five-metric framework for Coworker Performance, Intent-to-Outcome Rate, Time to Outcome, Human Touches per Outcome, Outcome Quality, and Cost per Completed Outcome, paired with SaaS Activation per Outcome to track underlying application usage. The document surveys how Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Braze, and ActiveCampaign are pricing agentic AI differently, and sets out the definitions, trust, and margin questions vendors must answer to make outcome-based pricing durable.

"Every vendor claims their agent produces outcomes, but almost none can tell a customer what an outcome is, who verifies it, or what happens when the two sides disagree," says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC. "The vendors who win the next pricing cycle will be the ones who can prove completed work, not just consumed tokens, and who can hold their margin when outcome volume swings."