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AI Reaches the Core But Is Stuck at Automation

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective reviews data from IDC's June 2026 Enterprise Applications and Strategies Survey, bringing forward opportunities for vendors and services providers to help unlock automation opportunities with more AI. Cross-functional processes bring additional value for organizations as they move toward the agentic enterprise. This survey found that organizations still have 32–39% of their workflows manual — not automated — across 53+ subprocesses of 7 cross-functional processes. The good news is that AI governance, maturity, and automation can quickly enhance the value for organizations on their AI journey.

"Moving to the agentic enterprise requires strategy, AI, and solid execution. IDC's June 2026 Enterprise Applications and Strategies Survey found that organizations are adopting AI quickly, but many still have a third or more manual processes," said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software and Agents at IDC. "Enterprise software vendors, native AI vendors, and services providers have a great opportunity to help their clients embrace a new operating model on their quest to the agentic enterprise, but it is contingent upon their offerings, road maps, and partnerships."

Black Hat USA 2026 Recap: Exposure Management Momentum and SIEM Architecture Shifts

Michelle Abraham — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At Black Hat USA 2026, exposure management vendors showcased solutions that consolidate discovery, validation, prioritization, and remediation capabilities, geared toward helping organizations that are using the vulnerability discovery capabilities of the latest frontier models to justify revamping their exposure management programs. New SIEM entrants showed their federated storage solutions, and several announcements signal a growing convergence between proactive and reactive security operations.

Cloudflare's Agents Week Targets the Governance and Observability Gaps in Agentic AI

Matthew Flug — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Cloudflare's Agents Week announcements introduce the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC) as a workflow distinct from the traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC), and deliver the observability, identity, and policy enforcement capabilities that lifecycle depends on. Attaching a verified identity and a recorded trace to agent actions gives organizations a way to apply governance standards written for human developers to agents, and to distinguish an optimization opportunity from a security incident.

Enterprise Software and AI: The Ambition Gap

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer presentation examines the quickly changing state of enterprise software in relation to AI. Buyers are investing in AI, including 72% already investing in enterprise software with embedded AI. However, there are a multitude of technology approaches to complete business processes, which adds complexity and incurs technical debt. Additionally, two-thirds of businesses already run AI agents. Buyers continue to purchase and build agents (roughly 25%–31% across 53+ business processes), trying AI to see how it works and how it fits their needs. Despite the use of AI in production, manual and semi-manual processes remain the largest process types among 53+ processes, representing roughly 32%–39% of the work on average. This gap needs to be closed in 2026 and 2027.

This report looks at how enterprise software and AI ambition is outpacing execution, AI momentum, 53+ business processes and technology usage (or lack thereof) across each process, why the gap persists, and what the focus needs to be in 2026 to close it.

Four Lenses of Enterprise Software and AI in 2026: Big Changes, Big Gaps

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses how the state of enterprise software in relation to AI is changing quickly. Buyers are investing in AI but using multiple approaches to complete business processes, adding more complexity while incurring technical debt. It looks at IDC's June 2026 Enterprise Application and Agent Strategies Survey data in four lenses: as a market opportunity, as a capability gap, as an investment road map, and as a governance risk. Each lens uses the same underlying survey, and each is built for a different reader — the vendor GTM lead, the product strategist, the CFO and COO, and the CIO.

"The world is changing, yet it isn't. Technical debt continues to be created. Across 53+ processes, IDC found that purchased and in-house-built AI agents account for roughly 27–31% of the business process, best-of-breed solutions account for the baseline of data plus 7–10% of the process, while manual and semimanual workflows account for roughly 32–39%. Despite advances in technology, the usage of it and rationalizing it across business processes to remove manual and semimanual data doesn't appear to be happening," said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software and Agents at IDC. "The data contained in this document is a great pathway for apps vendors and service providers to leap onto the opportunities presented."

IDC MarketScape: U.S. Care Coordination Application 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jennifer Eaton — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates U.S. care coordination vendors on the strategies and capabilities that move past record keeping, regulatory checklists, and manual workflows. Care coordination continues to change, pushed by the need to deliver care that is more efficient, more effective, and organized around the patient rather than the visit. That pressure has grown as value-based payment moves from voluntary pilots to models that carry real financial risk, tying an organization's margin to the outcomes and total cost of the populations it manages. U.S. healthcare organizations are responding with a new generation of care coordination technology built to manage complex patients, use limited clinical staff and resources well, raise the quality of care, and improve the experience of both the end user and the patient.

