The second edition of Boston Consulting Group's European Competitiveness Barometer, released today, signals widespread concern across the private sector, with 93% of executives warning of potential dire consequences for Europe's competitiveness, innovation, and job retention.

The report, survey of 850 C-level executives and over 6,400 European citizens, finds that 96% of business leaders believe the EU must take immediate steps to protect its commercial interests to avoid severe long-term consequences. That view is echoed by 85% of European citizens.

According to Forrester’s, The State Of Business Buying, 2026, generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how business buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase products and services. While genAI searches are the starting point for B2B buyers, leaders are increasingly relying on their internal and external buying networks — comprising colleagues and external influencers, respectively — to justify and de-risk purchasing decisions. The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with that number rising for more complex or strategic purchases.

According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, global smartphone shipments increased 2.3% year-over-year (YoY) to 336.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2025 (4Q25). Despite the memory shortage crisis in Q4 2025, the market was supported by sustained premium growth, strong momentum in foldables and accelerated pull-in demand as consumers anticipated upcoming price hikes. The total number of smartphones shipped reached 1.26 billion units in 2025.

The 2025 ISG Provider Lens global Multi Public Cloud Solutions report finds that enterprises are modernizing legacy environments while building cloud-native architectures to support AI-enabled applications. This has sharpened their focus on cloud infrastructure strength, operational governance and cost management.

The latest research from Omdia reveals that global smartphone shipments grew by 2% in 2025 to 1.25 billion units, marking the highest annual level since 2021. All regions grew compared to 2024, except for Greater China, which marginally declined amid the fading effect of the national subsidy scheme that boosted its performance in early 2025. Strong demand from both upgraders and replacement-buyers continued to boost the market, as several vendors broke records despite uncertainty reigning in the business environment throughout the year.

Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure reached a record $86 billion in Q3 2025, marking a sustained investment cycle as platform providers scale capacity for training and inference workloads, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Tracker.

As GenAI rapidly reshapes work, especially for less experienced employees, Gartner predicts that by 2030, 30% of enterprises will face declining decision-making quality due to an overreliance on AI.

CHROs must accelerate learning and experience development in these early career roles to sustain performance and maintain talent pipelines.

Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations are experiencing a financial reset. After decades of reliance on multimillion-dollar bespoke aircraft and highly specialized payloads, defense ministries are increasingly shifting to lower-cost, semi-disposable drones and modular video systems that can be deployed quickly, lost in theater if necessary, and replaced without crippling budgets.

Telecom operators worldwide are scaling capital investment in AI infrastructure amid surging demand for AI compute capacity and sovereignty requirements that favour local providers and homegrown solutions, according to Omdia’s new report, Telcos’ Strategic Investments in AI Infrastructure. This shift is creating new growth avenues for telcos. National and regional initiatives, such as the EU’s Gigafactories, are creating opportunities for telcos to lead large scale programs rather than cede them to hyperscalers.

The 2025 ISG Provider Lens Oracle Cloud and Technology Ecosystem report for Europe finds a growing number of companies view Oracle as a specialist hyperscale cloud provider for data- and AI-intensive workloads. They value its database leadership, cost-efficient AI infrastructure and deep multicloud integration that allows Oracle databases to run seamlessly within rival cloud environments.

The record Q4 performance capped a solid year for distribution, with full-year 2025 revenues rising 6.2%, following flat growth in 2024 and a market contraction in 2023. The results highlight the growing role of distributors as enterprises modernize infrastructure, adopt AI-ready technologies, and rebalance IT spending priorities.

As corporations accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence across operations, a growing chorus of technologists, regulators and risk specialists is warning that governance, accountability and intellectual-property protection are lagging dangerously behind innovation.

The ISG Buyers Guide for Sustainability Management, produced by ISG Research, provides the rankings and ratings of 20 software providers and their products to support environmental sustainability. The research finds that enterprises need to accurately measure and disclose environmental impacts to fulfill their sustainability goals, and sustainability software supports these requirements by enabling organizations to provide transparent, auditable disclosures. The Buyers Guide for Sustainability Emerging Providers ranks and rates 12 innovative providers of sustainability software that may better suit specific enterprise needs or offer a lower total cost of implementation and ownership.

As corporations accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence across operations, a growing chorus of technologists, regulators and risk specialists is warning that governance, accountability and intellectual-property protection are lagging dangerously behind innovation.

BOSTON—Corporate AI investment is growing significantly and will not pull back, with companies planning to double their spending on the technology in 2026, accounting for about 1.7% of revenues, more than twice the increase for 2025. CEOs are rolling up their sleeves and taking the lead as their companies’ main AI decision makers, with trailblazing chief executives now spending more than eight hours per week on their own AI upskilling and investing twice as much as their counterparts in upskilling and capability-building across their organizations.

The 2025 ISG Provider Lens Advanced Analytics and AI Services reports for the U.S. find that organizations are responding to the growing complexity of their IT environments by seeking unified data foundations to support predictive analytics and increasingly ambitious AI goals. As the average software portfolios of large enterprises near 2,000 systems, data and application fragmentation has elevated the importance of consistent data integration, governance and lifecycle management. Organizations are partnering with service providers on projects that combine data modernization, analytics and AI.

Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company, has revealed nine future of work trends that chief human resource officers (CHROs) will need to address in 2026 and beyond to ensure their organization achieves its desired talent and business outcomes.

Law enforcement agencies are no longer debating whether data should inform policing decisions; the question now is whether institutions are organized to act on the data they already have. As intelligence-led models move from theory into daily operations, many state and local departments are discovering that success depends less on technology adoption than on leadership alignment, workforce design, and the ability to translate analytical insight into timely operational choices. That shift has raised new questions about how intelligence functions are staffed, funded, and governed as well as whether existing structures are suited to an environment where information arrives continuously and decisions must be made faster than ever.

Cybersecurity leaders from government, enterprise, and the security industry gathered in Baltimore last week for the FutureCon Cybersecurity Conference, outlining a threat landscape defined less by incremental change than by structural disruption.

Data from the ISG Index , which measures commercial outsourcing contracts with annual contract value (ACV) of $5 million or more, show fourth-quarter ACV for the combined global market (both managed services and cloud-based services) at a record $34.3 billion, up 16 percent versus the prior year. It was the sixth consecutive quarter the combined market posted double-digit growth year over year, averaging nearly 18 percent growth in that span. The pace of growth, however, has decelerated somewhat over the last four quarters, slowing from 21 percent year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter last year.