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Anthropic Hands Activity Data Custody Back to the Enterprise

Stewart Bond, Jennifer Glenn, Ryan O'Leary, Esq. — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines Anthropic’s September 2026 introduction of Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), a data governance architecture that lets enterprises retain custody of Claude activity data, under their own cloud storage and encryption keys, while Anthropic continues to run automated misuse detection and routes flagged signals to the customer’s own cleared reviewers. IDC assesses EFS against its Enterprise Intelligence Architecture and prior guidance on data governance, agentic identity management, and AI enablement and offers guidance for CDOs and technology leaders on evaluating custody models, extending the Data Control Plane, and governing human reviewers alongside AI agents.

“EFS shows that for regulated enterprises, the real competitive differentiator among frontier LLM providers is no longer just model capability, it’s who controls the data and who can prove it.” — Stewart Bond, research VP, Data Intelligence and Integration, IDC

Decision Framework for Accessing Skills: Build, Buy, Borrow, or Bot

Abhinav Shrivastava, Gina Smith, PhD — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective offers organizations a framework for deciding whether to build a skill internally through upskilling and reskilling, buy it through hiring, borrow it through contractors and temporary staffing, or automate the task away. Drawing on IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Global IT Skills Survey, and Worldwide Future of Work Survey, it finds that the mix shifts with AI maturity. This document introduces a decision grid that sorts any skill gap on two factors: How close the skill sits to what employees already have and how long the need will last. It then shows HR and business leaders how to apply the grid against compliance and budget limits and make it a standing practice.

"Most organizations look at access to skills as an either-or decision between build (upskilling), buy (hiring), borrow (contracting/outsourcing), and bot (automating), with limited to no shared logic behind them," said Abhinav Shrivastava, senior research manager, Talent Acquisition and Strategy at IDC. "Organizations that will pull ahead of others will be those that view these levers simultaneously as one portfolio and manage the mix through a standing, organization-wide practice rather than leaving each decision to individual hiring managers."

Evolving Agentic Strategic Portfolio and Collaborative Work Management: Leveraging ServiceNow with User Reference Summary Context

Melinda-Carol Ballou — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective is one in a series of IDC documents examining agentic adoption across the AI assurance, ALM, quality, and portfolio strategies markets, providing vendor analysis and customer reference context for technology adoption and end-user buyer decision-making. This document updates ServiceNow's profile within IDC's SPM, CWM, and PPM coverage, incorporating 1H26 product announcements, IDC's 2025 worldwide PPM market share data, and reference perspectives from two ServiceNow customers on adoption, evaluation against alternatives, and organizational challenges in translating AI capability into realized value.

"IDC's research shows that organizations increasingly require end-to-end visibility across adaptive collaboration, from strategic intent through to day-to-day execution, coordinating across work management and related automation tools, benefiting increasingly from agentic strategies. The vendors making the most credible progress are those closing the gap between planning and execution on a shared data model, with AI governance, agentic orchestration, and human oversight designed in from the outset." — Melinda-Carol Ballou, research director, AI Assurance, ALM, Quality, and Portfolio Strategies, IDC

IDC Market Glance: Service Provider Agentic AI Platforms, 3Q26

Dina Capelle — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document that provides a concise current-state view of the worldwide service provider agentic AI platforms (SPAAP) market. This IDC Market Glance covers proprietary agentic AI platforms created, operated, and maintained by vendors whose core business is services. These platforms are the AI-native expression of the service-as-a-product shift: Service providers use them to industrialize and deliver services at scale and are increasingly deploying them in client environments. Every major services provider now ships one, so the purpose here is to map the landscape by what each platform actually industrializes. The competitive landscape spans horizontal services and industry-specific-led agentic AI platforms, specialized standalone agents, and multiagent life-cycle services and operations.

Business executives, product managers, and market insights or analyst relations professionals can use this information to understand the structure of the overall market or ecosystem; assess market, business, and partnership opportunities; and help identify where their organization fits into the competitive landscape.

IDC Market Glance content is current on the date it is published. The representative content contained in this presentation reflects a qualitative snapshot that is regularly refreshed. Company logos are illustrative only and do not reflect an exhaustive view of the market.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Receivable Automation Applications for the Enterprise 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts receivable (AR) automation software providers serving enterprise organizations with 1,000+ employees. This study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology leaders selecting an enterprise AR automation platform.

