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AI Transformation and the CIO-CEO Relationship

Tony Olvet — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the widening gap between what CEOs now expect from their technology leaders and what these leaders are measured, funded, and structured to deliver. Drawing on IDC's Worldwide CEO Survey, C-Suite Tech Survey, and Global CIO Advisory Board, the document explores how the CIO role is expanding beyond technology operations to include growth, innovation, workforce transformation, and organizational resilience, while many performance measures remain focused on efficiency and risk. The document outlines practical actions technology leaders can take to better align expectations, accountability, and execution with the CEO agenda.

"The CIO's mandate has moved faster than the performance measures used to evaluate it," says Tony Olvet, group vice president, C-Suite and Buyer Insights Research at IDC. "As AI becomes a larger part of business strategy, the CIO-CEO relationship increasingly depends on aligning priorities, accountability, and business outcomes. Technology leaders who help create that alignment will be better positioned to support growth, innovation, and organizational change."

AI-ification of Retail Media

Ananda Chakravarty — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective provides a viewpoint of how AI is changing the game with respect to mapping current attribution metrics in retail media. The report also reviews how AI addresses audience targeting as well as attribution through a set of techniques being pioneered by firms such as Amazon, Walmart, and other retail media networks (RMNs). The report also highlights marketing mix modeling and how this may move the market toward a more holistic view of retail media. Finally, the report identifies the flaws of return on ad spend (ROAS) attribution and how AI may overcome these flaws through new attribution methods.

"When your retail media metrics say 10x returns, but you're barely breaking even, it's time to revisit attribution. AI is changing the retail media game. New AI models are being rolled out by the most sophisticated RMNs to drive precise attribution. It's time for a reset," said Ananda Chakravarty, research vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

Beyond the Bank Branch: How Embedded Finance Is Redrawing the Boundaries of Retail and Corporate Banking Worldwide

Clay Miller, Dr. Chris Marshall, Maria Adele Di Comite — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how embedded finance is moving financial decisions into the customer journey. At the moment, financial transactions support purchases, payments, and other business workflows, while AI agents begin to influence product recommendations and customer relationships. It assesses the implications for banks, technology providers, and nonfinancial platforms, including margin pressure, borrower selection, real-time payments, open banking, and European regulatory change. It also gives technology leaders actions to protect strategic customer relationships, evaluate the risk and economics of embedded lending, participate beyond bank-owned channels, and plan regulatory work.

"For CIOs and technology leaders in banking, embedded finance turns customer ownership into a strategic business decision. The bank's leaders must define the data, decision capabilities, and financial products it retains as customer engagement shifts beyond bank-owned channels," said Clay Miller, adjunct research advisor, IT Executive Programs (IEP), IDC.

"Embedded finance can expand distribution while also creating a harder trade for banks: margin pressure, less visibility into the first credit decision, and the risk of becoming a commoditized balance sheet provider. Technology leaders should evaluate embedded lending on its own risk economics rather than assume it behaves like lending the bank originates itself," said Dr. Chris L. Marshall, program vice president, IDC Financial Insights.

"For retail customers, embedded finance works because the financial service arrives at the point of need; for corporate treasurers, value comes from real-time decisions and direct links between corporate systems and banks. The next challenge is to make these experiences work in compliance with evolving regulations, such as Europe moving from PSD2 toward PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation," said Maria Adele Di Comite, senior research director, IDC Financial Insights.

Beyond the Chatbot: How HubSpot's Context Bet Sets Up CRM's Next Act

Roger Beharry Lall — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Beyond the Target: An Executive Reality Check on Energy Transition

Roberta Bigliani — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation shows that energy transition decisions have moved into the executive suite, while the management systems needed to govern them have not caught up. Targets are set, capital is committed, and CEOs, CFOs, and COOs hold the main budget and decision roles on this agenda. What the survey exposes is a gap between that funded ambition and the accountability, data, and contracting discipline needed to prove a return on it.

IDC's 2026 Energy Transition Survey questioned 1,135 large organizations across 17 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. 81% have set a net-zero target, and 84% plan to increase investment over the next 24 months, yet only 18% report full profit-and-loss accountability for that investment, and just over half cite fragmented carbon and energy data as a constraint on their decisions. 79% deliver through external partners, and 34% report difficulty proving the returns they are expected to show within two to five years.

The presentation sets out what CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and business unit leaders should each do before that return window closes: Assign one accountable owner to every funded value case; connect operational, energy, and financial data through a single governed model; match technology investment sequencing to each sector's asset economics; and hold external partners to contracts written against measured outcomes. Organizations that put these four controls in place within the current planning cycle will be able to show what their energy transition spending bought.

