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AI Advisors, Agents and the Future of ALM: Is Market Demand Outpacing Vendor Supply?

Brian O'Rourke — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective highlights the ALM market, which is rapidly embracing GenAI and emerging agentic AI, with strong user adoption driven by predictive maintenance gains and unmet demand for embedded, domain-specific AI capabilities within ALM platforms.

"IDC global survey data indicates that generative and agentic AI solutions were being used by ALM applications customers in the first half of 2025, even though no embedded solutions were available in the market at that time; so the market for embedded applications for both GenAI and agentic AI should be strong." — Brian O'Rourke, research manager, Enterprise Asset Management and Smart Facilities, IDC

Accelerating Enterprise Transformation Through Data, Analytics, and AI

Deepika Giri, Shashank Nigam — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation highlights how Asia/Pacific enterprises are accelerating transformation through data, analytics, and AI. Market growth is driven by rapid GenAI adoption, cloud-native architectures, and resilient investment in analytics despite cost pressures. Organizations prioritize data intelligence, robust governance, and talent upskilling to unlock scalable AI impact. Strategic recommendations emphasize leading with data excellence, security, and workforce development to overcome challenges and deliver measurable business outcomes.

"AI success is powered by rigorous data management and strategic talent development. Enterprises that prioritize data quality, robust governance, and continuous upskilling will unlock transformative innovation and secure lasting competitive leadership in the dynamic digital landscape," says Shashank Nigam, senior research manager on AI, IDC Asia/Pacific.

Building an AI-Ready Data Architecture Series: The Business Activity Plane

Marlanna Harrington, Stewart Bond — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation is part of a four-part series, with each installment examining one of the four critical planes of the enterprise intelligence architecture that work together to enable AI-ready data and drive business outcomes. These planes support continuous learning, delivery of insights at scale, and a strong data culture across your organization.

This presentation provides a deep dive into the Business Activity Plane, outlining how to operationalize AI-ready data by embedding intelligence into workflows and the broader business processes they support. It examines how organizations move beyond generating insights to enable intelligent automation, leveraging data products, AI models, and emerging agentic capabilities to execute tasks, orchestrate workflows, and optimize end-to-end business outcomes.

Enterprise Connect 2026: AI Pushes Enterprise Communications Toward a CX-First Future

Jitesh Gera, Wayne Kurtzman, Denise Lund, Michelle Morgan — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses Enterprise Connect 2026. Enterprise Connect 2026 underscored a shift in enterprise communications from productivity-focused tools to AI-driven execution platforms. Vendors highlighted agentic AI as the central theme, emphasizing autonomous workflows, integrated systems, and measurable business outcomes — particularly in customer experience (CX). The market is increasingly moving toward verticalized, specialized AI solutions, positioning communications platforms as intelligent engines for both execution and CX transformation.

Enterprises Moving Ahead with Some Caution on Agentic AI for Business Process Services

Raymond Pucci — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores the growing enterprise interest in agentic AI for business process services, highlighting its advanced capabilities in planning, perception, tool usage, and memory compared with GenAI. While adoption is rising, with over 80% of enterprises exploring or using agentic AI, concerns remain around IT security, process delays, and financial impacts. This IDC Perspective recommends careful workflow mapping, robust data governance, and staff training to maximize benefits and mitigate risks as organizations cautiously advance with agentic AI solutions.

"Agentic AI is poised to redefine business process services, and enterprises are in the early stages of learning to embrace its autonomy. A key agentic AI challenge for enterprises will be to overcome their concerns over control and risk so as not to hold back the next leap in organizational productivity," said Raymond Pucci, research director, IDC's Intelligent Finance and Customer Care Business Process Services.

European Business Automation Market Events, 2H25

Milan Kalal — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note highlights key developments in the European business automation software market from July to December 2025, focusing on product announcements, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic vendor initiatives that drive end-to-end AI-powered automation.

