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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.

ASI and SoftBank Group Form Joint Venture to Scale Autonomous Construction Equipment

Sarah Lee — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

On September 24, 2026, ASI announced a joint venture with SoftBank Group focused on the development and commercialization of autonomous construction equipment for large infrastructure projects, alongside a $225 million direct investment in ASI. The company says the joint venture will provide additional capital to scale autonomous solutions across civil construction and material-handling use cases, building on what it describes as more than 25 years of Mobius fleet management and automation experience. The deal reflects two forces IDC has been tracking across heavy industrial equipment: increasing value in the software layer that orchestrates mixed-brand fleets and persistent workforce pressures increasing interest in technologies that can extend workforce capacity. The more interesting open question is how the market will evolve: toward a contest between OEM-native and OEM-agnostic autonomy or toward a layered stack in which both approaches coexist. ASI's existing commercial relationships with major equipment manufacturers suggest the latter remains a distinct possibility.

Beyond the Chatbot: How HubSpot's Context Bet Sets Up CRM's Next Act

Roger Beharry Lall — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

HubSpot used UNBOUND 2026 in Boston (September 16–18) to retire the 15-year-old INBOUND name and rebuild its CRM positioning around a Growth Context Graph, a rebuilt Breeze Assistant, and a model-agnostic agent harness called Aviator. HubSpot also became OpenAI's first named CRM partner for ChatGPT Ads and its Sponsored Agents test. With a strong focus on outcomes and a big bet on context, HubSpot is well positioned for the midmarket. What remains to be seen is whether customers disenchanted by the first Breeze iteration, now armed with plenty of AI-native alternatives, will give it another try.

Cheap Content, Expensive Problems: The Biggest Shift in Digital Experiences Since the Web Itself

Jordan Jewell — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines the most significant shift in content and digital experience technology in a generation. Generative AI has collapsed the cost of producing content, fragmented how it gets discovered through AI answer engines, and begun commoditizing the software used to manage it. The result is a market on the defensive: Enterprises are flooded with cheap content that fails to differentiate or rank, while keeping the content findable, compliant, and governed has become the real bottleneck. Two old assumptions have broken along the way: that content is an asset to accumulate rather than a liability to manage, and that its audience is human rather than the AI models now summarizing it to buyers. The document traces the market's arc from the DXP land grab to today's AI reset, assesses the segments facing the most change (DXP, CMS, DAM, video), and lays out what buyers and vendors must do to compete.

"Since we entered the AI era, making content got easier but everything else got harder," said Jordan Jewell, senior research director, Persuasive Content and Digital Experiences at IDC. "Increasingly, the reader you need to win over isn't even human; it's a model deciding whether to cite you. The vendors and enterprises that come out ahead won't be the fastest producers; they'll be the ones that can tell whether their content is accurate, accessible, compliant, and discoverable across the entire supply chain. This capability is content intelligence, and it's where defensible value is concentrating."

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."