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Addressing Critical Data Challenges in Retail: Fast-Evolving Data Management Roles and Strategies for Successful AI

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how retailers are accelerating investment in AI, but IDC’s 2026 Global Retail Survey shows that scaling AI depends heavily on the maturity of the underlying data environment. While 42% of retailers identify digital skills and talent as the largest individual barrier, poor data synchronization and integration at 34%, limited access to real-time data and analytics at 34%, and insufficient operational and customer data visibility at 29% form a significant cluster of structural constraints.

The same pattern appears in individual retail functions. Real-time network-wide inventory visibility remains a leading operational challenge, while difficulty personalizing at scale highlights persistent customer data fragmentation. Retailers therefore need to treat data integration, semantic consistency, ownership, real-time information, governance, and observability as core elements of their AI strategies.

Successful AI will depend less on the volume of data a retailer owns and more on its ability to provide trusted, timely, semantically clear, and appropriately governed information to humans, applications, and increasingly autonomous AI systems.

“Retailers are discovering that scaling AI is often less about finding a better model and more about giving this model a reliable representation of the business. Data synchronization, real-time access, and visibility sit immediately behind talent among the main barriers to AI execution. As AI moves closer to inventory, customer decisions, fulfillment, pricing, and store operations, data management becomes part of the operating model itself. Retailers that treat integration, inventory visibility, customer data unification, and governance as core AI capabilities will be much better positioned to move from experimentation to scalable business value,” says Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

From the AIforce Interface to the Platform: A Retail Lens on Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026

Ornella Urso — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents the retail-related key takeaways from Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026, held on September 15–17 in San Francisco. Salesforce reframed its CRM framework as an interface layer, backed by new AI models, governance capabilities, and role-specific agents. The report includes a selection of retail use case stories on commerce, order management, and retail media capabilities.

"Dreamforce 2026 showed Salesforce's ecosystem and intelligent layer strategy aimed at serving agents, businesses, and ultimately shoppers," said Ornella Urso, research director at IDC. "For retailers, the harder questions are once more foundational: whether commerce and service data are unified, who owns routing and escalation rules, and how governance is enforced before an agent checks out an order or issues a refund."

IDC Market Glance: Warehouse Applications, 3Q26

Stephanie Krishnan — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document that provides a concise, current-state view of warehouse applications in 3Q26. It outlines the major segments supporting the market: warehouse and inventory management, order management, workforce management, automation, and yard management.

IDC Market Glance content is current on the date it is published. The representative content contained in this presentation reflects a qualitative snapshot that is regularly refreshed. Company logos are illustrative only and do not reflect an exhaustive view of the market.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Adobe Professional Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Douglas Hayward — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the AI-enabled Adobe professional services ecosystem through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that explain success in the AI-enabled Adobe professional services market. This IDC MarketScape covers a variety of vendors participating in the Adobe professional services space. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses vendors relative to the criteria and to one another and highlights the factors expected to be the most influential for success in the market in both the short term and the long term.

"Marketing is in transition, driven both by AI's promise of revolutionizing the customer life cycle and by demand from CEOs and CMOs for CMOs to drive profitable net-new revenue growth after years of disappointing returns on enterprise martech investments," says Douglas Hayward, senior research director for Customer Experience Services and Strategies at IDC. "To drive that new revenue growth using AI-enabled Adobe technology, CMOs and CIOs must work with CX services vendors that understand the intersection of marketing and new AI technologies, who can credibly model and then deliver business results for their clients."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Smart Conference Room Hardware for Hybrid Meetings 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Gala Spasova — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses 12 vendors of AI-enabled smart conference room hardware for hybrid meetings, evaluating them on their capabilities and strategies across key parameters of performance. It provides insights into the strengths and challenges of each of the 12 vendors included: Barco, Biamp, Cisco, Crestron, HP Inc., Jabra, Logitech, Neat, Sennheiser, Shure, Yamaha, and Yealink.