The second half of 2025 marked a definitive transition in the European business automation software market, moving from generative AI experimentation toward the deployment of autonomous "agentic" systems. While 1H25 was characterized by the proliferation of "copilots" and assistive interfaces, the period from July to December 2025 saw major vendors — including UiPath, SAP, Microsoft, and Appian — launching frameworks designed for end-to-end task execution with minimal human intervention. Strategic focus areas shifted toward process intelligence as the foundational "connective tissue" required to ground AI agents in operational reality. Concurrently, the activation of the EU AI Act's provisions for General-Purpose AI in August 2025 forced a marketwide recalibration of governance and transparency standards within automation platforms.

IDC Market Glance: Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Low-Code Developer Technologies, 1Q26

Arnal Dayaratna — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The IDC study of generative AI, agentic AI, and low-code developer technologies outlines the primary technology segments that define this evolving software landscape. It encompasses foundation model providers, AI development platforms from cloud and enterprise vendors, and development frameworks that support model integration, orchestration, and application development. The IDC Market Glance also includes agent builder frameworks and AI assisted developer tools that embed generative capabilities directly into the software engineering workflow. Code editors, integrated development environments, and related developer productivity tools are represented alongside low-code and no-code platforms that incorporate generative AI services. In addition, compute software development kits (SDKs) and hardware-aligned software stacks are identified as key elements that support model training, fine-tuning, and inference across diverse deployment environments.

Top Database Management Trends, Challenges, and Breakthroughs for 2025: How Vendors Are Shaping the Path to Agentic AI

Devin Pratt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective summarizes the most notable database supplier initiatives completed in 2025 and explains how they collectively signal a shift from databases for AI experiments to databases for AI execution. Across the market in 2025, vendors expanded integrated vector search and hybrid retrieval, advanced converged access to real-time operational and analytical context, strengthened hybrid cloud and multicloud operating models, introduced early agent-aware tooling inside database platforms, and increased emphasis on automation and production-grade controls. Taken together, these moves reflect a market prioritizing predictable retrieval, lower data movement, and safer database-assisted actions as organizations push agentic AI into operational workflows.

"Last year, 2025, marked a point in which database innovation pivoted from adding AI features to operationalizing AI outcomes. Suppliers that make retrieval predictable, context continuous, and AI-assisted actions controllable inside the database management system (DBMS) will set the pace for agentic AI at scale," says Devin Pratt, research director, IDC

Trusting the Vibe: Understanding and Managing the Security Risks of AI-Assisted Development

Katie Norton — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation examines the security implications of AI-assisted development across the full spectrum of adoption, from AI coding assistants to vibe coding to agentic systems. Drawing on IDC survey data and independent security research, the presentation documents a consistent gap between organizational confidence in AI-generated code and its actual security performance and identifies the threat vectors and attack surfaces that enterprises must account for as adoption scales. The presentation outlines a three-layer control framework spanning point-of-generation controls, validation and traceability, and governance and oversight and maps specific security practices to each stage of the software development life cycle. Organizations that embed security deliberately into their AI coding workflows are best positioned to capture the productivity benefits of these tools without compromising application security.

Zycus Horizon EU & UK 2026: Zycus Provides a Vision for the Post S2P World

Patrick Reymann, Ashok Patel — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Zycus Horizon EU & UK 2026 in Vienna showcased an ambitious shift from traditional SourcetoPay to an 'IntaketoOutcomes' model powered by agentic AI, positioning procurement as an autonomous, outcomedriven control tower. The event blended keynotes, customer proof points, and a roadmap featuring ANA’s expansion into services, Merlin Agentic Sourcing, and conversational Intake 4.0, enabled by Agent Creator and Flow Creator. While Zycus must still prove scalability, breadth, and ecosystem readiness to execute on this vision, Horizon EU & UK 2026 clearly signaled an intent to lead the emerging agentic procurement platform category.