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AI's Impact on Discovery, Advertising, and Brand

Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation, delivered at IDC Directions 2026, provides buyers with insights regarding the impact of AI on discovery, advertising, and brand.

A tectonic shift is underway in how brands are discovered, evaluated, and chosen, as generative AI reshapes the rules of marketing and commerce. Traditional search is giving way to AI-generated answers, zero-click journeys, and agent-driven buying, where both consumers and B2B buyers increasingly rely on AI to research, compare, and even make decisions on their behalf. This transformation is redefining visibility, forcing brands to move beyond SEO toward becoming machine-readable, contextually relevant, and continuously optimized across a fragmented content and technology landscape.

In addition, new advertising models are emerging within AI environments, creating both disruption and opportunity. In this new era, success will depend on how well brands align content, data, and systems to influence AI-driven discovery — and ultimately earn a place in the decisions machines make on behalf of customers.

Defining AI Bill of Materials: Structure, Scope, and Role in AI Trust Services

Sakshi Grover, Grace Trinidad — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the emergence of the AI bill of materials (AI BOM) as a foundational framework to manage the growing complexity of AI systems. As enterprises transition toward agentic, distributed, and continuously evolving AI architectures, traditional governance and security models are proving insufficient. The document outlines the structure, scope, and operationalization of AI BOM, highlighting its role in enabling system-level visibility, traceability, and control across models, data, pipelines, and runtime environments. It also explores enterprise adoption drivers, regulatory influences, and vendor approaches, positioning AI BOM as a critical control layer for managing risk, cost, and compliance in modern AI ecosystems.

"AI systems are evolving into distributed, stateful execution environments composed of models, data pipelines, prompt orchestration layers, APIs, and autonomous agents operating across dynamic runtime contexts. AI BOM functions as the control plane for this architecture, capturing dependency graphs, lineage, identity propagation, and runtime telemetry in a machine-readable form. Without this, enterprises cannot correlate system behavior with underlying components, resulting in blind spots across governance, security, and operational integrity as AI systems scale," says Sakshi Grover, senior research manager, Cybersecurity Products and Services, IDC.

Governance as the Backbone for AI in the U.S. Federal Civilian Government

Massimiliano Claps — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation analyzes the U.S. federal government's evolving AI governance by combining a discussion on the policy and regulatory developments that were mandated over the past 12 months with a survey of 152 IT and non-IT senior leaders from U.S. federal government departments and agencies.

IDC research shows that AI adoption is progressing fast in the U.S. federal civilian government market; thus AI governance becomes the backbone of AI adoption to ensure coordination via CAIO roles, interagency collaboration, updated policies, and structured compliance frameworks.

Microsoft Customer Insights: An Emerging Architecture for Agentic Mesh for CX

Gerry Murray — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Microsoft moved Conversational Journeys from public preview to GA and added SMS in the same release. The runtime combines Customer Insights — Journeys, Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and Copilot Studio agents in a single no-code Dataverse environment.

Additive Digital Governance: Redesigning Authority, Work, and Coordination for Machine-Scale Operations

Shannon Kalvar — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

As machine-scale digital complexity overtakes human-scale coordination models, enterprises need more than better telemetry and faster automation. Additive digital governance provides a governance model for redefining authority, redistributing work between humans and machines, and turning operational events into durable institutional learning. The result is a more governable, resilient, and sustainable digital operating model.

"When complexity exceeds human absorption capacity, the decisive advantage no longer comes from speed alone. It comes from the ability to define boundaries, legitimate trade-offs, and govern machine-scale operations without exhausting the people responsible for them," says Shannon Kalvar, research director, IDC.

IDC ProductScape: Worldwide Advanced Production Planning and Scheduling, 2026

Lorenzo Veronesi — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The IDC ProductScape offers a comprehensive guide on the key functionalities of worldwide advanced production planning and scheduling, featuring products from Blue Yonder, Dassault Systèmes, Epicor, Eyelit, Infor, MPDV, QAD, RELEX, SAP, Siemens, and Velotic. The status of each functionality is categorized as fully supported, partially supported, partner provided, road map, or not supported, aiding technology purchasers in quickly identifying which vendors align with their changing requirements.

