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AI-ification of Retail Media

Ananda Chakravarty — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective provides a viewpoint of how AI is changing the game with respect to mapping current attribution metrics in retail media. The report also reviews how AI addresses audience targeting as well as attribution through a set of techniques being pioneered by firms such as Amazon, Walmart, and other retail media networks (RMNs). The report also highlights marketing mix modeling and how this may move the market toward a more holistic view of retail media. Finally, the report identifies the flaws of return on ad spend (ROAS) attribution and how AI may overcome these flaws through new attribution methods.

"When your retail media metrics say 10x returns, but you're barely breaking even, it's time to revisit attribution. AI is changing the retail media game. New AI models are being rolled out by the most sophisticated RMNs to drive precise attribution. It's time for a reset," said Ananda Chakravarty, research vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

Enabling Telecom Omni-Service Monetization

Chris Silberberg, Peter Chahal — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines how telecom operators can monetize an expanding portfolio of consumer, enterprise, NaaS, and API-based services, and how BSS vendors are helping them do so. It sets out 6 structural challenges — business model diversity, catalog fragmentation, ecosystem and API commercialization, data fragmentation, regulatory divergence, and commercial agility — identifies the billing, charging, CPQ, catalog, marketplace, and settlement capabilities most relevant to each, and profiles 15 vendors serving this market.

"The rationale for telco BSS investment is shifting from a focus solely on TCO, or monetizing a specific product such as 5G FWA, toward investing in systems with the flexibility to sell anything. This is to unlock revenue growth and commercial agility by monetizing a wider range of services. Technical capability is just one part of the solution; telcos must also reconsider their processes and organizational setup if they are to overcome common challenges," said Chris Silberberg, research manager, Global Telecom Operations and Monetization at IDC.

IDC Market Glance: AI-Ready Workforce, 3Q26

Amy Loomis, Ph.D. — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document intended to visually depict a concise current-state view of the AI-ready workforce. The AI-ready workforce has become a strategic priority as organizations move past experimentation and start embedding AI across the employee life cycle and the business processes that support it. This IDC Market Glance maps that evolving ecosystem, tracking the vendors and services shaping how organizations recruit, develop, support, and govern their people alongside the AI agents and platforms increasingly doing some of the work autonomously.

AI is changing how work gets done, and organizations need to treat technology investment, workforce skills, data quality, and responsible AI practices as parts of a single strategy rather than separate initiatives. Getting that integration right, often more than any single tool or platform choice, will determine whether AI investment translates into lasting business value.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Payable Automation Software for Midmarket 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts payable automation software providers serving midmarket organizations with 100–999 employees. The study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology leaders selecting an AP automation platform.

For midmarket organizations, the AP technology decision is increasingly shaped by complexity rather than transaction volume alone. As companies add entities, suppliers, systems, approval structures, and financial requirements, AP platforms must help finance absorb that complexity rather than simply automate individual tasks.

"The midmarket AP challenge is no longer simply processing more invoices. It is keeping growing business complexity from becoming growing finance complexity." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Payable Automation Software for Large Enterprise 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts payable automation software providers serving enterprise organizations with 1,000 or more employees. The study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the most important criteria for technology buyers selecting an enterprise AP automation platform. At enterprise scale, the AP technology decision is increasingly about orchestration rather than invoice automation alone. Organizations need platforms capable of coordinating processes, systems, data, controls, suppliers, exceptions, and emerging autonomous workflows across complex and often fragmented financial environments.

"Enterprise AP is becoming a control layer for financial operations. The leaders will be the platforms that can coordinate complexity across systems while giving finance confidence that every automated action remains visible, governed, and accountable." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Payable Automation Software for Small Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts payable automation software providers serving small businesses with 0–99 employees. The study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology buyers selecting an accounts payable (AP) automation platform.

Small businesses should increasingly evaluate AP automation based on the amount of organizational capacity the technology creates rather than the number of individual tasks it claims to automate.

"For small businesses, the real promise of AP automation is not simply processing invoices faster but allowing the business to grow without requiring the finance team to grow at the same rate," says Kevin Permenter, research director om financial applications, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Accounts Payable Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses the vendors offering embedded payment capabilities within accounts payable (AP) and procure-to-pay (P2P) workflows. Embedded payments in AP allow organizations to initiate, authorize, process, and track supplier payments directly inside the applications finance teams already use rather than routing payments through a separate banking portal or standalone payment tool.

This assessment is one of four workflow-specific reports produced under IDC's broader worldwide embedded payment applications 2026 study. Companion reports cover accounts receivable (AR/order-to-cash), travel and expense (T&E), and treasury.

"Embedded payments have turned AP into one of the clearest proving grounds for whether a vendor's AI claims translate into production results," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications at IDC. "Buyers are no longer asking whether a platform can pay a supplier. They are asking whether it can do so with the rail economics, fraud controls, and straight-through processing rates their business actually needs."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Accounts Receivable Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors offering embedded payment capabilities inside accounts receivable and order-to-cash workflows, including payment acceptance, automated cash application, credit and collections intelligence, and dispute and deduction resolution. The study evaluates how directly vendors connect payment execution to the surrounding AR workflow rather than treating payments as a system requiring separate reconciliation.

"Cash application has quietly become the workflow where AI investment pays off fastest and most visibly," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications at IDC. "The vendors pulling ahead are the ones closing the remaining exception queue, the short pays and unmatched remittances, rather than the ones still marketing an auto-application rate that the market has largely caught up to."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Travel and Expense Management Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors offering embedded payment capabilities inside travel and expense management workflows, covering virtual and physical card issuance, point-of-spend policy enforcement, embedded travel payments, and automated reimbursement. This study examines how vendors are shifting control from post-trip audit toward real-time enforcement at the point of purchase and how card issuance ownership shapes the rest of the platform's capability.

"The center of gravity in T&E has moved from the expense report to the moment of spend," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications at IDC. "Vendors that own the card issuance stack directly are able to enforce policy before a transaction clears, not after, and that distinction is becoming one of the clearest lines separating leaders from the rest of the field."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Treasury Management Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors offering embedded payment capabilities inside treasury workflows, covering cash aggregation, multi-horizon forecasting fed by AP and AR data, treasury-grade payment execution, and FX and liquidity risk monitoring. The study evaluates how well vendors extend forecasting and cash visibility from a broader finance platform into a genuine treasury capability rather than a bolt-on reporting layer.

"Cash aggregation across banks and accounts has become table stakes, so the real differentiation in treasury now comes from how forecasting draws on live AP and AR data instead of static exports," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications, IDC. "Agentic AI adoption in treasury is still uneven across the vendors we evaluated, and that gap is likely to define the next round of competitive separation in this workflow."