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2026 CIO Signature Report — The Evolving CIO Agenda: Driving Business Value Through Governance, Talent, and AI

Martina Longo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation explores the outlook of CIOs worldwide over the next 12 months, examining their measures of success, key challenges, strategic priorities, technology investment plans, talent and skills gaps, governance responsibilities, and relationships with technology partners.

Drawing on quantitative findings from IDC's Worldwide CIO Sentiment Survey (n = 459) and qualitative insights from six in-depth interviews with CIOs across global markets, this inaugural CIO Signature Report provides a unique perspective on the priorities shaping the technology leadership agenda. It also examines the growing connection between technology investments and business outcomes, and how this shift is redefining the CIO's role as a strategic business leader.

Amazon unBoxed 2026: Amazon Ads Agent Merges the Console and DSP and Puts AI in the Planning Seat for Advertisers of All Sizes.

Roger Beharry Lall, Allyson Leavy — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Braze Forge 2026: Building a Martech Stack for the Future of Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Braze used Forge 2026 to show it is positioned to be the execution layer for agentic marketing, with the journey builder as one piece of it. Decisioning Studio Go, Operator building full Canvases, and Agentic Standards for QA move decisioning and campaign checking from marketers to AI agents. Operator Connect and the Braze MCP Server let agents in Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot call Braze directly. CMOs should now judge engagement platforms on decisioning quality, the scope of actions agents can take, the governance around them, and access to enterprise data, in addition to channels and orchestration.

Faros Positions Its Token Engineering Platform for Outcome Optimization

George Mironescu — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses Faros' platform repositioning around token engineering and the key capabilities supporting this value proposition.

"Many organizations burned through AI budgets quickly and reacted with blunt token caps that indiscriminately penalize teams and project initiatives. This pattern stems from both limited visibility and control of agentic software delivery. Faros' Token Engineering platform repositioning seeks to address this challenge," says George Mironescu, associate research director, Software Development, Delivery, and Engineering at IDC.

Four Operating Logics Applied to Mainframe Modernization: A Composed Decision

Matthew Flug, Shannon Kalvar, Archana Venkatraman — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

“Mainframe modernization is a composed decision in which the custodial, procedural, flow, and bounds requirements stay active until the last workload moves. Organizations that name who settles workload decisions, and that translate what experienced staff know into test cases, change records, and limits on automated action, can resolve objections that a revised schedule would leave in place. Treating those objections as resistance puts at risk the system knowledge on which modernization depends,” says Matthew Flug, Research Manager, Intelligent Application Modernization and Deployment Platforms at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic AI Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Neil Ward-Dutton, Melih Murat — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the agentic AI platform software market through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics, providing guidance about agentic AI platform software vendors and their offerings. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses vendors relative to the criteria, and it highlights the factors expected to be the most influential for success in the market in both the short term and the long term.

"As organizations start to scale their use of AI agents, platforms that they can use not only to build and deploy — but also to operate, secure, evaluate and govern — AI agents become very valuable," said Neil Ward-Dutton, research VP, agentic automation and AI technologies at IDC. "IDC research shows that almost three-quarters of organizations are already at the stage of deploying multiple agent workflows, so the time for organizations to explore the benefits of these platforms is now."

IDC Survey Spotlight: Which Finance Areas in Your Organization Are Most in Need of Process Improvement?

Heather Herbst — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight discusses the results of IDC Syndicated Surveys 2026: CFO Buyer Insights Survey, April 2026 (n = 517) on the finance areas CFOs identify as most in need of process improvement, with financial governance, risk, and compliance emerging as the single largest source of pain across the function. Procure-to-pay, corporate risk and treasury management, tax, and business continuity cluster closely behind, pointing to a broader process improvement agenda that cuts across the office of the CFO and requires a modernization portfolio approach rather than isolated point fixes.

Worldwide Hyperscaler and Top Service Provider Infrastructure Demand Presentation, 2Q26

Leon Kao — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an overview of service provider infrastructure demand trends among the 15 selected service providers through the second quarter of 2026.

Agentic Orchestration Checks In: The Opportunity for Media Networks Has Arrived for Healthcare

Alex Holtz, Nimita Limaye — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how agentic orchestration and the rise of health media networks are reshaping advertising as reimbursement pressure, concentrated therapeutic economics, and the loss of modeled health audiences push pharmacies, payers, PBMs, and digital health platforms toward compliant first-party data monetization. With operators such as CVS Media Exchange, Walgreens Advertising Group, Optum, GoodRx, and the point-of-care networks building closed-loop, high-intent advertising surfaces, this document maps the category into three archetype stacks and details the architectural, regulatory, and measurement challenges that determine who can credibly participate. It offers a blueprint for stakeholders to capture therapeutic and non-endemic demand while separating advertising decisioning from coverage and clinical judgment as agentic assistants reach the point of care.

"Healthcare has the highest-intent first-party data in commerce media and the least room for error in activating it," says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies, IDC. "The closed-loop infrastructure that transformed retail, then travel, and then financial services is now arriving in pharmacies, plans, and digital health platforms — but here, the institution selling the ad may also control the formulary, the prior authorization, and the fill. The question isn't whether this market forms. It is whether operators build the disclosure and governance architecture now, while agentic care navigation is small enough to design."

"Healthcare's next margin frontier isn't a new service line — it's already sitting in the data. For pharmacies, plans, and digital health platforms, first-party assets represent a high-margin revenue opportunity that is reimbursement independent, clinically non-dilutive, and self-reinforcing as measurement closes the loop," said Dr. Nimita Limaye, research vice president, IDC Health Insights. "What separates sustainable advantage from short-term extraction is architecture: institutions that embed consent, de-identification, and disclosure into the core product — not the compliance stack — will compound. The ones that don't will discover that advertising revenue earned at the cost of patient trust carries the steepest hidden price in the industry."

Hightouch Reframe 2026: Bringing Warehouse-Native Data and Context to Agentic Marketing

Tapan Patel — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its Reframe 2026 Chicago event, Hightouch argued that large language models (LLMs) need a marketing harness consisting of customer data, brand context, tools, and governance. Its Agentic Marketing Platform (AMP) consists of three products: the Agentic and Composable CDP, which run background agents that find and rank marketing opportunities; Lifecycle Studio, which drafts and configures life-cycle campaigns for marketer approval; and Ad Studio, which creates on-brand ads and paid media campaigns. For campaigns across all products, Hightouch has also built review agents that check campaigns before people sign off.

AMP moves Hightouch into a crowded agentic marketing market where incumbent platforms bundle their own agents, and CMOs cannot afford separate agents from several vendors doing the same jobs. To compete, Hightouch must integrate with a growing set of systems that hold context and capabilities and show incremental gains in business outcomes from agent-driven marketing workflows.