IFS 1Q26 Financial Results: Industrial Operations Embed AI for Agility, Performance, and Work

Aly Pinder, Sarah Lee, Mickey North Rizza, Brian O'Rourke — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

On April 22, 2026, IFS announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2026 period ending March 31, 2026. IFS reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth of 25%. IFS highlighted cloud revenue growth of 24% year over year (YoY), net retention rate (NRR) of 114%, and recurring revenue mix of 84% of total revenue. Growth in the first quarter was driven by a combination of new customers, revenue expansion within existing customers, consistent retention metrics, and increasing adoption of AI-driven capabilities across industrial operational workflows. Some of the wins and expansions for IFS.ai were from large enterprises such as Aramex, Coca-Cola, China Airlines, Drydocks World, First Solar, JVCKENWOOD, LATAM Airlines, Miele, and ShinMaywa Industries. This IDC Link provides a perspective on IFS' financial highlights for 1Q26 and its potential impact on industrial operations, enterprise applications, asset-intensive industries, and aftermarket service.

IDC PeerScape: Best Practices for Asset Management in Utilities

John Villali — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape highlights five key best practices that distinguish successful APM implementations in utilities: adopting risk-based asset prioritization, integrating IT and OT data, transitioning to condition-based predictive maintenance, aligning APM with business and regulatory objectives, and strengthening data governance. Together, these practices enable utilities to optimize maintenance strategies, improve reliability metrics, reduce operational costs, and enhance their ability to justify investments in a highly regulated industry.

Utilities that treat APM as an enterprise transformation rather than a standalone technology deployment are better positioned to manage risk, extend asset life cycles, and deliver consistent, high-quality service to customers. As grid complexity continues to increase, APM will play a central role in enabling utilities to balance reliability, affordability, and sustainability objectives.

"Asset performance management is becoming a foundational capability for utilities navigating grid modernization, changing market dynamics, and rising reliability expectations. Organizations that integrate data, analytics, and operational decision-making into a cohesive APM strategy will be best positioned to reduce risk, optimize assets, extend asset life cycles, and deliver measurable business and regulatory outcomes," said John Villali, senior research director, IDC Energy Insights.

Velotic: The Journey Toward an AI‑Ready Industrial Data Fabric

Lorenzo Veronesi — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes the role of Velotic in the modern industrial software ecosystem. Velotic's creation out of the integration of Proficy, Kepware, and ThingWorx marks a shift from monolithic industrial applications to data‑centric, AI‑ready platforms. The company offers manufacturers not only an OT backbone and ecosystem but also introduces choices around architecture, DataOps, branding, and partner models.

"Industrial software is no longer a sidecar to hardware or IT procurement; long‑term value will accrue to those that control and structure industrial data, not just to those selling individual point solutions," said Lorenzo Veronesi, associate research director, Manufacturing Insights, IDC. "Manufacturers should treat Velotic not just as a logo change, but rather as a chance to evolve their architecture. They should pursue a map drafting of the as-is versus to-be Proficy, Kepware, and ThingWorx dataflows and define a mid-term target for an integrated, AI‑ready data fabric."

Google Cloud Next 2026: Building the Agentic Enterprise Through an Integrated Developer Platform

Jim Mercer — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Google Cloud Next 2026 marks a pivotal transition from generative AI experimentation to production-scale agentic systems. The event highlighted Google Cloud's strategy to deliver a unified platform spanning infrastructure, data, security, and developer tooling, enabling enterprises to build, deploy, and govern autonomous agents at scale. Central to this vision is the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which integrates development frameworks, runtime environments, governance controls, and optimization capabilities into a cohesive system. This IDC Link examines the key announcements and provides perspective on their implications for developers, DevOps, and platform engineering as we move toward the agent development life cycle (ADLC).