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Adobe Workfront — Evolving AI-Driven Workflow, Collaboration and Workspace Management Across Adobe Experience Cloud

Melinda-Carol Ballou, Wayne Kurtzman — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Adobe announced enhancements to Adobe Workfront at its Summit conference last month, centered on AI-driven workflow optimization, intelligent workspace management, and expanded collaboration capabilities across the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem. The announcements reflect a broader shift toward embedding AI agents and natural language interfaces directly into work management platforms to help improve execution speed, data access, coordination, and decision-making. These updates position Workfront as a more integrated system of execution within Adobe’s experience platform, linking planning, content production, and operational workflows.

As organizations must optimize business execution across widely distributed geographies amid economic, geopolitical and supply chain volatility, augmenting planning in conjunction with AI is a core focus across organizations in conjunction with effective AI governance and agentic orchestration. This IDCLink outlines key elements of the Adobe Workfront announcements and assesses implications for enterprise work management, effective planning and prioritization with AI-enabled process automation.

Amazon's Advertising Strategy and Innovation Analyst Spring 2026 Update

Roger Beharry Lall, Alex Holtz — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses Amazon's Advertising Strategy and Innovation Analyst Spring 2026 Update. Amazon Ads is rapidly evolving into a comprehensive, AI-powered advertising platform, expanding beyond its retail roots to offer full-funnel, omni-channel solutions. Key innovations include agentic AI, creative automation, and advanced measurement, all aimed at simplifying and scaling advertiser access. Success will hinge on Amazon's ability to foster openness, interoperability, and trust, ensuring its differentiated capabilities extend to partners and advertisers across the broader digital ecosystem.

"As Amazon Ads evolves from a retail media powerhouse to an AI-driven, full-funnel platform, its future will hinge not on what it keeps inside its walls, but on how boldly it opens its ecosystem. The next era of advertising will be defined by those who master openness, trust, and the seamless fusion of commerce, content, and technology." — Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies at IDC

"Amazon's ambition to be the infrastructure behind cross-platform advertising is clear, but the real test lies in democratizing its most powerful tools. Can Amazon extend its closed-loop advantage to partners and midmarket advertisers, or will the walls remain? The answer will shape the future of global advertising." — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications

Freshworks Refresh 2026: Freddy AI Agent Studio and the Unified ServiceOps Foundation

Shannon Kalvar — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its annual Refresh conference on May 14 in New York City, Freshworks (NASDAQ: FRSH) launched Freddy AI Agent Studio in Freshservice, a no-code environment for building and deploying domain-specific AI agents across IT, HR, and business service workflows. The announcement extends Freshservice’s positioning as a unified service operations platform by adding an agentic layer, an MCP Gateway for third-party context integration, and experience-level agreements (xLAs) for outcome measurement. Freshworks also used the event to reposition itself as an employee-experience-first company, raising its 2028 ARR target to $1.3B+ and projecting Freshservice alone at roughly $1B ARR by 2028.

HPE Meets SAP Sapphire's "Autonomous Enterprise" with a New Compute Scale-Up Server

Max Pepper — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

HPE, which IDC identified as a leader in its 2026 MarketScape for SAP HANA-certified server appliances, has released the Compute Scale-up Server 3250, raising the bar for SAP HANA-certified appliances, just as SAP's "Autonomous Enterprise" pivot drives demand for infrastructure that can handle compute- and memory-intensive workloads such as text/media analytics, business intelligence/data analytics, and unstructured databases alongside core ERM. The 3250's memory density, low-latency node controller, and fault-tolerant uptime position HPE to capture intensifying demand from RISE customers activating Joule Assistants and modernizing their SAP environments at scale, although a backdrop of growing SAP-driven hyperscaler competition and rising component costs will test the 3250's market demand.

How to Become a Truly Data-Driven Enterprise

Karen D. Schwartz, Marlanna Harrington, Megha Kumar, Reid Paquin, Devin Pratt — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how organizations can truly be data driven. Organizations often assume that they are data driven, because they have dashboards, reports, and data teams. But when they try to deploy to make data-led decisions, they discover that their data can't answer simple questions or assemble complete customer views without missing records. Being a truly data-driven company requires treating data as the default language for decisions, with leadership, culture, and infrastructure all aligned and measured against that standard. It requires that every group and domain use the same framework across data, along with a data culture to back it up.

