According to IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, V2 2026, August, Asia/Pacific AI and GenAI investment, including China and Japan, is set to grow from $121.5 billion in 2025 to $555.2 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.5%. This growth reflects enterprises moving generative AI and Agents beyond isolated pilots and into core, enterprise-wide operations. Agentic AI and orchestration platforms emerge as key catalysts, enabling enterprises to unify predictive, generative, and prescriptive capabilities within a single governance framework rather than managing them as separate initiatives.

Customer service organizations are prioritizing technology investments as AI rapidly reshapes the function. A Gartner survey of 199 service and support leaders conducted in April through May 2026 revealed that spending on AI has increased by 38%, while overall service and support function budgets have grown just 2%.

The 2026 ISG Buyers Guides for Learning and Development report that traditional learning management systems have merged with learning experience platforms to form a new category that combines administration, skills awareness and engaging user experiences. Integrated with human capital management systems, human resources data, collaboration applications and content providers, these platforms allow organizations to carry out successful skills strategies without additional administrative burdens.

The worldwide external OEM enterprise storage systems (ESS) market continued its sharp acceleration in the second quarter of 2026, reaching $10.3 billion in vendor revenue, a 33.6% year-over-year increase, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker. It represents the second-highest quarterly total in the tracker’s history, trailing only Q4 2025, and the highest revenue ever recorded outside a fourth-quarter period. ESS growth accelerated further from the 28.7% rate posted in the first quarter of 2026, marking a second consecutive quarter of acceleration after the market’s 3.9% full-year 2025 growth rate.

Gartner predicts over half of successful cyberattacks on AI agents are expected to exploit access control weaknesses and prompt injections by 2029. There is a growing need for organizations to identify, monitor and protect AI models from these unique threats, which is driving the adoption of advanced AI security solutions. To build a strong defense, businesses need to combine their existing security systems with specialized AI security tools.

The US, which is central to the advanced-chip ecosystem, is expected to capture almost half (48%) of this investment, at $15.1 trillion. Asia Pacific is expected to account for $US8.2 trillion cumulative capex, led by China and India, while sovereign AI strategies are accelerating investment in Europe and the Middle East.

The 2026 ISG Buyers Guides for Contact Centers find that contact center software, originally built for efficient routing and interaction management, now orchestrates workflows throughout the customer journey and uses data to improve operational and business decisions. Platforms increasingly incorporate advanced analytics, automation and self-service features. With the integration of AI, they are beginning to perform quality management, summarize interactions and use automated agents to assist human operators.

The worldwide external OEM enterprise storage systems (ESS) market continued its sharp acceleration in the second quarter of 2026, reaching $10.3 billion in vendor revenue, a 33.6% year-over-year increase, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker. It represents the second-highest quarterly total in the tracker’s history, trailing only Q4 2025, and the highest revenue ever recorded outside a fourth-quarter period. ESS growth accelerated further from the 28.7% rate posted in the first quarter of 2026, marking a second consecutive quarter of acceleration after the market’s 3.9% full-year 2025 growth rate.

As finance teams begin to deploy AI agents, CFOs face a critical decision between focusing on immediate returns or prioritizing governance and oversight. The risks and opportunities of AI agents are fundamentally different from previous automation waves in finance.

New Omdia research shows that US PC shipments (excluding tablets) grew 1.0% year-over-year (YoY) in 2Q26 to 18.8 million units, returning to growth following a 7.0% decline in 1Q26. Growth was driven by demand being brought forward as retailers and channel partners secured inventory ahead of price increases resulting from memory and storage supply constraints. Average PC sell-in prices in the US exceeded $1,000 for the first time, up 12.0% YoY. However, the return to growth is expected to be short-lived, with Omdia forecasting US PC shipments to decline 10.7% for the full year and 18.4% in the second half of 2026.

Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company identified five actions that chief information security officers (CISOs) should take by the end of 2026 to combat accelerating technological disruption.

Firms on the 2026 IDC FinTech Rankings Top 100 grew their 2025 financial-services revenue almost 20% year over year, which is nearly double the 12% growth in overall IT spend, according to results announced today by IDC Financial Insights. Jacksonville, Florida-based FIS, IDC’s #1-ranked technology provider to the financial services industry, led a list in which the share of revenue coming from financial services jumped from 48% in 2024 to 60% in 2025, signaling deeper, more concentrated investment in the sector rather than broader participation across other industries.

Video has become one of the largest consumers of network bandwidth and digital infrastructure resources, and demand continues to accelerate as artificial intelligence, immersive applications and enterprise collaboration generate unprecedented volumes of visual content. That growth is forcing technology leaders to look beyond traditional measures of video quality and performance toward broader questions of operational efficiency, infrastructure scalability and long-term energy consumption.

Global semiconductor revenue is expected to reach $1.6 trillion in 2026, increasing 92% from 2025 revenue of $809 billion, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company. In 2027, it is forecast to total $1.9 trillion.

The accelerating growth of AI-generated content, higher-resolution media, immersive applications and enterprise video communications is forcing organizations to reconsider how they manage one of the largest contributors to global network traffic. Rather than treating video compression as a narrow technical function, enterprise technology leaders are increasingly evaluating it as a strategic lever for controlling infrastructure costs, improving energy efficiency and supporting long-term digital growth.

An Executive Q&A Session with Yuri Gubin, Chief Technology Officer at DataArt

The number of people who can build applications, automate processes and redesign work has dramatically expanded with the introduction of generative artificial intelligence and rise of agentic systems, creating a new challenge for enterprises trying to capture the benefits of distributed innovation without sacrificing governance, security or operational discipline.

The 2026 ISG Buyers Guides for Cybersecurity find that enterprises need unified visibility, continuous monitoring and rapid threat analysis and response to defend expanding operations. Rather than building a perimeter around a set of on-premises systems and workloads, organizations now require multiple integrated security systems covering hybrid and multicloud environments, distributed applications, autonomous agents and remote devices. Software providers are responding with AI-enabled enhancements that accelerate discovery of vulnerabilities and identification of root causes while reducing administrative tasks. These advances allow IT technicians to reliably resolve a higher volume of incidents.

Global semiconductor revenue surpassed $425bn in 2Q26 reaching another all-time high as the market grew a record 31.4% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), according to new research from Omdia. AI demand and strong memory prices continued to be the leading market dynamics, taking total semiconductor revenue for the first half of 2026 to $752 billion. The 31.4% QoQ increase surpassed the previous sequential growth record of 29.2% in 1Q26. Since Omdia began tracking the semiconductor market in 1Q02, only 10 out of 97 quarters have recorded sequential revenue growth above 10%. The last four quarters beginning in 3Q25, have all recorded double-digit sequential growth, with 3Q26 expected to follow the same trend.

Enterprise leaders moving artificial intelligence from experimentation into everyday operations need management structures that can keep innovation aligned with business priorities as capabilities, workforce skills and operating requirements change. Establishing governance, defining new responsibilities for IT, improving visibility across business functions and creating mechanisms for employees to share successful innovations can help organizations turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into repeatable business outcomes.

The 2026 ISG Provider Lens Microsoft AI and Cloud Ecosystem report for Switzerland finds that the evolution of technologies, regulations and AI consumption models is raising enterprise expectations for providers to deliver transparent operations, clear business impact and ongoing responsibility for operations.