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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for Small Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates agentic marketing platforms available to small businesses and provides essential guidance for technology buyers in this segment. Small businesses have historically been caught between consumer-grade marketing tools that are too limited and enterprise platforms that are too complex to adopt without dedicated technical staff. Agentic marketing platforms are beginning to close that gap, offering AI agents that plan, execute, and adjust campaigns with limited manual intervention. This study defines the market, evaluates vendors serving small business buyers, and assesses how close current offerings come to genuine agentic capability, the ability to learn and adapt without manual reconfiguration, versus sophisticated automation carrying an agent label. IDC finds real, practical value available today, alongside real gaps small business buyers should weigh carefully, particularly around ongoing technical requirements and governance that works without a dedicated administrator.

"The small businesses winning with agentic marketing aren't the ones chasing the most sophisticated platform. They're choosing vendors that work out of the box, solve one clear use case, and prove value within weeks. This market is moving fast, and the vendors pulling ahead are building specifically for what small businesses need, not retrofitting enterprise tools for a smaller buyer." — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications

Keep or Leap: How Marketing Leaders Are Navigating the Shift to AI-Native Martech

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the shift from traditional to AI-native martech stacks, arguing that marketing leaders face a continuum of choices, keeping and augmenting, building internally, or leaping to AI-native vendors, rather than a single binary decision. Vendors competing on AI-native features alone are solving the wrong problem. The real advantage goes to whichever platform makes AI invisible enough that buyers stop sorting tools into categories at all. The contest to orchestrate the resulting stack, meanwhile, remains genuinely open at every company size, to whoever moves first.

"The pressure buyers are putting on vendors right now has less to do with AI than with long-held frustration over speed, flexibility, and fit. Vibe coding and AI-native disruptors merely gave this frustration somewhere to go. It didn't resolve it, and neither will the next AI feature that a legacy vendor bolts onto an otherwise unchanged product," says Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications at IDC.

Industry Buyers Handbook: Worldwide Retail 2026

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Industry Buyers Handbook aims to help technology vendors understand technology investment areas in the worldwide retail industry. Vendors can use this Handbook to:

Align the company’s proposition with the buyer’s tech priorities as they relate to domain processes.
Position the technology offering and innovation capabilities to respond to the buyer’s business transformation objectives.
Develop a compelling narrative that resonates with the buyer’s requirements.

Technology vendor executives in areas such as marketing, sales, and product strategy can leverage the insights in this Handbook to inform and formulate their approach to buyers within the worldwide retail industry. These insights are largely based on IDC survey data but also leverage senior IDC analysts’ knowledge, IDC research, and ongoing conversations with key industry players.

“Retail technology investment is proceeding, despite challenges. Retailers rate recession risk above the cross-industry average, yet most are still increasing IT spending across cloud, data, and cybersecurity,” says Filippo Battaini, Research Manager, IDC Retail Insights. “This Handbook gives technology suppliers the evidence base to align messaging, portfolios, and sales motions with where retail budgets are truly moving.”

Red Hat AI 3.5 Extends AI Governance and Cost Controls Across Hybrid Infrastructure

Matthew Flug — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Red Hat has released Red Hat AI 3.5, an update to its AI portfolio centered on pre-deployment safety verification, resource controls for shared GPU infrastructure, agentic operations, multitenancy, and native observability with token-level cost attribution. The release reflects a change in what buyers expect from AI platforms, as the operational discipline applied to production infrastructure now governs how AI workloads are evaluated, isolated, and managed.

Opticon 2026: Optimizely Repositions from DXP to AI Marketing Platform

Roger Beharry Lall, Jordan Jewell, Gerry Murray, Tapan Patel — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At Opticon 2026 in New York, held August 31 and September 1, Optimizely put its Agent Platform (formerly known as Opal) at the center of its story, with content, experience, and data products now in supporting roles. Behind the shift are a rebranded, post-trained model family called Mark; an open source benchmark; general availability for Virtual Teammates; and an answer-engine-optimization push built on a search data partnership. It's a bid to be judged against the emerging AI marketing workforce category rather than digital experience platforms, where Optimizely trails Adobe and Salesforce on revenue despite strong customer praise.

