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Early Efforts to Win on the Agentic Web and Key Points of Failure

Gerry Murray — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores the rise of the agentic web, which is emerging as a machine-to-machine internet layer where AI buyer agents autonomously discover, evaluate, and transact on behalf of humans. It details seven macrotrends reshaping buyer discovery, outlines five essential CMO capability initiatives, and provides a readiness diagnostic. The document argues that marketing must lead this transformation with IT, CISO, legal, and so forth to ensure they build structured, trusted, and agent-accessible presence that will dominate the next era of digital commerce.

"There are two ways to win on the agentic web. The most effective way is the brands' influence is strong enough that buyers mention your products in most of their requests to agents. That captures intent. Failing that, deals go to the brand with the first matching offer. That means your tech stack is your brand. Unfortunately, today's tech stacks are architected around a database marketing model that does not apply on the agentic web, which is all about intent-based marketing," Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents at IDC

Red Hat Summit 2026 – A Focus on Sovereignty

Dave McCarthy — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Red Hat Summit 2026 signaled a transition from experimental AI to sovereign AI, as the company unveiled a series of architectural advancements designed to decouple the cloud control plane from global hyperscaler infrastructure. Red Hat has fundamentally reframed digital sovereignty, elevating it from a localized compliance requirement into a global strategic imperative for operational independence.

The event focused on three pillars: the general availability of Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support, deep technical integrations with NVIDIA and IBM for "Sovereign-by-Design" AI stacks, and the expansion of OpenShift Virtualization as a viable exit ramp for VMware customers. By introducing agentic AI capabilities within Red Hat AI 3.4, the company is betting that the next wave of automation will require a unified, private operating model that spans from air-gapped datacenters to global public clouds. Ultimately, Red Hat is positioning its open-source foundation as a credible path to digital autonomy amid geopolitical shifts and increasing regulatory scrutiny.

ServiceNow Puts Governance at the Center of Its Agentic Platform

Adam Reeves — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At Knowledge 2026 in May 2026, ServiceNow announced a broad set of platform updates spanning developer tooling, AI experience, data intelligence, and agent governance. The announcements address leading barriers to enterprise AI adoption and reflect a competitive environment in which vendors increasingly win or lose developer influence based on how well they support AI-native development without sacrificing operational control. By prioritizing integrating autonomous agents and governance guardrails directly into the workflow, the company aims to shift AI's role in the enterprise from generating recommendations to completing work autonomously..

The AI Platform Imperative: Architecting for Scale, Speed, and Autonomy

Jennifer Thomson — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation, delivered on April 16, 2026, at IDC's FutureTech Summit in Milan, Italy, delves into why organizations must recalibrate their technology foundations for the AI economy. AI is no longer a future consideration; it is actively reshaping how businesses scale, compete, and operate. Success in this new era is not simply about adopting AI tools, but about building the right platform foundations to deploy AI workloads responsibly, sustainably, and securely. This presentation explores:

Why platform innovation is the critical enabler of transformative business value
What a strategic road map looks like — from scalable, secure AI-ready infrastructure to resilient cloud-native and hybrid architectures
What leadership imperatives C-suite and technology leaders must embrace to confidently drive autonomous, agentic AI across IT operations, governance, development, and observability

The CMO Guide to Agentic Buyers: From Reach to Response

Gerry Murray — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective is written for CMOs preparing to compete in the agent-mediated markets by 2030. It examines the emergence of autonomous, AI buyer agents transacting on behalf of individuals and organizations and the implications for enterprise marketers. It covers the agentic shopping maturity model, infrastructure landscape, B2B and B2C marketplace developments, and a 24-action implementation road map.

"Agentic shopping is the first digital channel that makes database marketing practices and infrastructure obsolete. IDC forecasts AI agents will drive $500 billion in U.S. digital commerce, representing 25% of U.S. retail digital commerce by 2030. I would not want to be in the position of a CMO that is unprepared as 25% of revenue shifts to a channel I cannot compete in," said Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents at IDC.

Twilio SIGNAL 2026 Points to an Agent-Native CRM Built Around the Customer Conversation

Arnal Dayaratna — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Twilio's SIGNAL 2026 announcements show the company expanding beyond delivering calls and messages into helping enterprises manage AI agents that talk, text, and interact with customers. Conversation Orchestrator, Conversation Memory, Conversation Intelligence, and Agent Connect address four practical requirements that emerge when AI agents enter customer-facing work: keeping conversations intact across channels and handoffs, remembering relevant details from prior interactions, identifying risk and intent while the customer is still engaged, and connecting agents built or selected by the enterprise to voice and messaging channels.

Agentic AI Deployment Best Practices – Intelligence Is the Outcome, Execution Is the Moat

Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides technology executives with a set of best practices and recommendations for planning an agentic AI deployment. It provides a deployment framework, design guide, and deployment assessment tool that executives can adopt to decrease business risks and increase agentic-driven outcomes. The research provides recommendations tailored to agentic deployments for selecting partners, AI infrastructure, IT operations, software development, data architecture, governance, and human workforce development.

IDC PlanScape: Digital Twins in State and Local Government

Alison Brooks, Ph.D., Ruthbea Yesner — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides state and local government IT leaders with actionable guidance on understanding, evaluating, and implementing digital twin technologies across urban environments.

“The transformation from static city models to dynamic digital twins marks a fundamental shift in urban management. Leading implementations report measurable returns — including 25% reductions in infrastructure downtime, 20–30% energy savings in buildings, and improved emergency response times — though outcomes vary significantly with program maturity, data quality, and organizational readiness.” — Alison Brooks, research vice president, Worldwide Public Safety

The Audit Trail That Did Not Exist: ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 and the Case for Governed Autonomous Work

Frank Dickson, Grace Trinidad — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

ServiceNow used Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas to make a focused argument: that the same platform managing enterprise workflows is now the right place to govern the identities, assets, and AI agents operating across those workflows. The security and risk announcements collectively represent the first full integration of two major acquisitions into a production-ready platform. A less discussed but consequential shift runs through all of it: enterprise software is no longer exclusively deterministic. The governance frameworks enterprises built for rule-based systems do not automatically extend to AI agents that reason probabilistically, and Knowledge 2026 was in large part ServiceNow's answer to that gap.

U.S. Federal Civilian Government Agencies' Aggressive Value Realization Goals for AI

Massimiliano Claps — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation analyzes the United States federal government's evolving AI adoption from pilot to production. The study combines the results of an IDC survey of 152 senior IT and non-IT leaders from U.S. federal government departments and agencies, with an in-depth analysis of the U.S. 2025 Federal Agency Artificial Intelligence Use Case Inventory, published on GitHub by the United States Office of Management and Budget.

Both the IDC survey and the 2025 Federal Agency AI Use Case Inventory show that AI adoption is progressing fast in the U.S. federal civilian government market, with use cases spanning IT, cybersecurity, back-office administration, and mission-specific areas. With increased budget dedicated to AI, federal government IT leaders are demanding more aggressive time to value and ROI.