International Data Corporation (IDC) has published its FutureScape 2026 research – a comprehensive outlook on the next five years in enterprise technology.
Spanning more than 35 worldwide reports, IDC’s FutureScape 2026 details how agentic artificial intelligence (AI) will evolve from isolated pilots to enterprise-wide orchestration – transforming decision-making, operations, and competitiveness across every sector of the global economy.
“Organisations today are managing through economic and geopolitical uncertainty and, amid it all, agentic AI is emerging as a strategic inflection point,” says Meredith Whalen, chief product, research & delivery officer at IDC. “Our research shows that this new class of AI isn’t just speeding up innovation – it’s reshaping how work gets done, how people contribute, and how industries will grow in the years ahead.”
Charting the agentic future
IDC’s FutureScape 2026 research identifies the crosscurrents shaping enterprise strategy: economic volatility; geopolitical shifts; regulatory change; workforce disruption; changing customer engagement; and rising expectations for trust and transparency.
These pressures converge as AI accelerates creating a pivotal moment for leadership. IDC forecasts that by 2030, 45% of organisations will orchestrate AI agents at scale, embedding them across business functions.
“Leaders can’t control the geopolitical and technology crosscurrents shaping today’s economy,” says Rick Villars, group vice-president, Worldwide Research at IDC. “But with a clear AI transformation strategy, strong data and infrastructure, and a skilled AI-ready workforce they can turn disruption into advantage and steer their organisations toward sustainable growth in the AI era.”
FutureScape 2026 delivers actionable insight to help organizations:
- Build AI-ready strategies aligned with business value.
- Develop a skilled, adaptive workforce for AI collaboration.
- Modernise technology stacks to support scalable agentic architectures.
- Embed trust, ethics, and resilience as competitive advantages.
- Understand how agentic AI alters the business personas that interact with technology suppliers.
Key highlights from the research includes:
- Job role shift: By 2026, 40% of all G2000 job roles will involve working with AI agents, redefining long-held traditional entry-, mid-, and senior-level positions.
- Data readiness: By 2027, companies that do not prioritise high-quality, AI-ready data will struggle scaling GenAI and agentic solutions resulting in a 15% productivity loss.
- AI business disruption impact: By 2030, up to 20% of G1000 organisations will have faced lawsuits, substantial fines, and CIO dismissals due to high-profile disruptions stemming from inadequate controls and governance of AI agents.
- Managing cloud risk: By 2028, due to geopolitical uncertainties, 60% of organisations with digital sovereignty requirements will migrate sensitive workloads to new cloud environments to reduce risk and increase autonomy.
- Pricing: By 2028, pure seat-based pricing will be obsolete as AI agents rapidly replace manual repetitive tasks with digital labour, forcing 70% of vendors to refactor their value proposition into new models.
- ROI on AI investment: By 2026, 70% of G2000 CEOs will focus AI ROI on growth, driving C-suite efforts to boost revenue and reinvent business models without growing headcount.