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A CMO’s Guide to Google’s 2026 CX Strategy

Gerry Murray — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses Google’s 2026 CX strategy, which ushers in agent-driven commerce, integrating AI-powered agents, Universal Commerce Protocol, and persistent shopping experiences. Google aims to mediate and monetize the customer journey. CMOs must adapt by enhancing product data, enabling real-time decisioning, and redefining brand roles within Google’s ecosystem to ensure visibility, seamless interoperability, and consistent customer experience across both Google and owned channels.

“In the era of agentic shopping, first-mover brands that adapt to the new rules of agentic commerce will gain structural share advantages,” says Gerry Murray, director of Enterprise Applications and Agents at IDC. “Product visibility through commerce AEO will be equally or more important than brand visibility via content AEO.”

Market Forecast: Worldwide Sales Force Productivity and Performance Software Forecast, 2026–2030 — Steady But Slowing Growth for a Mature Market

Michelle Morgan — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides worldwide sales force productivity and performance software market forecast for 2025–2030. The sales force productivity and performance market is forecast to reach $35 billion in 2030, demonstrating a mature, predictable market that continues to attract sustained vendor investment and buyer confidence. The Americas' share, which declined from 61% in 2025 to 57.6% in 2030, suggests that the historically dominant revenue engine for sales force productivity and performance vendors is losing momentum. Without proportionally faster growth in APJ and EMEA to offset, overall market expansion may continue to face headwinds.

"The sales force productivity and performance market is growing at a consistent pace — 8.9% CAGR this year versus 8.8% projected last year — which is either a sign of a well-understood market or a sign that the models have stopped learning much from new data. Probably some of both. What is more interesting is the regional rebalancing: The Americas still holds 61% of the market in 2025, but that share is forecast to slip to 57.6% by 2030, while APJ and EMEA each add more than a point. That is a slow shift; but in a market forecast to decelerate toward 8.4% annual growth by 2030, where the next wave of buyers comes from matters. The vendors that have been treating international expansion as an afterthought may want to revisit that posture." — Michelle Morgan, senior research manager, Sales Force Productivity and Performance

Tanium Achieves ENS Alta Certification, Unlocking Spain's Most Sensitive Public Sector and Critical Infrastructure Markets for the Autonomous IT Platform

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Tanium has achieved ENS Alta certification for its SaaS solution, Tanium Cloud, making the Autonomous IT Platform the first independently validated at the highest tier of Spain's Esquema Nacional de Seguridad framework by the Centro Criptológico Nacional. ENS Alta governs access to Spain's most sensitive public sector environments — including central government ministries, autonomous communities, critical infrastructure operators, and essential service organizations — and achieving it positions Tanium to directly serve a market segment where independent CCN validation is a prerequisite rather than a preference. IDC views this certification as a strategically significant market access event for Tanium in Southern Europe, arriving at a moment when the transposition of NIS2 and the entry into force of DORA are expanding the population of Spanish organizations treating ENS Alta–level controls as a vendor selection benchmark — creating an accelerating commercial opportunity for the only autonomous IT platform validated at this level.

From Code to Biology: The Selective Capability Leap of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5

Arnal Dayaratna — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, 2026, as two deployments of the same underlying model. Fable 5 is generally available, while Mythos 5 is initially restricted to vetted cybersecurity and critical infrastructure partners. The primary dimension of the model's innovation, and the strongest evidence that it represents a step change in capability, is its performance in software engineering. Fable 5 outperformed Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on SWE-Bench Pro and FrontierCode Diamond. The benchmark results were reinforced by Stripe's report that Fable 5 completed a 50-million-line Ruby code-base migration in one day, work the company estimated would otherwise require a full engineering team more than two months. The release was interrupted three days later by a U.S. export control directive; the Department of Commerce lifted the controls on June 30, and Anthropic restored access on July 1.