"Care coordination has crossed from a documentation problem to a decision problem. The data finally moves; the question now is whether the technology can turn it into the right action, at the right moment, for the right patient." — Jennifer Eaton, research director, IDC's Health Insights

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Contact Center–as-a-Service Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Michelle Morgan — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study explores the evolution of CCaaS from basic call distribution to advanced, AI-driven orchestration platforms. It highlights the shift toward agentic AI, enabling autonomous workflows and broader customer experience integration. This document evaluates vendors based on capabilities, strategy, and market share, offering guidance for buyers on architectural framing, use case alignment, and AI governance to ensure successful deployment and measurable outcomes.

“The real disruption in contact centers isn’t AI itself,” says Michelle Morgan, research manager, AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service and Contact Center Strategies at IDC. “It’s how agentic platforms redefine what must be orchestrated, measured, and governed across the entire customer journey. Individual AI capabilities are, at this point, table stakes. What changes is the operating model underneath them: When an agent can initiate actions, hand off across systems, and make judgment calls that used to require a human, the unit of work shifts from a single interaction to a chain of them. That shift is where most contact center leaders’ existing governance frameworks start to show their age.”

IDC MarketScape: 中国Data Agent 2026年厂商评估

Leo Li, Yanxia Lu — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

本IDC研究评估的厂商类型覆盖互联网厂商、云服务厂商、大数据厂商等。IDC针对入选厂商的能力和战略进行了综合评估，评估标准包括收入规模、产品技术能力、市场和生态以及未来发展战略等。各维度根据市场情况进一步划分为若干细分项，并配以不同权重，从而形成IDC MarketScape综合评分体系，通过IDC分析师针对各个厂商和大量最终用户的深入访谈，综合分析并确定各厂商在IDC MarketScape中的相对位置，并探讨厂商的特点和战略、总结发展趋势，为技术买家进行产品选型提供参考。

“Data Agent市场在快速成型，各家企业采用不同的技术路线来实现Agent在原有解决方案中的落地。可以预见，Data Agent的出现会让市场用户愿意投入更多资源和预算来进行采购升级，但具体的商业模式和可带来的营收规模尚未固定。”——李浩然，IDC中国新兴科技研究领域高级分析师。

IDC PeerScape: Service Transformation, Data Integration, and Sovereignty Practices to Optimize AI Success in National Civilian Governments

Massimiliano Claps — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape examines three government entities at the frontier of these converging trends:

The Republic of Kazakhstan, which is deploying AI capabilities, spanning national data lakes, sovereign large language models (LLMs), and citizen-facing agentic services, to deliver proactive public services at a national scale
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has institutionalized a global data-sharing architecture for tsunami detection, enabling real-time open data exchange across national warning centers, international partners, and private sector suppliers
The European Space Agency (ESA), which is deploying cloud-native, AI-augmented Earth observation (EO) platforms built on sovereign infrastructures that create digital twins of the planet to support climate policy, disaster preparedness, and environmental decision-making.

Government CIOs across all mission areas will find transferable insights in the practices documented in this IDC PeerScape: the importance of data integration as a prerequisite for intelligent decision-making and agentic AI; the architectural choices that preserve sovereign control without sacrificing technological capability; and the governance models that make cross-boundary data sharing both trustworthy and operationally effective.

"Siloed investments in digitization are no longer sufficient. Forward-looking governments are achieving mission outcomes by investing in integrated data architectures, sovereign AI infrastructure, and open-ecosystem platforms that enable intelligence at scale." — Massimiliano Claps, research director, IDC Government Insights

IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Engineering, Production, and Operations Software Tracker Taxonomy

Gabriele Roberti, Rasmus Andsbjerg — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This taxonomy outlines market segmentation and measurement methodologies for the Engineering, Production, and Operations Software Tracker, including software markets, companies, geography, deployment type, and revenue metrics reported. It serves as the foundation for understanding the reported segments of the tracker and describes how these segments relate to IDC research in general.

"IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Engineering, Production and Operations Software Tracker represents a comprehensive outline of segments reported in the data product," says Gabriele Roberti, director, IDC. "The tracker is a critical research tool to measure performance of market participants, review market opportunities, guide investment decisions, identify partners, analyze acquisitions, and much more."