"Organizations that make the effort to become truly data driven will make better decisions, identify customer needs faster, and identify efficiency and product problems earlier, all with lower risk," says Karen D. Schwartz, an adjunct research advisor with IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "It's a lot of work, but the payoff seems well worth the effort."

IDC Survey: How Is the Middle East War Reshaping Strategic AI Initiatives?

Melih Murat — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey draws on findings from IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey Wave 2 (syndicated) to examine how the economic fallout from the ongoing Middle East War is reshaping enterprise technology priorities across the GCC, Türkiye, and South Africa. It highlights a cautious, budget-conscious operating environment in which nearly two-thirds of surveyed organizations anticipate a recession within the next 12 months, while geopolitical disruption and rising hardware costs dominate executive concerns. The research shows technology investment shifting from broad innovation toward operational resilience, with cybersecurity, infrastructure and IT operations optimization, AI, and data and analytics emerging as the areas most protected from budget cuts. It also underscores the growing urgency for AI use cases that deliver measurable efficiency gains and near-term business value and the need for regionally differentiated strategies that align AI investment with each market's unique risk profile, data readiness, and infrastructure maturity.

Japan AI/Data Platform Software Forecast, 2026–2030

Takuya Uemura, Yasusuke Suzuki — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an overview of the Japan AI/data platform software market in 2025 and the revenue forecast for 2026–2030. The AI/data platform software market referred to herein denotes an integrated market segment, derived from IDC's software Market Definition, encompassing analytics and BI software, AI platforms, and data platforms (comprising data management systems, data protection, and data security).

"The utilization of generative AI is evolving from conversational to autonomous AI agents, advancing the automation of business processes and the sophistication of decision-making. As a result, data preparation needs will expand significantly, and data-driven management with AI at its core will become widespread. Moving forward, multifaceted capabilities, such as technical proficiency in AI utilization, data analysis capabilities, construction and operation of high-quality data infrastructure, and establishment of governance to control increasingly complex risks, will determine corporate competitive advantage," says Takuya Uemura, senior research manager, AI and Automation, IDC Japan.

This is the English translation of the Japanese document (IDC #JPJ53497226).

SAP Connect Türkiye 2026: Accelerating AI-Driven Enterprise Transformation

Eren Eser — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note summarizes the key themes and consequential implications from SAP Connect Day Istanbul 2026, held on April 8, 2026. The event brought together SAP customers, partners, and leaders in Türkiye to discuss AI-powered enterprise transformation across finance, supply chain, data, and industry-specific use cases. The document contextualizes the event within SAP’s broader global strategy and the evolving Turkish market landscape.

“Türkiye is emerging as an important market for SAP’s AI and cloud strategy. SAP Connect Day Istanbul demonstrated that Turkish enterprises are not only ready for AI-powered transformation, but are already leading in specific areas. The runway for establishing new AI-driven operating models is short. Organizations that act decisively now will define the competitive landscape for years to come,” said Eren Eser, associate research director, IDC’s Global Services Insights.

U.S. Department of Commerce Commits $2B in CHIPS Act Funding to Advance Domestic Quantum Computing Strategy

Heather West, PhD — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The Department of Commerce’s $2 billion quantum initiative marks a significant shift in U.S. quantum strategy from research support toward industrial-scale ecosystem development and domestic manufacturing acceleration. While the investments could strengthen U.S. leadership across multiple quantum modalities, the program also introduces important long-term questions around market concentration, government influence, and the sustainability of funding across future administrations.

ADP Meeting of the Minds and Executive Strategy Summit, 2026

Leonardo Freitas — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note reviews key themes and announcements from ADP Meeting of the Minds 2026, ADP's 41st annual client and partner conference. IDC observed ADP consolidating its positioning around a unified global HCM platform (ADP Lyric HCM), a layered agentic AI capability (ADP Assist), and an ecosystem anchored in ADP Marketplace and strategic partners.