Accenture FY 3Q26: Solid Profitability and Cash Flow as Growth Moderates; New Moves in OT Security and the Midmarket

Lars Goransson, Douglas Hayward — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

On June 18, 2026, Accenture reported results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 (ended May 31, 2026). Revenue of $18.72 billion rose 6% in U.S. dollars and 3% in local currency (about 4% excluding the roughly 1 percentage point drag from the U.S. federal business), with growth across all geographic markets, industry groups, and types of work. Profitability and cash flow were strong, and Accenture used the quarter to announce two strategic moves intended to open new sources of growth: a $4.2 billion acquisition-led expansion into operational technology (OT) security and the launch of Accenture Edge for the midmarket. The following growth rates are year over year and in local currency unless stated otherwise:

Worldwide Sales Force Productivity and Performance Market Shares, 2025: In Sales Tech, the Early AI Adopters Are Cashing In

Michelle Morgan — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides worldwide sales force productivity and performance software market shares for 2025 calendar year. The sales force productivity and performance market grew nearly 10% in 2025, adding over $2 billion to reach $23.1 billion, with Salesforce, Microsoft, and Oracle together commanding 55% of the market. Growth was global, with EMEA and APJ outpacing the Americas and public cloud now representing 90% of market spend. The standout winners were vendors that moved early and decisively into agentic AI.

“The 9.8% growth we’re seeing in sales technology is no coincidence. It’s the direct fingerprint of agentic AI entering the revenue stack. Autonomous agents that can prospect, qualify, and follow up without human prompting are collapsing the distance between intent and action. We’re not just automating tasks anymore; we’re automating entire selling motions.” — Michelle Morgan, research manager, AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service, and Contact Center Strategies at IDC

Klaviyo's K:LDN Play: Two Agents, One Profile, and a European Land Grab

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) used K:LDN 2026 (in London on June 30, 2026) to announce the public beta of its marketing agent composer, to level up the positioning of its customer agent and service agent, and to introduce a new social product, Klaviyo Social Marketing, each drawing on a single, real-time customer profile. The company pitched a virtual flywheel to attendees in which service fuels marketing and vice versa, reducing the traditional gap that results in missed opportunities and frustrated customers. These functions operate on the same shared Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP), making each one sharper and ultimately making brand campaigns more effective.

Salesforce Connections 2026: Short-Term ROI on Marketing AI to Drive Long-Term Transformation

Gerry Murray, Heather Hershey, Douglas Hayward, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective summarizes Salesforce Connections 2026 and its implications for CMOs and marketing technology buyers. The document covers Salesforce's Agentforce Marketing and Commerce announcements, including the pipeline generation agents Piper and Hunter, the Contentful acquisition, the Agentforce Marketing Goals Agent, and Headless 360 MCP campaign management capabilities.

"The road to scaling agentic marketing is ultimately an organizational, process, and technological transformation proposition, each step of which will have to pay its way," says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC. "By forming its go-to-market strategy on this principle, Salesforce aligns itself with CMO agendas and CFO requirements for funding enterprise-scale investments, which expands account TAM and accelerates Salesforce's ability to capture share of the agentic infrastructure spend."

Omnea Advances Spend Orchestration with MCP Integration and Tropic Price Intelligence Partnership

Patrick Reymann — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Omnea, a London-based provider of procurement orchestration and third-party risk management (TPRM) software, made two notable product announcements in June 2026. The company launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects its procurement data to leading AI assistants and announced a partnership with Tropic to embed real-time SaaS price intelligence directly into procurement workflows. Taken together, these moves signal Omnea's intent to position its platform as an agentic operating layer for enterprise procurement.

Addressing the Pipeline Conversion Gap: What CMOs and CROs Must Do to Turn Marketing Demand into Measurable Revenue

Andrea Siviero, Sudhir Rajagopal, Heather Hershey, Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Web Conference Proceeding examines the structural disconnect between pipeline and revenue, starting with a clear diagnostic: where conversion breaks down across the customer buying journey, and why traditional pipeline metrics fail to reflect true performance. It also presents a cross-functional perspective across demand strategy, revenue operations, and sales alignment. IDC analysts share how high-performing organizations turn demand into measurable revenue by aligning to how customers actually buy, improving handoffs and orchestration, and adopting metrics leadership trusts.

Most organizations are generating more pipeline than ever, yet revenue performance isn’t keeping pace. While the marketing-sourced pipeline has grown, conversion rates, deal velocity, and win rates have stagnated or declined. The challenge isn’t about demand; it’s about what happens next.

This IDC Web Conference Proceeding explores:

Where pipeline-to-revenue breakdowns most commonly occur, and how to diagnose them
How buying behavior has changed, and the implications for conversion, engagement, and journey design
What high-performing organizations do differently to connect demand generation to revenue outcomes
How to improve marketing, sales, and RevOps alignment to reduce friction and accelerate deals
Which metrics truly reflect revenue impact, and how to move beyond volume-based reporting
How to build executive confidence in marketing’s contribution to revenue