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Critical External Drivers Shaping Global IT and Business Planning, 2027

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation describes the critical drivers — important external forces — that will shape the global business ecosystem and influence enterprise IT and business strategies for the next 12–24 months and beyond. The 2026 drivers were identified, developed, and reviewed by a cross-functional international analyst team at IDC. This year’s document reveals 20 interrelated critical drivers that coalesce around four major themes: AI maturity and economics, reestablishing operational foundations, shifts in geopolitical infrastructure, and systemic and emerging risk. These 20 drivers provide the foundation for the development of IDC FutureScape predictions for 2027.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Revenue Orchestration Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Michelle Morgan — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors against inclusion criteria and market trends for unified revenue orchestration software. It highlights the shift from stage-based pipeline management to signal-driven workflows and agentic AI taking bounded action, with buyer evaluation moving toward execution proof rather than feature counts.

"Agentic AI is pushing revenue orchestration platforms past the point of dashboards and summaries," says Michelle Morgan, senior research manager for IDC's AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service, and Contact Center Strategies. "The real test isn't what an agent can do; it's what a buyer can verify. Vendors that can show closed-loop outcomes, not just autonomy claims, are the ones worth watching."

IDC PlanScape: DevSecOps

Nick Kirtley — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PlanScape discusses DevSecOps.

"DevSecOps is seen as a go-to practice applying security within DevOps teams across the organization. However, there are challenges involved, preventing teams from adhering to required levels of security across all teams. There are measures that CISOs and CIOs can take to ensure that teams improve their uptake and adherence to security processes and tooling," says Nick Kirtley, adjunct research advisor, IT Executive Programs (IEP), IDC.

IDC Survey Spotlight: Is Agentic AI Cost Governance Keeping Pace with Adoption?

Rick Villars — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines whether enterprise cost governance for agentic AI is keeping pace with adoption. Drawing on IDC’s July 2026 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey (FERS Survey) Wave 4, it finds that agent workflows are now in production at nearly every enterprise, yet two-thirds of organizations overspent their agent budgets over the past year, and most organizations that rate their own cost governance as mature are among them. This disconnect between self-assessed maturity and actual budget outcomes is the central finding: Governance is being built after scale arrives rather than ahead of it.

The IDC Survey Spotlight argues the gap will widen as agent sophistication, not merely agent count, scales through 2030, and points technology leaders toward three priorities: assigning single-owner accountability for agent spend, funding real-time cost visibility before scaling further, and correcting the sequencing that leaves the deepest adopters the least governed.

Market Share: China Semiconductor Fabless Shares, 2025

Helen Chiang — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation examines the 2025 market shares of the leading vendors in the semiconductor fabless market.

“Although consumer demand in 2025 was pressured by rising component prices due to AI datacenters crowding out capacity, China’s overall market maintained growth momentum, driven by enterprise and government AI computing demand and continued domestic substitution,” says Helen Chiang, research vice president, Computing Systems Platforms and Technologies, Enterprise Infrastructure.

Renaissance Thinking in an AI World: What the Next Generation of Business Consultants Must Be

Bill Latshaw — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how the role of the business consultant changes as AI automates the routine analytical work that once defined the base of the consulting pyramid. IDC argues that AI raises the value of renaissance thinking, the ability to operate with both depth and breadth, continuously testing assumptions and reframing problems, rather than diminishing it. As baseline analysis becomes fast and inexpensive, consultant differentiation shifts to causal diagnosis, cross-domain pattern recognition, contextual judgment, and the human work of trust and change that AI does not perform reliably end to end. The document describes what the renaissance-thinking consultant is like in an AI-centric market, how they produce results within the emerging hybrid operating model of senior value pods. It describes their role in an AI delivery platform and an elastic delivery network that clients increasingly value, and how buyers and providers can deliberately develop renaissance-thinking consultants.