At enterprise scale, AR is evolving beyond collections automation toward a revenue-to-cash control layer that coordinates customer accounts, credit, collections, disputes, deductions, payments, cash application, intelligence, and increasingly autonomous actions across complex financial environments.

"The next phase of enterprise AR is not about generating more collection activity. It is about coordinating the decisions that determine when revenue becomes cash while giving finance the visibility and control to know why those decisions were made." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Accounts Receivable Automation Software for Small and Midmarket Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts receivable automation software providers serving small and midmarket organizations with 0–999 employees. This study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology leaders selecting an AR automation platform.

For small and midmarket businesses, the value of AR automation increasingly lies in shortening the operational distance between the invoice and usable cash. That requires more than automating collections. It requires a coordinated approach to customer payment experience, collections, disputes, cash application, and cash intelligence.

"The real measure of AR automation is not how much collection activity the software can generate. It is how effectively the platform removes the friction standing between an invoice and usable cash." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Print Management Solutions Independent Software 2026 Vendor Assessment

Evan Hardie, Geoffrey Wilbur, Tim Greene — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape study assesses the market for print management software solutions among the most prominent global independent software vendors and identifies their strengths and challenges. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that position vendors for success in this important market. This IDC study is based on a comprehensive framework to evaluate print management delivered within the context of an engagement.

"Print management remains a persistent challenge in 2026, and IT teams face constant pressure to optimize devices, control costs, and maintain security, even as hybrid work has simply become the baseline that print must support. What's changing is the platform underneath print itself: Microsoft's move toward driverless, IPP-based printing through Windows Ready Print and Protected Print Mode is forcing vendors to rethink device compatibility, while ARM-based and Copilot+ PCs add further disruption to users' ability to print. At the same time, agentic AI is pulling print management into a broader layer of document intelligence and workflow automation. Securing print in this environment increasingly means moving to the cloud and a SaaS billing model that offers more budgeting predictability. As the landscape evolves, buyers should seek a solution aligned with their business and technology goals," says Evan Hardie, senior research director, IDC.

IDC PeerScape: Practices to Enhance Multi-Tool Endpoint Device Management Strategies

Phil Hochmuth — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape examines the endpoint device challenges faced by five global enterprises and the strategies they used to address those challenges. The document anonymizes all customer organizations and individuals. Companies are identified only by general industry and region; no company names, product names specific to the customer’s business, or individual names are disclosed.

“The diversity of endpoints used in business environments, and the spawning of subsequent software tools to manage these endpoint types, is making IT operations managers’ heads spin,” says Phil Hochmuth, research VP, Endpoint Device Management and Enterprise Mobility at IDC. “But enterprises are getting creative and innovative about tackling the problems of device management tool sprawl in their environments.”

IDC PlanScape: An AI Orchestration Skills Framework

Gina Smith, PhD — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

"Every enterprise putting agents into production is quietly asking employees to orchestrate," says IDC senior research director Gina Smith, PhD. "But very few organizations I speak to have explicitly described to employees what orchestration involves. Even fewer tell me they have trained them for it. That's scary. Without effective, thorough orchestration, their AI initiatives are certainly at risk."

Organizations that treat orchestration as a trainable capability will move faster and make fewer mistakes. The framework in this study gives them a way to start.

Retail and Commerce Media Networks — The Market Broadens Beyond Retail

Alex Holtz — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective sizes the worldwide retail media network and commerce media network (RMN + CMN) market at $218.7 billion in 2025, rising to $498.2 billion in 2030 at a 17.9% CAGR, and examines the redistribution of this growth across seven verticals. Retailer-owned networks remain dominant but decline from 87.0% of commerce media in 2026 to 82.6% in 2030, while non-retailer verticals compound at 25.9%. Format composition rotates at the same time: Search falls from 51.9% of the market to 36.1%, while video becomes the largest single format at 37.1%. This document identifies transaction frequency and breadth of use case, not data volume or audience scale, as the variables separating viable commerce media networks from data assets without a business, and it maps three distinct technology buying patterns emerging across the market.

"Commerce media is no longer a retail phenomenon. It is becoming an infrastructure layer across every transaction-rich industry, and the binding constraint has shifted from ad serving to identity, consent, and orchestration. The organizations that win will be the ones whose loyalty and consent infrastructure can support autonomous decisioning, not the ones with the most inventory." — Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies at IDC