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AI's Impact on Discovery, Advertising, and Brand

Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation, delivered at IDC Directions 2026, provides buyers with insights regarding the impact of AI on discovery, advertising, and brand.

A tectonic shift is underway in how brands are discovered, evaluated, and chosen, as generative AI reshapes the rules of marketing and commerce. Traditional search is giving way to AI-generated answers, zero-click journeys, and agent-driven buying, where both consumers and B2B buyers increasingly rely on AI to research, compare, and even make decisions on their behalf. This transformation is redefining visibility, forcing brands to move beyond SEO toward becoming machine-readable, contextually relevant, and continuously optimized across a fragmented content and technology landscape.

In addition, new advertising models are emerging within AI environments, creating both disruption and opportunity. In this new era, success will depend on how well brands align content, data, and systems to influence AI-driven discovery — and ultimately earn a place in the decisions machines make on behalf of customers.

AI's Impact on Discovery, Advertising, and Brand Marketing

Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

These event proceedings were presented at the IDC Directions conference in Boston in April 2026.

How your brand is discovered, evaluated, and remembered has been turned upside down by AI. This session challenges long-standing assumptions about SEO/AEO, media, and brand building with the latest research and outlines practical actions marketers can take to stay competitive in an AI-first market.

Agentic AI Platforms: The Lynchpin for Deployment and New Competitive Battleground

Mickey North Rizza, Neil Ward-Dutton — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

These event proceedings were presented at the IDC Directions conference in Boston in April 2026.

Enterprises want to evolve from one-off, prebuilt agents into sophisticated, agentic solutions that drive business transformation. Nancy Gohring and Mickey North Rizza will explore the fast-moving agentic AI platform market, including enterprise demand, competitive battlegrounds, and tensions/opportunities for entrenched enterprise app providers.

Contact Center Country Focus, 2025: The United Kingdom — Key Factors to Succeed in the Market

Oru Mohiuddin — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an overview of the U.K. contact center market and key factors to succeed in the market. The U.K. contact center market is distinct from the rest of Europe, pairing a strong appetite for advanced technology and AI with a uniquely high sensitivity to security driven by its role as a global business and services hub. Unlike many European markets where security concerns stem from a more conservative regulatory culture, U.K. security priorities are shaped by greater exposure to cross‑border threats and spillover risks, forcing organizations to balance speed and innovation with resilience and control. This creates a rare combination of high innovation potential and complex risk management, making the United Kingdom a critical market for vendors seeking growth — and a compelling reason to dive deeper into this document.

Defining AI Bill of Materials: Structure, Scope, and Role in AI Trust Services

Sakshi Grover, Grace Trinidad — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the emergence of the AI bill of materials (AI BOM) as a foundational framework to manage the growing complexity of AI systems. As enterprises transition toward agentic, distributed, and continuously evolving AI architectures, traditional governance and security models are proving insufficient. The document outlines the structure, scope, and operationalization of AI BOM, highlighting its role in enabling system-level visibility, traceability, and control across models, data, pipelines, and runtime environments. It also explores enterprise adoption drivers, regulatory influences, and vendor approaches, positioning AI BOM as a critical control layer for managing risk, cost, and compliance in modern AI ecosystems.

"AI systems are evolving into distributed, stateful execution environments composed of models, data pipelines, prompt orchestration layers, APIs, and autonomous agents operating across dynamic runtime contexts. AI BOM functions as the control plane for this architecture, capturing dependency graphs, lineage, identity propagation, and runtime telemetry in a machine-readable form. Without this, enterprises cannot correlate system behavior with underlying components, resulting in blind spots across governance, security, and operational integrity as AI systems scale," says Sakshi Grover, senior research manager, Cybersecurity Products and Services, IDC.

Dynamic Workplace Management: Using AI to Power the Modern Office

Gala Spasova, Meike Escherich — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective explores how AI is reshaping dynamic workplace management to power the modern office. Dynamic workplace management leverages AI to transform static office environments into adaptive, data-driven spaces that align with fluctuating work patterns and employee needs. By integrating real-time occupancy data, predictive analytics, and intelligent scheduling, organizations can optimize space, enhance employee experience, and improve operational efficiency. Success depends on robust governance, privacy safeguards, and collaborative change management, ensuring AI-driven solutions deliver both business value and a workplace that employees genuinely want to return to.