Worldwide Manufacturing Go-to-Market Handbook 2026

Gunjan Bassi, Stephanie Krishnan, Jonathan Lang, Heriberto Roman, Nigel Wallis — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation on Worldwide Manufacturing Go-to-Market Handbook 2026 is designed to help technology vendors build their industry-focused narratives and go-to-market strategies. It should be used to tailor marketing messaging to industry-specific business priorities, sharpen portfolios, and create sales campaigns that resonate with prospects and customers. It helps tech suppliers to:

Align their company value propositions and messaging with key business priorities, challenges, and investment drivers in the manufacturing industry
Leverage the priorities and emerging business needs of existing customers and prospects to develop competitive messaging and campaign themes
Showcase how their company's products and services solve concrete business challenges within this value chain
Understand the relevance and investment horizon of key programs and use cases, map them with their company capabilities, and translate into go-to-market action plans

Priorities, programs, and use cases discussed in this Manufacturing Go-to-Market Handbook are selected by senior IDC analysts based on in-depth and ongoing IDC research and conversations with key stakeholders in the worldwide manufacturing sector. Account-based actions need to consider that individual company strategic business priorities and initiatives might differ based on specific sub-industries or organizations' individual digital maturity.

"The biggest shift being observed in 2026 is that supply chain, production, and consumer engagement have stopped being separate modernization tracks," says Jonathan Lang, research director, IDC Manufacturing Insights. "Manufacturers are pulling ahead by treating these as one connected digital strategy, where data captured in one area compounds value in the others, and where investment decisions in any single priority are increasingly made with the other two in mind."

The Trade Desk Ships Kokai Zuma: Agentic Workflows, a Usability Reset, and a Bet on Measurement

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Industry Market Forecast: Worldwide Mining, 2026 — Digital Transformation Spending Guide

Roberta Bigliani, Gaia Gallotti, Gaurav Verma, Jose Ignacio Diaz, Nigel Wallis — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation on Industry Market Forecast: Worldwide Mining, 2026 provides tech vendor product managers and market intelligence leads with an overview of mining digital transformation (DX) spending and highlights how mining organizations are investing in industry-specific solutions during 2026.

By looking at the size of the worldwide market and the top growing use cases, technology vendor executives can better evaluate:

Areas for investment in product or service development
Sales and marketing campaign prioritization
Market penetration

Used in combination with the other Industry Intelligence documents, this presentation can help technology vendors gain a competitive advantage.

“Mining’s digital transformation looks less like a wave of adoption and more like a slow, deliberate reweighting of where the next dollar of CapEx goes — asset by asset, site by site, cycle by cycle,” says Gaurav Verma, research director, IDC Energy Insights. “In mining, digital investment isn’t a technology decision — it’s a capital allocation decision wearing a technology label. The winners will be the initiatives that speak fluently in cost per tonne, safety risk, and asset life, not in innovation buzzwords.”

Industry Go-to-Market Handbook: Worldwide Smart Cities, States, and Spaces, 2026

Ravikant Sharma, Claudia Medina, Nigel Wallis — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This Industry Go-to-Market Handbook is designed to support technology vendors in building their industry-focused narratives and go-to-market (GTM) strategies for the worldwide smart cities, states and spaces industry. It should be used to tailor marketing messaging to industry-specific business priorities, sharpen portfolios, and create sales campaigns that resonate with prospects and customers. It helps tech suppliers to:

Align their company value propositions and messaging with key business priorities, challenges, investment drivers in the smart cities, states, and spaces government segment
Leverage the priorities and emerging business needs of existing customers and prospects to develop competitive messaging and campaign themes
Showcase how their company’s products and services solve concrete business challenges within this value chain.
Understand the relevance and investment horizon of key programs and use cases, map them with their company capabilities, and translate into GTM action plans

Priorities, programs, and use cases discussed in this Industry Go-to-Market Handbook are selected by senior IDC analysts based on in-depth and ongoing IDC research and conversations with key stakeholders in the smart cities, states, and spaces segment. Account-based actions need to consider that individual company strategic business priorities and initiatives might differ based on specific sub-industries or organizations’ individual digital maturity.

“As constituent expectations rise and budgets tighten, cities are under growing pressure to connect data across departments, validate it, and act on it in real time,” said Ravikant Sharma, research director, IDC Government Insights. “Cities that build this discipline earn the public trust that makes continued investment easier to justify.”

IDC Market Glance: 中国AI营销市场概览，2Q26

Lizzie Li, Wenting Xu — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

迈入AI大模型普及阶段，中国营销市场正在完成从数字化向智能化的深度转型。大模型打通数据、市场洞察、内容生产、媒介投放、用户运营、营销触达全链路，在降低营销成本的同事，提升了营销的效率和成果。与此同时，消费者信息获取方式持续变革，AI对话交互催生全新流量阵地，品牌竞争延伸至 AI 知识资产布局。本IDC Market Glance报告涵盖了2026年第二季度中国AI营销市场，并展示了不同细分市场中具有代表性的活跃厂商。