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Addressing Critical Data Challenges in Retail: Fast-Evolving Data Management Roles and Strategies for Successful AI

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how retailers are accelerating investment in AI, but IDC’s 2026 Global Retail Survey shows that scaling AI depends heavily on the maturity of the underlying data environment. While 42% of retailers identify digital skills and talent as the largest individual barrier, poor data synchronization and integration at 34%, limited access to real-time data and analytics at 34%, and insufficient operational and customer data visibility at 29% form a significant cluster of structural constraints.

The same pattern appears in individual retail functions. Real-time network-wide inventory visibility remains a leading operational challenge, while difficulty personalizing at scale highlights persistent customer data fragmentation. Retailers therefore need to treat data integration, semantic consistency, ownership, real-time information, governance, and observability as core elements of their AI strategies.

Successful AI will depend less on the volume of data a retailer owns and more on its ability to provide trusted, timely, semantically clear, and appropriately governed information to humans, applications, and increasingly autonomous AI systems.

“Retailers are discovering that scaling AI is often less about finding a better model and more about giving this model a reliable representation of the business. Data synchronization, real-time access, and visibility sit immediately behind talent among the main barriers to AI execution. As AI moves closer to inventory, customer decisions, fulfillment, pricing, and store operations, data management becomes part of the operating model itself. Retailers that treat integration, inventory visibility, customer data unification, and governance as core AI capabilities will be much better positioned to move from experimentation to scalable business value,” says Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

From the AIforce Interface to the Platform: A Retail Lens on Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026

Ornella Urso — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents the retail-related key takeaways from Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026, held on September 15–17 in San Francisco. Salesforce reframed its CRM framework as an interface layer, backed by new AI models, governance capabilities, and role-specific agents. The report includes a selection of retail use case stories on commerce, order management, and retail media capabilities.

"Dreamforce 2026 showed Salesforce's ecosystem and intelligent layer strategy aimed at serving agents, businesses, and ultimately shoppers," said Ornella Urso, research director at IDC. "For retailers, the harder questions are once more foundational: whether commerce and service data are unified, who owns routing and escalation rules, and how governance is enforced before an agent checks out an order or issues a refund."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Smart Conference Room Hardware for Hybrid Meetings 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Gala Spasova — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses 12 vendors of AI-enabled smart conference room hardware for hybrid meetings, evaluating them on their capabilities and strategies across key parameters of performance. It provides insights into the strengths and challenges of each of the 12 vendors included: Barco, Biamp, Cisco, Crestron, HP Inc., Jabra, Logitech, Neat, Sennheiser, Shure, Yamaha, and Yealink.

"Meeting-room AI divides into a perception layer that belongs to the device and a reasoning layer that belongs to the meeting platform," says Gala Spasova, senior research manager, Intelligent Workplace and Management at IDC. "Buyers that understand that division buy the right thing from the right supplier. Those that do not tend to pay for generative features they would have received anyway, while accepting whatever audio the room happens to deliver into them."

IDC PlanScape: Cybersecurity Risk Management Services in the Age of AI, Identity, and Board Accountability

David Clemente, Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PlanScape examines what’s causing changes in risk management, what a cybersecurity risk management program needs to look like today to keep up with them, and how service providers can be used to strengthen and support risk management.

“No CISO is an island, though some may feel isolated,” says David Clemente, research director, IDC Security, Sustainability, and Compliance. “Instead, they and their cybersecurity risk management responsibilities are part of a larger program that now extends across the organization, encompassing other business leaders and functions. In the same way, no organization is self-sufficient in its risk management; every organization relies on service providers for essential activities.”

Clemente adds, “Choosing the right provider is essential, and its wealth of experience (across industries, security tools, and adversaries) is often the difference between an alert and an incident. It has never been more important to invest in strengthening risk management and finding the right service providers.”

IDC Survey: Agentic AI Is Live at the Edge, and Physical AI Investment Is Next — EdgeView 2026

Olga Yashkova — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey summarizes findings from IDC’s EdgeView 2026 Survey, August 2026 (n = 650). Respondents include organizations with 500+ employees that currently use at least one form of edge computing, with director level or above decision-makers across IT, line of business, and operations.

This survey is intended to help technology vendors, service providers, and investors understand the buying intentions, challenges, and opportunities in edge deployments, including why organizations move infrastructure and applications closer to where data is generated and consumed; how they weigh latency, cost, resiliency, security, and compliance in doing so; and how AI is reshaping edge budget allocation.

This presentation takes an edge AI angle, focusing on agentic AI use cases across industries, and concludes with a look at physical AI and how both agentic and physical AI are moving from pilots into production at the edge.

“Edge AI is now a funded priority, and the next budget increase will go to the projects that deliver results first,” said Olga Yashkova, research manager, Edge AI Strategies and Hosting and Colocation Services, Worldwide Telecom Services, IDC.

