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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for Midmarket Organizations 2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates agentic marketing platforms available to midsize organizations and provides essential guidance for technology leaders in this segment. Midsize marketing teams typically run several tools across content, campaigns, and channels acquired at different times for different reasons and are looking for platforms that can coordinate that sprawl rather than add to it. This study defines the market, evaluates vendors serving midsize buyers and assesses how well current platforms handle multi-agent coordination and independent learning across channels, which are the capabilities that most affect a growing marketing team's ability to scale without adding headcount. IDC finds meaningful progress on integration and orchestration since the 2025 assessment of this segment, alongside a persistent gap in agents that improve their own performance over time without manual retraining. Midsize buyers should weigh both dimensions carefully when selecting a platform built to grow with them.

"Midsize buyers want a platform priced for their budget, built for how a midsized team actually works, and simple enough that value shows up in the first quarter instead of the fifth," says Roger Beharry Lall, research director on advertising technologies and SMB marketing applications, IDC.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Do B2B Buyers Across Market Segments Use Social Channels?

Sudhir Rajagopal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines how B2B buyers across three company size segments, small business, midmarket, and large enterprise, use social and community platforms throughout the technology buying journey. Drawing on IDC’s May 2026 Tech Buyer Behavior Survey (n = 413), the analysis finds that while social media reach is nearly universal, with video (YouTube) the single-most used channel across all segments, the underlying purpose diverges by buyer purpose and company size. For marketing leaders and CMOs, the implication is to segment their social channel spend by both buyer segment and life-cycle stage in the buyer journey.

Rebuilding Marketing Content for AI-Orchestrated B2B Buyer Journeys

Sudhir Rajagopal, Tapan Patel — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how content architecture maturity, personalization granularity, and buying committee coverage shape the effectiveness of AI-driven buyer journey orchestration among B2B technology marketers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on IDC's 2026 Barometer Survey (syndicated) of 400 marketing leaders and IDC's broader research on agentic AI, buyer behavior, and marketing operating models, this document provides advice for marketing leaders and CMOs navigating and investing in the orchestration of buyer journeys amid the rise of AI-mediated B2B marketing.

"Most marketing organizations are confident in their AI orchestration, but confidence and capability are not the same thing", said Sudhir Rajagopal, research director, IDC CMO Advisory. "Only a third of marketers can orchestrate content during the buyer journey across the full buying committee, which increasingly is led by AI agents. It is time for marketing to build and orchestrate content that an AI agent can act on."

市场份额：中国AI增强的销售管理型CRM市场份额，1H26

Wenting Xu — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

本IDC研究分析了2026年上半年中国AI增强的销售管理型客户关系管理（CRM）市场中领先供应商的市场份额。

围绕企业提升销售效率、改善客户经营和增强收入可预测性的需求，AI正在推动销售管理型CRM从以客户信息记录和销售流程管控为主的工具，向具备智能洞察、内容生成、预测分析和任务执行能力的销售管理平台演进。AI的应用价值也逐步从单点功能辅助，延伸至与客户数据、业务知识和销售工作流的深度融合。

IDC中国企业级软件研究领域高级研究经理徐文婷表示：“AI增强的销售管理型CRM的核心价值，在于将客户数据、行业知识与销售工作流深度融合，推动系统从过程记录与管控工具向智能决策与执行平台演进。未来，中国企业在选择AI增强的销售管理型CRM时，将更加关注AI能否解决实际销售问题、带来可量化的业务改善，而非单纯比较AI功能的丰富程度。”

How Company Size Shapes AI’s Impact on B2B Marketing

Sudhir Rajagopal, Roger Beharry Lall, Katie Evans, Supriya Deka — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective is a deeper dive into how AI’s impact on B2B technology marketing varies by company size. Using IDC’s 2026 Marketing Barometer Survey, IDC found that the variations and gaps between company sizes reflect structure, not capability. Each segment carries a distinct exposure: Small firms are expanding capabilities on a thin data foundation, midmarket is losing search traffic faster than its answer engine strategy can replace it, and large enterprises lack buyer visibility despite leading on AI discovery infrastructure. The document offers segment-specific budget and recommendations for CMOs.

“A high AI impact on marketing performance may not always be proof of a better strategy; it’s often proof of a more basic structure,” says Sudhir Rajagopal, research director, CMO Advisory Service, IDC. “Smaller organizations, unrealized technical debt, and more basic buyer signals can make an organization look further ahead on AI than it actually is. In prioritizing and sequencing marketing investments, CMOs must calibrate their existing performance against structural position, technical debt, and AEO visibility to see more sustainable AI returns in marketing.”

AT&T Texas' Collocation Filings Are a Reminder: Regulated Interconnection Is Shrinking, While Neutral Collocation Keeps Winning

Olga Yashkova — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AT&T Texas' September 2026 filing of conformed interconnection agreements (IAs) with competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), including Wide Voice LLC, Comcell Inc., YMax Communications Corp., and Syntrio Solutions LLC, reflects routine compliance with Telecom Act obligations for legacy voice carriers rather than any broadening of the local exchange market. Meanwhile, most of the interconnection growth in 2026 is occurring elsewhere: Enterprises and cloud providers are leasing market-priced space in carrier-neutral facilities operated by Equinix, Digital Realty, and CyrusOne to support AI inference and cloud on-ramps, and that demand is outpacing available power.

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.”

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.