"Hybrid work did not reduce the demand for office space, it made that demand uneven," says Gala Spasova, senior research manager, Europe Smart Office and EMEA Content and Knowledge Management Strategies, at IDC. "The real challenge for organizations now is how to align the available space with how employees use it."

IDC Market Glance: Cloud-Native Software Engineering, 2Q26

George Mironescu — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance provides insight into the current cloud-native software engineering market, technologies, and vendor landscape, including segments and subsegments. Technology vendors may supply more than one product or offering to the market, but only the parent corporation is listed within a specific market segment. The document draws from 150 vendor offerings across various subsegments.

IDC’s Worldwide Digital Sovereignty Taxonomy, 2026

Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a comprehensive reframing of the digital sovereignty (DxSo) landscape, reflecting the evolving priorities and complexities of the market. The taxonomy, first introduced in 2023 and revised in 2024 to emphasize cloud sovereignty, now aligns with a broader DxSo concept, expanding from the original three pillars of data, technical, and operational sovereignty to four primary technology markets: business apps, business platforms, IT infrastructure, and IT operations and assurance.

This updated taxonomy provides a detailed hierarchical mapping of primary and secondary markets, offering clarity on how organizations can assemble technologies, operational models, and strategies to achieve coherent and consistent digital sovereignty. It offers a robust, forward-looking framework that captures the dynamic nature of digital sovereignty, enabling stakeholders to navigate regulatory, operational, and technological challenges with greater clarity and strategic intent.

The taxonomy supports IDC’s research and deliverables, including market forecasts, vendor profiles, and customer buying patterns, and is foundational for related services such as the Digital Sovereignty CIS and the forthcoming Sovereign AI Infrastructure Index SIS.

IDC defines digital sovereignty as the capacity for digital self-determination by nations, organizations, and individuals, emphasizing total control over data management, storage, and processing. The taxonomy’s segmentation covers a wide range of technology markets, including new and reclassified secondary markets under each primary category. Business apps and business platforms now encompass a broader set of software and development tools, while IT infrastructure and IT operations and assurance consolidate previously fragmented markets, reflecting the convergence of compute, storage, networking, and management functions.

The taxonomy also introduces a refined digital sovereignty strategy stack, which articulates the layered approach organizations must take — from applications, platforms, and infrastructure to various assurance levels (IT, business, governance, and customer) — to ensure resilience, compliance, and operational sovereignty. Cloud remains central to digital sovereignty, with IDC positioning sovereign cloud as a subset of DxSo, subject to all relevant data laws and regulations, and applicable to both public and private cloud deployments.

IDC’s methodology ensures the taxonomy remains aligned with other IDC frameworks and addresses critical questions around stack completeness, data residency, and market measurement. The taxonomy is designed to track global DxSo spending and its economic impact, providing actionable insights for IT buyers, vendors, and service providers.

“Digital sovereignty has switched gears over the years. It has evolved from digital self-determination and digital self-sufficiency to survivability at the national level, given the crucial nature of digital technologies underpinning society and critical national infrastructure. As a result, this taxonomy has also evolved and now encompasses the IT products, platforms, and services that are needed to assure sovereignty at a much broader scale, going further than just data sovereignty and cloud sovereignty, and even the relatively newer concept of AI sovereignty,” said Rahiel Nasir, research director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC.

Impact of the Middle East War on Cloud Adoption in META: Insights Across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Türkiye, and South Africa — Based on IDC's March 2026 Tech Buyer Survey

Jebin George — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines how the Middle East War is reshaping cloud adoption strategies across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) region, based on fresh survey data from CIOs and IT decision-makers in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Türkiye, and South Africa. It provides new insights into how rising geopolitical risk, economic uncertainty, and supply chain pressures are influencing enterprise cloud priorities, from increased focus on resilience, security, and sovereign cloud to shifts in IT spending, architecture design, and sourcing strategies.

The report highlights where cloud adoption continues to accelerate, where it is becoming more selective, and how organizations are redesigning cloud environments to balance performance, control, and cost. It also outlines the implications for cloud providers operating in the region, making it essential reading for technology leaders navigating an increasingly complex and risk-driven cloud landscape.

Microsoft Customer Insights: An Emerging Architecture for Agentic Mesh for CX

Gerry Murray — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT