IDC: Organizations want more economic value from AI

At the recent GTDC APJ Summit in Singapore, IDC’s Sandra Ng shared predictions from IDC’s newly released IDC Future Scape 2026 report. The report highlights the top trends and direction businesses in the region will most likely be taking over the next few years as they continue to invest in AI and other emerging technologies.

Ng, who is senior vice president, IDC Asia/Pacific also highlighted how AI has evolved from experimentation to enterprise-wide orchestration in the region, with organizations already adopting agentic models where humans and intelligent systems act with autonomy. During her presentation, Ng also offered strategic imperatives for technology providers, emphasizing how AI, data ecosystems and distributed intelligence would create distinct competitive advantages in the future.

“The shift that we are going to see in 2026, and we're really beginning to see that in the last few months, is the focus on revenue growth. Think about AI return of investment (ROI) from the perspective of boosting revenue. In most parts of the second half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, when vendors and partners talk to customers, most of the use cases conversations were around productivity,” said Ng.

“Over the last few months, we have begun to see that shifting into what are the use cases that can actually help to generate revenue, new business models, as well as new revenue streams for organizations. So, we are seeing that shift, and already two-thirds of the CEOs in the Asia-Pacific region believe that their organization or AI will offer the organization a chance to reinvent business models in the next three to five years. But obviously, it's not going to be a simple and easy uptake for the CEO community, especially when they try to connect technology directly with revenue generation,” added Ng.

Ng believes there are a few things that organizations would have to prioritize as they get to 2026. Given that AI investments are not necessarily cheap, the ability to scale will be able to help to improve from an ROI standpoint. Ng explained that organizations will look to continuous buying journeys.

“A lot of customers prefer the buying journey to be continuous because AI is very complex. It’s also because of the changing pricing model, the expansion of consumption model, and because of the AI upgrades that they will need to get once they buy the first product. All of this is pushing them towards a continuous buying journey,” explained Ng.

Then, there is the agentic talent shift whereby the CIO, and the CTO community would have to be very proactively involved in shaping the workforce strategy or the talent strategy of the organization.

“This is one where they have no prior experience, but this is the one that you (tech vendor and partners) are going to be called upon because of the knowledge with regards to AI agents and how that will flow into business processes,” said Ng.

Organizations will also need to look at data as that competitive advantage which the next level is all about bringing together proprietary in-house data with the ecosystem data.

“For technology vendors and partners, it’s really thinking about if you get to speak to and engage at the CEO level, you really need to talk about your capabilities and use cases that would actually connect with revenue streams and revenue generation outcomes,” added Ng.

The full list of predictions for 2026 by IDC shared by Ng can be found here.