"Meeting-room AI divides into a perception layer that belongs to the device and a reasoning layer that belongs to the meeting platform," says Gala Spasova, senior research manager, Intelligent Workplace and Management at IDC. "Buyers that understand that division buy the right thing from the right supplier. Those that do not tend to pay for generative features they would have received anyway, while accepting whatever audio the room happens to deliver into them."

IDC Survey: Early Adopters of Functional Agentic AI — Education Leading Adoption, But Skills and Governance Gaps Persist

Matthew Leger, Nigel Wallis — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presentation examines how early adopters in the education sector are approaching agentic AI adoption across sourcing strategies, governance models, business priorities, and vendor selection. It evaluates how the sector is moving from early deployment into enterprise-scale operations, and what factors are shaping the pace, structure, and success of that transition.

“Educational institutions are deploying agentic AI into production faster than all-industry peers across nearly every sourcing approach, but governance, skills, and enterprise coordination have not kept pace,” says Senior Research Manager Matt Leger, IDC Public Sector, Worldwide Education and EdTech Digital Strategies. “The production lead creates a narrow window of advantage. Institutions that use it to establish oversight frameworks covering workflow ownership, audit trails, and tiered agent autonomy will set the compliance and procurement standards that shape the sector for years. Those that delay will inherit frameworks designed by others or face retroactive governance costs when accreditors and regulators catch up.”

IDC Survey: IDC’s Digital Sovereignty Survey, 2026 — SaaS Sovereignty

Bo Lykkegaard — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines preferences for SaaS sovereignty among 633 sovereignty-conscious organizations worldwide. It examines how buyers weigh sovereign controls when selecting SaaS applications, which capabilities and applications matter most across industries, and how AI training data ownership shapes sovereign cloud and SaaS decisions.

“Sovereignty has entered among key SaaS application requirements across all industries, not just regulated sectors. Buyers want a palette of concrete controls, and AI sovereignty is now an integral part of these required capabilities for many,” said Bo Lykkegaard, associate VP, European Software Research at IDC.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Collaborative Applications, 2026

Wayne Kurtzman — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the worldwide collaborative applications market. This presentation includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective across all collaboration application segments (team collaboration, conferencing, enterprise communities, virtual events, and email), AI and agentic impact, a market outlook, and IDC’s advice for technology suppliers/service providers.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved collaboration applications, not replaced them. By grounding AI in the activities, content, and context of a multiplayer, multimodal workspace, collaboration enables agentic and AI-augmented interactions, with people taking an instructive role in driving results.” — Wayne Kurtzman, research VP, Collaboration Future of Work, IDC

Omnicom’s Progress in 1H26: The Growth Platform Is Coming Together

Douglas Hayward — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note reviews Omnicom’s 2026 first-half results, published on July 28, which showed core revenue up 5% organically to $11.6 billion, with growth accelerating to 6.1% in 2Q26. Integrated Media services that combine media, commerce, data, and tech transformation services led growth, while the iconic creative-led advertising business declined.

“Omnicom did well delivering 5% organic growth in 1H26,” said Douglas Hayward, senior research director for Customer Experience Strategies and Services at IDC. “If Omnicom can deliver its promise of up to 5% organic for 2026 while digesting IPG and accelerating its transition to a platform-based operating model, it will be well paced to dominate the competitive landscape in 2027 and beyond.”

Stagwell’s Progress in 1H26

Douglas Hayward — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Stagwell reported 3.3% organic net revenue growth in 1H26, with digital transformation and communications offsetting flat creative and media performance. This IDC Market Note assesses the results, the 2026 guidance that depends on a double-digit second half, and Stagwell’s platform strategy built around The Machine. “Stagwell has the right strategy and it’s starting to pay off, with revenue growth beginning to return,” said Douglas Hayward, senior research director for customer experience strategies and services at IDC. “2H26 will show whether Stagwell is now really about to return to double-digit growth.”