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Industry Buyers Handbook: European Utilities, 2026

Gaia Gallotti, Gaurav Verma, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Industry Buyers Handbook aims to help technology vendors understand the areas of technology investments of the European utilities industry. Vendors can use this Handbook to:

Align the company's proposition to 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, including marketing, sales, and product strategy, can leverage the insight from this Handbook to inform and formulate their approach with buyers within the European utilities industry. The insight provided in this Handbook is largely based on IDC survey data and also leverages senior IDC analysts' knowledge, IDC research, and ongoing conversations with key industry players.

"European utilities are operating in a period of sustained macroeconomic volatility, energy price shocks, and geopolitical instability while carrying the weight of an energy transition whose physical buildout is immense and increasingly capital intensive," says Gaia Gallotti, research director, IDC Energy Insights. "In this environment, IT investment is no longer a discretionary modernization lever but the fastest and most cost-efficient way for utilities to unlock the efficiency, flexibility, and resilience gains that physical infrastructure alone cannot deliver at acceptable cost or pace."

CX Path: Executive Summary, 2026 — Examining the CX Buyer’s Journey

Nadia Ballard, Aly Pinder, Eric Newmark, Tiffany McCormick, Douglas Hayward — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an executive summary of the worldwide findings from IDC’s 2026 CX Path program.

IDC’s 2026 CX Path polled 2,530 respondents across 12 countries to collect information on CX application and AI adoption, the CX buyer’s journey, and CX vendor preferences and ratings.

Coverage includes application adoption, use of generative AI and/or agentic AI, deployment models, budget plans and replacement cycle timing, purchasing preferences and attitudes toward CX buying channels, pricing options, CX management platforms, ratings, spend, and advocacy scores. The study covers 14 functional application markets: advertising; marketing; sales; digital commerce; configure, price, quote (CPQ); product information management/experience management (PIM/PXM); contact center and customer service; voice of the customer (VOC); customer experience orchestration; content and experience management; customer data platforms (CDPs); customer and digital experience analytics; aftermarket service life-cycle management; and price optimization.

IDC Survey: Early Adopters of Functional AI in the Hotel and Restaurant Industry

Dorothy Creamer, Nigel Wallis — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines the state of agentic AI adoption among enterprise operators in the accommodation and restaurant sectors. Drawing on responses from 139 functional leaders in hotels and restaurants, this survey benchmarked responses against a worldwide sample of 2,951 and assesses deployment maturity across adoption approaches. The survey also tracks the business benefits, success metrics, and implementation challenges operators report as well as the strategic foundations — scope, road map maturity, governance structure, and autonomy models — they have established. Finally, the survey data paints a clearer picture of the vendor ecosystems hotel and restaurant operators rely on to apply agentic capabilities. A core objective of this study is to provide an explanation for why a sector with demonstrably mature strategy and above-average deployment success rates nonetheless trails global production benchmarks and to identify the structural actions required to close that gap.

“Hotels and restaurants rank autonomous booking and ordering as a top agentic AI priority, compared with retail, which ranks it last,” says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Strategies at IDC. “This presents a very different motivation for hospitality and food service, driven by the fact that the broader hospitality industry has spent a decade watching OTAs and aggregators claim the guest relationship and the margin that comes with it. Agentic AI is the industry’s bid to take both back, and the agentic AI strategies that are emerging are a recognition that revenue recovery and operational survival now run on the same technology road map.”

IDC Survey: The AI Front Door, Earned Trust, and Diversified Buying Committees — The New Rules of B2B Tech Buying in 2026

Sudhir Rajagopal — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey uses insights from IDC’s 2026 Tech Buyer Behavior Survey to assess the impact of digital, omni-channel, AI, and consumer experience expectations on B2B buying behavior and practices; instill a deeper understanding of marketing practices desired by tech buyers; and identify the role of the human-to-human experience as agentic AI rises.

The B2B buying journey is now truly omni-channel, with technology buyers pulling multiple sources of content across multiple channels, both digital and human led, simultaneously. This raises the stakes for vendors to orchestrate marketing and sales engagement based on real-time buyer intent signals. In addition, the technology buying journey is heavily disintermediated by AI throughout the customer life cycle, requiring vendors to engage the human buyer as well as the buyer’s AI agents, as AI-mediated discovery and task delegation become core practices.

MacKenzie-Childs: Extending Customer Intelligence Beyond Marketing to Support Growth

Ornella Urso — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how MacKenzie-Childs, a U.S. home and lifestyle brand, has moved from a catalog-led model to a digital-first business that uses customer data across marketing and, increasingly, product development. The document describes the company’s acquisition-led growth strategy, the company’s adoption of Amperity as its customer data platform alongside systems such as NetSuite and Yotpo, and the early benefits of self-service analytics and AI-assisted querying through AmpAI.