IDC Survey: Enterprise Infrastructure Pulse Survey, 1Q26 — Storage Systems — Focus on AI Workloads

Carol Sliwa — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey summarizes the findings from IDC’s 1Q26 Enterprise Infrastructure Pulse survey of IT decision-makers with knowledge of and purchasing responsibility for their organization’s storage systems and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Taking the pulse of the enterprise IT market, the 1Q26 storage survey offers in-depth insight into infrastructure requirements and investments. This presentation is the second of two executive summaries of the 1Q26 survey, with a special focus on storage infrastructure for AI workloads. Topics covered in the first executive summary (see IDC Survey: Enterprise Infrastructure Pulse Survey, 4Q25: Storage Systems and Hyperconverged Infrastructure — Executive Summary, IDC #US54285126, June 2026) included spending plans, usage of flash storage, adoption of new storage technologies and architectures, hybrid cloud storage trends, and HCI deployment patterns.

The Enterprise Infrastructure Pulse is a quarterly survey that explores trends in various IT infrastructure domains, including servers, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, data protection, and data logistics.

IDC Survey: Manufacturing Survey, 2026 — Canada, Part 2: Physical AI, Digital Twins and Threads, and IT/OT Integration

Nigel Wallis — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey uses IDC's 2026 Worldwide Manufacturing Survey to examine how manufacturers are prioritizing investments and decisions over the next 24 months. The study isolates the Canadian sample and compares it with the worldwide total to assess where Canadian manufacturing technology adoption tracks global patterns and where it diverges. It is built for technology vendors developing go-to-market and account-based marketing plans that need to know where a global pitch works in Canada unchanged and where it needs a Canada-specific adjustment.

The analysis in this study (Part 2) covers:

Physical AI: Maturity, priorities, technology-by-technology adoption, and barriers to scale
Digital thread and digital twins: Thread maturity, drivers, and where twin emphasis is shifting
IT/OT integration: Data governance priorities and 18-month expectations.
OT security: Priorities and capability rollout

"Fewer Canadian respondents operate physical AI autonomously relative to other regions, yet plans for edge compute investment are higher," says Nigel Wallis, research VP, IDC Insights. "Likewise, while cross-site, near-real-time IT–OT integration adoption is behind today, expectations are that Canadian manufacturers will catch up to worldwide norms within 18 months. This will drive interest and investment in digital twins and threads but also spur a deeper focus on OT security."

IDC Survey: U.S. Enterprise XR Survey, 2026 — General Productivity

Ramon T. Llamas — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey: U.S. Enterprise XR Survey, 2026 — General Productivity discusses enterprise buyers who have deployed VR, MR, AR, or ER hardware and software for general productivity work. Built on IDC’s XR Commercial Survey, fielded among U.S. enterprise respondents in the first quarter of 2026, the study tracks this segment along three lines: how far deployments have progressed and how many hours a week employees actually spend in a headset; which headsets and software setups, tethered or standalone, this segment has settled on and how organizations get hold of that software; and how the benefits buyers expected going in, among them productivity, collaboration, compliance, error reduction, and knowledge retention, stack up against the benefits they report once the software is in daily use. The survey also sizes XR adoption as a share of total staff and points to which functions inside these organizations account for most of that use.

Suppliers selling hardware, software, or services into this segment, along with the integrators and channel partners that reach these buyers, can draw on the survey to understand how the segment behaves today and where any gap between what buyers wanted and what they got offers opportunities to compete.

IDC’s Worldwide Smartphone ODM Tracker Taxonomy, 2026

Sean Kao, Kiranjeet Kaur, Nabila Popal — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a taxonomy for segmenting smartphone ODMs. Historical data in IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Smartphone ODM Tracker examines the upstream supply chain for smartphones, which is increasingly shifting toward a different ODM ecosystem. This service provides quarterly insights into which ODMs manufacture for which branded vendors, along with breakdowns by product technologies, supplier relationships, and other categories.

“The smartphone ODM taxonomy and market coverage extend IDC’s mobile phone market research by overlaying technical specifications for these systems and the main ODM market players,” said Sean Kao, senior research manager, Worldwide ODM research at IDC.

Stagwell’s Progress in 1H26

Douglas Hayward — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Stagwell reported 3.3% organic net revenue growth in 1H26, with digital transformation and communications offsetting flat creative and media performance. This IDC Market Note assesses the results, the 2026 guidance that depends on a double-digit second half, and Stagwell’s platform strategy built around The Machine. “Stagwell has the right strategy and it’s starting to pay off, with revenue growth beginning to return,” said Douglas Hayward, senior research director for customer experience strategies and services at IDC. “2H26 will show whether Stagwell is now really about to return to double-digit growth.”