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Agentic Commerce Reality and the Last Mile of Human Customer Experiences

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses the importance of agentic commerce. Agentic commerce is beginning to reshape the buyer journey, but in uneven and uncomfortable ways: discovery is rapidly shifting to intent-driven, zero‑click, and agent‑curated results; experiences are becoming highly personalized yet less brand led; transactions are faster but leave accountability murky; fulfillment is quietly optimized rather than reinvented; and post‑purchase may end up as the last real arena for human-differentiated customer experience.

"Agentic commerce is often marketed as a simple story of the inevitability of smarter AI. That's far from true. This is a business soap opera about the dynamics of power, profit, and control," says Heather Hershey, research director of AI-Enabled Digital Commerce at IDC. "The progression of agentic commerce will be asymmetrical across various regions and domains. The result: the need for complex, new operational, and narrative strategies that appeal to humans and agentic AI interfaces concurrently."

Anthropic’s OpenClaw Decision Reveals the Cost Pressures Emerging in Agentic AI

Arnal Dayaratna — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Apple Business comes not to bury the UEM market, but to elevate Apple device usage at work (particularly among SMBs)

Phil Hochmuth — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Google's Gemma 4 Brings On-Device AI into the Multimodel Architecture Conversation

Arnal Dayaratna — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Google's Gemma 4 extends open-weight AI further into the practical deployment environments where software is built and used. The family spans mobile, browser, desktop, wearable, and edge scenarios through smaller E2B and E4B variants and the LiteRT-LM runtime, while larger models are available on Google Cloud through Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine. Multimodal and multistep AI behavior is becoming more portable across execution surfaces that were previously constrained by model size, latency, and hardware limits. Google is treating Gemma 4 less as a side release for the open model community and more as a distributed deployment layer spanning edge and cloud environments simultaneously.

IDC ProductScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Asset-Intensive Enterprise Asset Management Applications, 2025–2026

Brian O'Rourke — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC ProductScape offers a comprehensive guide on the key functionalities of AI-enabled asset-intensive enterprise asset management applications, featuring products from Hitachi Energy, IBM, IFS, KloudGin, Octave (Hexagon), Oracle, Oracle Utilities, Ramco, SAP, ServiceNow, and Ultimo. The status of each functionality is categorized as fully supported, partially supported, partner provided, road map, or not supported, aiding technology purchasers in quickly identifying which vendors align with their changing requirements.

SAP Build: An AI-First Enterprise Development Platform

Arnal Dayaratna — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines SAP Build's role in the developer tools landscape and argues that SAP Build is a distinct AI-first platform for enterprise development. It unifies pro-code, low-code, and agent-driven development with embedded AI, business context, governance, and native SAP integration. This approach helps enterprises modernize processes, scale AI, and maintain control and compliance.

"SAP Build reflects an important shift in enterprise development. It brings pro-code, low-code, and agent-driven development together within a single governed environment and treats AI as a core part of the development model rather than as an added feature. This approach matters because enterprises now need development platforms that support speed, control, and business context at the same time. For SAP-centric organizations, SAP Build stands out because it pairs AI-first development capabilities with direct access to enterprise processes, data, and governance. Its openness to external tools also positions it as a compelling option for organizations that operate across SAP and non-SAP systems." — Arnal Dayaratna, vice president, Software Development, IDC

VMware Reinforces VCF Strategy with VKS Enhancements and Ecosystem Expansion to Better Support Mission-Critical and AI-Enabled Workloads at KubeCon Europe

Max Pepper — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

VMware's KubeCon Europe (that took place March 23–26) announcements highlight the continued evolution of positioning VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as an AI-native private cloud platform with VKS 3.6 enhancements and the expanded partner ecosystem with F5, Kong, and Tigera Calico delivering incremental improvements in security, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience for running both VM- and Kubernetes-based workloads. Meanwhile, the strategic move of Velero to the CNCF helps reinforce VMware's alignment with the cloud-native ecosystem and expands opportunities for broader adoption and partnerships across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Agents as Apps: The Rise of Agents — A Vendor Business Model Reset

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Since early 2025, new AI agents have been hitting the market, and recently, the pace has increased significantly. These new agents are reshaping business processes while helping organizations reinvent themselves around a new technology operating model. In this AI era, the winner is not the app with the best UI but the agent that reliably completes outcomes — at scale, with trust and economic leverage.

This comprehensive guide brings forward the trends driving the markets and highlights the 10 moves enterprise software vendors and services providers must make quickly to survive in the agentic era. Without this immediate strategic focus and emphasis, vendors will face limited growth — and even extinction.

"The world is changing quickly. AI agents represent the next evolution of the application model, shifting from tool-based interaction to outcome-based execution," said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software, IDC. "Don't get left behind!"

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Utility Customer Experience Management Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment

Gaia Gallotti, Jean-François Segalotto — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors providing AI-enabled customer experience management (CXM) solutions to utilities worldwide. It analyzes vendors' capabilities, strategies, and comparative positioning in a market undergoing structural transformation. The report provides utilities with a structured framework to assess vendor offerings across industry depth, platform architecture, data readiness, AI integration, and ecosystem extensibility. It is intended to support utilities as they modernize customer operations to reduce cost to serve, strengthen customer trust, enable electrification-driven business models, and scale AI adoption responsibly.

"Utilities are operating in an environment defined by increased customer vulnerability, heightened regulatory scrutiny, expanding product portfolios, and rising expectations for seamless digital engagement," said Gaia Gallotti, research director, IDC Energy Insights. "At the same time, generative AI is beginning to deliver measurable productivity gains within customer operations, particularly across contact centers and digital self-service. Utilities that modernize their CXM platforms with strong data foundations, embedded AI capabilities, and flexible, industry-specific architectures will be better positioned to reduce cost to serve, unlock new revenue streams, and build long-term customer trust in an increasingly complex energy landscape."

NVIDIA and Storage Partners Back New STX Reference Architecture to Accelerate Agentic AI

Carol Sliwa, Henry Arzumanian — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At GTC 2026 in San Jose, NVIDIA spotlighted storage as a critical component of the infrastructure necessary to keep AI factories running at optimum performance with the launch of its BlueField-4 STX reference architecture. Major AI storage players confirmed their intention to codesign and support STX — which includes the previously announced Inference Context Memory Storage (CMX) platform to accelerate and scale agentic AI — starting in the second half of 2026. Many storage vendors also took the occasion to provide updates on their support for the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design introduced at last year's GTC event, as well as the latest developments on their AI infrastructure.