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ANA Masters of Marketing 2025: AI for Brand Authenticity and Innovation

Gerry Murray — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes the ANA Masters of Marketing 2025 event, held October 21–24 in Orlando, Florida. The event showed how leading brands leverage AI for authentic storytelling, personalization, and innovation, emphasizing ethical use, human creativity, and trust to drive engagement and growth in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape.

"In the age of AI, true marketing mastery lies in blending machine-driven innovation with human authenticity to build trust, relevance, and lasting brand value," said Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC.

CreatorIQ Connect 2025: AI-Native Infrastructure for Brand-Safe Creator-Led Growth

Gerry Murray — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes major announcements and topics discussed during the CreatorIQ Connect 2025, held October 15–16, at the Ebell of Los Angeles. CreatorIQ announced its enhanced influencer marketing platform built on its Creator Graph with improved usability, discovery, payments, compliance, measurements, and brand safety capabilities.

"Influencer marketing is becoming an increasingly reliable source of ROI on marketing," said Gerry Murray, director, IDC's Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents. "As buyers migrate from search to conversational AI engagement, it is imperative that brands leverage social and influencer channels to boost the depth and breadth of their content on the digital sources AI uses to assess brand relevance."

Dreamforce 2026: The Era of the Agentic Enterprise

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective describes how Dreamforce 2025 (held October 14–16) marked Salesforce's pivot from Customer 360 to Agentforce 360, positioning the company as an agentic platform rather than a cloud-first CRM. The company declared the "end of the cloud era," recasting each former cloud as an Agentforce module (Sales, Marketing, Service, Field Service, Revenue, Commerce, IT Service, and Industry Clouds), while Slack is reframed as the Agentic Operating System and conversational UX. Partnerships with OpenAI, Stripe, Anthropic, and Google broaden model and commerce reach; Slack's role as collaborative UX places it at the center of agent-driven work. Data 360 must prove value beyond existing warehouses by operationalizing context for agents, while suppliers align tech stacks and skills to Agentforce's deterministic plus agentic pattern.

Agentforce 360 is a pragmatic step toward enterprise-ready agents, balancing nondeterministic intelligence with governed, predictable execution across the customer life cycle.

"Dreamforce 2025 is Salesforce's line in the sand moment: Agentforce 360 reframes Salesforce from system of record CRM to an agentic AI operating platform, with Slack as the front door and Data 360 as the spine," says Heather Hershey, research director of AI-Enabled Digital Commerce at IDC. "Salesforce has placed a major bet on the future of the emerging agentic enterprise, one in which intelligent context starts to operationalize the 'messy middle' — the 80% of repetitive business processes locked in unstructured data and outdated flows — turning unstructured data into opportunities for agentic decision autonomy with human-supervised execution."

Salesforce Dreamforce 2025: A Parade of Products and Partnerships for Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses the Salesforce Dreamforce 2025 event. Salesforce Dreamforce 2025 showcased a sweeping evolution in agentic marketing, unveiling Agentforce 360 and a host of AI-powered capabilities designed to transform customer engagement. The event highlighted Salesforce's strategy to become the enterprise platform for agentic automation, integrating AI agents across marketing, sales, service, and operations.

"Agentic marketing will fundamentally redefine brand-buyer relationships," said Gerry Muray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents. "We're only beginning the first stage of disruption by applying agentic automation to marketing operations. The much bigger impact will occur when agents on billions of smartphones start shopping semi-autonomously. At that point, product and service markets will function more like stock exchanges with automated bids and asks with declarative preferences and requirements. Journey data will disappear, but rich intent data will become ubiquitous and brands that master real-time offer generation will dominate."

Schneider Electric Innovation Summit 2025: Electrification and AI Convergence Drives the New Industrial Era

Olga Yashkova, Natalya Yezhkova — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Link summarizes the key learnings from Schneider Electric's North America Innovation Summit 2025 that took place November 18–19 in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event highlighted the company's strategic focus on integrating electrification, automation, and digital transformation to address the quickly progressing demands of datacenters and other industries.

Braze Forge 2025: Highlighting Full-Stack Infrastructure for Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective analyzes the Braze Forge 2025 conference held September 29–October 1, 2025, in Las Vegas. Braze Forge 2025 demonstrated the company's commitment to transforming customer engagement through AI integration and platform innovation. Announcements at the event addressed every aspect of the modern marketing technology stack, from data activation and personalization to channel optimization and workflow automation.

"The breadth and depth of innovation showcased at Forge 2025 reinforces Braze's position as a leader in customer engagement technology," said Gerry Murray, director, IDC's Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents service. "Braze is providing the foundation for brands to build more meaningful, responsive, and profitable customer relationships with a fully integrated stack for agentic marketing."

What Factors Are Causing AI Business Value Realization Challenges for European Organizations?

Neil Ward-Dutton — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight explores the different factors that European organizations say inhibit their ability to realize measurable business value from AI investments. It explores the importance of factors such as resistance to business process change, regulatory uncertainty, and challenges in quantifying ROI.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Influencer Management for SMB Companies 2025–2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of worldwide influencer management for SMB companies for 2025–2026. Influencer marketing isn't just a trendy tactic — it's a strategic, technology-driven discipline that sits squarely in the center of modern marketing operations. Today, influencer management platforms (IMPs) are comprehensive, end-to-end solutions. These powerful systems integrate AI-powered creator discovery, campaign orchestration, advanced analytics, compliance enforcement, and streamlined payment automation.

Several key trends define the market landscape and drive demand for these advanced tools: AI is now core infrastructure for personalization, regulatory pressures demand accountability, and channel diversification is nonnegotiable. Crucially, the professionalization of creators, particularly micro-influencers and midtier influencers, now drives the highest engagement and ROI. Consequently, successful platforms must support cross-channel campaigns, enable full-funnel attribution, and guarantee seamless integration with the wider martech ecosystem.

When assessing vendors, buyers should look for proven strength in workflow automation, robust analytics, and global reach. The selection process must align directly with organizational size and strategic integration needs, prioritizing vendors that deliver strong automation, data-driven insights, and guaranteed compliance. Ultimately, the most successful brands treat their IMP as a growth engine. They invest in comprehensive platforms that enable scalable, measurable, and compliant influencer programs, cementing influencer management's role as essential infrastructure within the marketing tech stack.

"From trivial tactic to essential martech component, influencer management is now the key to scaling in an AEO-driven landscape. It provides SMBs with the unique opportunity to drive discovery, introduce new products, and effectively disrupt brands with larger budgets and more resources." — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications, IDC

Key Takeaways from ITC Vegas 2025

Inci Kaya — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

In comparison to prior years, where early-stage proof-of-concept discussions dominated, the 2025 gathering demonstrated a shift in mindset toward a commercial-scale ecosystem. The order of the day — the year — is no longer ideation but rather deployment, operations, and measurable business outcomes.

Automation Anywhere Acquires Aisera

Maureen Fleming, Hayley Sutherland — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

The November 2025 acquisition of Aisera by Automation Anywhere (AAI) consolidates two vendors with rapidly converging and complementary technologies aimed at enabling autonomous process operations driven by agentic AI. In a market rapidly investing in building and buying AI agents, this acquisition promises to speed up the delivery of sophisticated full-featured solutions, along with a broader set of tools for IT to build custom agentic solutions for departments across the enterprise.