Claudeforce: The Future of (Marketing) Work Is Chat

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Salesforce’s Claudeforce partnership with Anthropic, and its 22.6% stock gain after August 27, 2026 earnings, shows agentic AI redistributing enterprise software value rather than eliminating it. Salesforce is betting that consumption revenue outpaces seat revenue as employees delegate work to AI. This IDC Perspective covers what this shift means for chief marketing officers (CMOs) deciding which applications to defend, renew, or replace as Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot compete with SaaS platforms for the conversational UI layer.

"The future of marketing work is chat. The fight is over who owns the conversation and how much that position enables them to further encroach on conventional martech functionality," says Gerry Murray, research director on enterprise marketing applications and agents, IDC. Murray adds, "Partnerships between SaaS vendors and AI labs is something of a 'keep your enemies close' strategy, but it is also a strategic acceptance of the inevitable transformation of work."

Digital Engineering and Operational Technology Services Case Studies Showcase Report, Part 10: Software-Defined Vehicle

Francesca Ciarletta, Mukesh Dialani — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation showcases 17 software-defined vehicle case studies that highlight customers' business challenges, the solutions implemented, and the value delivered. The case studies were submitted by engineering services vendors and vetted by IDC. This is the 10th in a series of case study showcase documents focused on a broad range of engineering challenges, demonstrating how service providers can serve as valuable partners in helping organizations address complex technology and business requirements.

Digital Infrastructure Maturity: Leadership Benchmarks, 2026

Mary Johnston Turner — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Leader Presentation identifies key benchmarks that define digital infrastructure maturity and AI infrastructure readiness to drive best in class business outcomes, based on IDC’s 2026 Worldwide Digital Infrastructure Sentiment Survey of 1,015 digital infrastructure decision makers conducted in June 2026

Analysis of correlations across business outcome improvement metrics and AI infrastructure readiness identify three distinct levels of digital infrastructure maturity: Leaders, Developing, and Emerging organizations. Leaders, representing the top 10% of organizations, consistently demonstrate levels of business outcome improvement that are more than 2X that of the least mature, Emerging, organizations. The study offers tech leaders a checklist of ten critical data points that can be used to evaluate levels of AI infrastructure readiness and overall digital infrastructure maturity across a range of metrics including percentage of workloads that will be AI-enabled in two years, investment in AIOps and agentic AI for infrastructure operations, and consistency of operations and security across hybrid deployment models.

This benchmark framework can be used by tech leaders to assess current levels of digital infrastructure maturity, and AI infrastructure readiness, and to prioritize critical areas of investment needed to help move the organization forward.

From Audits to Automation: Why CIOs Need AI-Powered Continuous Compliance

Helen Beal — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how CIOs can navigate escalating regulatory complexity and machine-speed AI cyberthreats by transitioning from point-in-time audits to continuous compliance. By collaborating with the CISO and security teams to embed declarative guardrails, policy as code, and automated evidence streaming into internal developer platforms (IDPs), technology leaders can protect operational resilience without slowing innovation.

"AI-driven threats and expanding global mandates have made traditional, snapshot audits obsolete," says Helen Beal, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "By integrating continuous compliance and non-human identity governance directly into IDPs, CIOs turn compliance from an adversarial, end-of-year scramble into real-time, machine-readable operational assurance."

From Systems of Engagement to Systems of Execution: The Structural Reinvention of the Digital Workplace and Services Around It

Pushkaraksh Shanbhag — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes the structural reinvention of DWS, drawing on the key learnings and insights from IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Workplace Services 2026 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US54119026, September 2026). It argues that leading providers of workplace services are redefining their vision of the digital workplace: from a system that connects employees and enables them with the necessary tools for work to an intelligent, connected system that executes work with managed autonomy. This report tracks five connected shifts: supervised agentic autonomy, the knowledge layer as the new advantage, the end of the AI premium and the rise of outcome economics, experience accountability with financial consequences, and the dissolving boundary of the workplace. The report identifies three provider maturity tiers, explores the gap between ambitions and reality, and recommends that buyers treat execution depth, commercial alignment, and experience accountability as key procurement criteria.

"The modern digital workplace is shifting from enabling the enterprise workforce to executing critical business operations, as agentic AI matures and adoption scales. This shift gives buyers a concrete opportunity to frame their procurement of services for the digital workplace around specific requirements for agentic capability, experience accountability, and outcome economics," says Pushkaraksh Shanbhag, senior research director on worldwide services research, IDC.