“AI can produce the analysis in seconds, but it cannot decide which problem is worth solving, diagnose why it is happening inside a particular organization, or lead the people who must change. This is the consultant’s work, and it is exactly the work of the renaissance thinker. The firms and buyers that win in an AI world will be the ones that treat AI as an instrument for seeing more and keep human judgment firmly in the lead,” said Bill Latshaw, research director, Worldwide Business Consulting Services at IDC.

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

Alex Holtz, Dorothy Creamer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how agentic orchestration and the rise of financial media networks are reshaping advertising as margin compression and credit tightening drive card issuers, payment networks, and fintech wallets toward first-party data monetization. With the emergence of programmatic access to authenticated transaction data, operators such as Chase, American Express, Mastercard, and PayPal are pioneering closed-loop, high-intent advertising surfaces. The document details the architectural, operational, and measurement challenges and opportunities as financial media networks formalize, offering a blueprint for stakeholders to capture non-endemic brand demand and sustainable growth.

"As margin compression pushes card issuers and payment networks to rethink their revenue mix, financial services emerges as the fastest-growing frontier for commerce media," says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Commerce Media and Advertising Strategies, IDC. "The closed-loop infrastructure that transformed retail, and then travel, is now redefining how brands reach authenticated, high-spend audiences through banks, card networks, and fintech wallets. The question isn't if this shift will happen — it is who will own the loop, and how quickly they will build before the market consolidates."

CIO Peer Perspective — From IT Expertise to AI Readiness: Closing the Skills Gap Through Workforce Transformation

Leonardo Freitas, Martina Longo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence is transforming the technology skills challenge from a talent acquisition issue into a workforce transformation imperative. While technology talent shortages remain a top concern for both CEOs and CIOs, organizations are increasingly discovering that workforce readiness, rather than technology readiness, is the primary constraint on scaling AI initiatives. This IDC Perspective explores how leading organizations are responding by augmenting employees with AI, redesigning roles and workflows, embedding continuous learning into day-to-day operations, and building new capabilities around governance, orchestration, and AI oversight.

"Organizations have entered a new phase of the skills challenge. The objective is no longer simply to close talent gaps through hiring. Instead, leading CIOs are rethinking how work gets done and combining AI augmentation, targeted upskilling, and new operating models to build sustainable workforce readiness," says Leonardo Freitas, research manager at IDC.

Drones as a Business Strategy: Beyond Delivery and Inspection

Karen D. Schwartz, Alison Brooks, Ph.D., Alan Webber — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how drones are moving beyond their traditional delivery and inspection roles to become a broader business strategy tool for enterprises. As businesses search for more creative, effective ways to reach customers, they are increasingly considering drones. Drones have matured greatly over the past few years and continue to improve in terms of technology, affordability, and efficacy. This makes them a realistic alternative for business functions like marketing, advertising, and customer service. Evaluating drone use against other, more traditional methods of reaching customers requires focusing on value, task fit, regulatory acceptability, privacy, and public acceptance.

“While it would have been virtually unthinkable for a small or midsize company to consider a drone as a viable option for business tasks a few years ago, cost and technology advances make them at least worth consideration,” said Karen D. Schwartz, adjunct research advisor for IDC’s IT Executive Programs (IEP). “And as prices fall, technology continues to improve, and regulations are worked out, they may become even more attractive.”

From Software Consumer to Software Producer: A Framework for Deciding When Finance Should Buy, Extend, or Build

Kevin Permenter — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents a framework for finance leaders deciding when to buy commercial software, extend a platform they already own, or build a targeted application in-house. As AI coding tools make it possible for finance professionals to build working software in days rather than months, the decision that used to sit with IT alone now belongs to the CFO as well. IDC recommends that CFOs adopt a repeatable, criteria-based framework for this decision, along with lightweight governance for anything finance builds in-house.

“The most innovative finance organizations, over the next five years, won’t necessarily buy better software. They’ll get better at creating their own. The CFOs who win this shift won’t be the ones who build the most; they’ll be the ones who know exactly when to buy, when to extend, and when to build,” says Kevin Permenter, research director, Enterprise Applications at IDC.