“MacKenzie-Childs shows how a heritage retailer can make customer data useful to teams well beyond marketing,” said Ornella Urso, head of IDC Retail Insights Europe. “The value is less about any single tool and more about the combination of self-service analytics, clear business definitions, executive alignment, and modernized operational systems. The next test for the company, and for the wider industry, will be turning that foundation into personalized customer experiences while keeping data handling disciplined as AI-assisted analysis spreads across the organization.”

IBM Advances Trusted Quantum Computation, Introducing a New Framework for Quantum Advantage

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

As enterprises increasingly prepare for quantum computing to deliver business value, confidence in the reliability and reproducibility of quantum results will become just as important as computational performance. IBM Quantum's latest research advances this objective by introducing complementary approaches for trusted quantum computation, representing an important milestone on the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and future enterprise applications.

Infosys FY 1Q27 Earnings Signal Accelerating AI Revenue Momentum, Large Deal Strength, and Upward Guidance Revision as Enterprise AI Transformation Takes Hold

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Infosys delivered FY 1Q27 revenue of $5.082 billion, representing 2.4% year-over-year constant-currency growth and 1.0% sequential growth while reporting that AI now accounts for 8.2% of total revenue. The large deal total contract value (TCV) reached $3.6 billion with 61% net new, and free cash flow was a robust $955 million. The company simultaneously revised its FY27 revenue growth guidance upward to 1.5–3.0% in constant currency while maintaining its operating margin guidance of 20–22%. IDC views these results as a meaningful indicator that Infosys' AI-first strategy, anchored in Infosys Topaz and a disciplined enterprise AI transformation services model, is converting market positioning into measurable financial performance, with AI revenue share, large deal momentum, and guidance revision collectively signaling that the company is capturing enterprise AI investment at scale across its global client base.

T-Mobile's 2Q26 Earnings: "Shake It Off" — Revenue Strength Allays Account Net Add Softness; 5G Broadband and Fiber Continue Charging Ahead

Jason Leigh — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

T-Mobile reported 2Q26 results on July 23, 2026, with total revenue increasing 8% YoY to $22.8 billion in the second quarter. That result slightly missed Wall Street consensus estimates of $22.9 billion. However, with net income of $3.2 billion, earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.99, well above adjusted EPS estimates of $2.58–2.59. Total service revenue increased 9% YoY to $19.0 billion, while postpaid service revenue grew by 13% YoY to $15.9 billion. Net income reached $3.2 billion despite UScellular merger-related costs during the quarter. T-Mobile also increased its full-year cash flow outlook, reflecting continued confidence in the underlying performance of the business.

IDC Survey: The Martech Stack in Transition — AI-Native Vendors’ Race to Catch Budget, Buyers, and the Baton

Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how U.S. organizations are transitioning from traditional martech stacks toward AI-native marketing platforms. Drawing from an online survey of over 100 senior marketing, advertising, and IT/data leaders across small, midmarket, and large organizations, the survey focused exclusively on those already using, piloting, planning, or evaluating AI-native marketing applications. The research maps current stack composition against the trajectory organizations expect over the next 12 months.

The study identifies the drivers pulling organizations toward AI-native tools and the barriers holding broader adoption back, and it quantifies how far marketing budgets are shifting from traditional to AI-native vendors, now and a year from now. It also maps where AI-native adoption is strongest and weakest across core marketing functions, examines the rise of internally built AI tools alongside vendor-supplied ones, and looks at preferences for orchestration and workflow architecture as the stack evolves.

For technology vendors, services firms, and marketing leaders, the findings provide a benchmark for where the midmarket stands on the path to AI-native martech, and they pinpoint where budget is migrating, which use cases each segment is adopting first, what continues to hold deployment back, and which layer of the stack is best positioned to take on the orchestration role.

Industry Go-to-Market Handbook: Worldwide Retail, 2026

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation contains the IDC Worldwide Retail Go-To-Market Handbook 2026, which is designed to support technology vendors in building their industry-focused narratives and go-to-market strategies. This handbook 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 retail industry
Leverage the priorities and emerging business needs of existing customers and prospects to develop competitive messaging and campaign themes
Showcase how their companies' products and services solve concrete business challenges within this value chain
Understand the significance and investment horizon of key programs and use cases, map them with their company capabilities, and translate into go-to-market action plans

The 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 worldwide retail sector. Account-based actions must consider that individual company strategic business priorities and initiatives might differ based on specific subindustries or organizations' individual digital maturity.

"By 2026, leading retailers are moving AI from the pilot phase to routine execution, scaling personalization, unifying in-store and digital experiences, and governing them within a modern and secure architecture," said Filippo Battaini, research manager, IDC Retail Insights. "For technology providers, the opportunity lies in aligning messaging and portfolios with the evidence-based investments retailers are making in the short, medium, and long term."