This year’s IDC FutureScape centers on a global shift taking place across the technology industry: the agentic pivot. Over the next few years, agentic AI is expected to enter every layer of the enterprise, transforming how businesses and industries operate.
IDC predicts that agentic automation will enhance the capabilities of more than 40% of enterprise applications by 2027, laying the foundation for next-generation AI operating models and reshaping one-third of business processes and workflows.
The tech industry has always been effective at helping businesses adopt AI. Today, 42% of enterprises already have AI agents in production, and another 40% plan to follow in the next year. But easier deployment does not guarantee effective use.
“Their ability to further use and leverage agents is limited by basically the need to vet all the growing range of options that they’re getting, to preset guardrails for orchestration and workload and data security of these growing fleets of agents, and a lot of concerns about the long-term costs of operating agents,” Rick Villars, Group Vice President, Worldwide Research at IDC, said in a recent webinar about the tech industry’s agentic future.
As IT leaders move further into the agentic future, the focus must shift from adoption to purposeful application, using agents to transform operations, partnerships, and business models.
According toIDC analysts Rick Villars, Jevin Jensen, and Lars Goranson share tech industry predictions around the agentic pivot and explore what IT leaders can do to prepare today.
The tech industry’s own agentic transformation
Innovation is no longer just about new platforms or products; it’s about how technology interacts with itself.
For enterprise customers, this means the way they engage with IT environments will change dramatically. Every device, application, and platform will soon include an agentic layer capable of self-management and adaptive interaction.
The most strategic IT leaders will take a deliberate approach, understanding where autonomy adds value, where human oversight remains essential, and how this transition affects governance, cost, and security.
“Whether it’s hardware, software packages, services contracts, this is going to be one of the most fundamental things that you need to prepare for in the next several years,” said Villars.
One visible area is in IT Ops, where automation is evolving into autonomy.
Rethinking IT operations: From automation to autonomy
Most enterprises have achieved a high degree of automation for Day 0 and Day 1 operations such as provisioning, configuration, and deployment. But the real complexity begins at Day 2, when systems are live, serving customers, and generating revenue.
This is where agentic AI changes the game.
“Unlike traditional IT automation and rules-based type systems, agentic AI can continuously learn from events, adjust strategies in real time, and escalate these issues for human judgment and decision-making. This means that future AI agents will take on more and more operations of these day-two tasks,” said Jevin Jensen, Research Vice President, Infrastructure and Operations at IDC.
By 2030, IDC expects AI agents to handle hundreds of operational processes simultaneously, significantly reducing human involvement in repetitive work. The result is greater efficiency, resilience, and scalability. Organizations that adopt this hybrid model will be able to manage complex digital ecosystems without losing control.
Watch the webinar: The Tech Industry’s Agentic Pivot
To get there, IT leaders must set clear guardrails, define escalation paths, and ensure every agent’s decisions can be audited and explained.
As internal operations become more autonomous, the same logic is reshaping the services ecosystem. The way technology is delivered and paid for is changing just as quickly.
Services become products and outcomes become the measure
The agentic pivot is also transforming how IT services are designed and delivered. For decades, service engagements were built from scratch and customized for each client. That model is rapidly evolving.
“Most IT services were delivered as projects, custom-built engagements for each client. And that model still matters, but the economics are changing now. And with AI and automation accelerating both development and delivery, enterprises want faster, more predictable results, and providers are looking for ways to scale expertise without rebuilding it each time. And that’s giving rise to what IDC refers to as service as a product,” said Lars Goranson, Vice President, Research, Worldwide Services at IDC.
For enterprise buyers, this shift changes how partners are evaluated. The key questions become:
- What reusable IP or frameworks are you bringing to the engagement?
- Have you validated them internally as “customer zero”?
- How will success be measured and shared?
By 2029, IDC predicts that 30% of global IT services will be delivered as modular, platform-based products, and 30% of contracts will tie payment to business outcomes rather than inputs.
In this new landscape, transparency builds trust, and trust becomes a differentiator. Providers that share their experiences and lessons learned will stand out as credible, accountable partners.
As automation scales across platforms and services, a new challenge emerges: managing the growing number of agents operating across the enterprise.
Managing the agent surge
As adoption accelerates, organizations face a new challenge: agent sprawl. IDC forecasts a tenfold increase in the number of agents within large enterprises and a thousandfold increase in the actions and data calls they perform.
That scale introduces both complexity and cost. Each agent consumes compute, interacts with data, and performs actions that must be tracked, governed, and optimized.
Enterprises that act now will have the advantage. That means:
- Creating a central registry of agents and their roles.
- Applying FinOps for AI principles to monitor usage, token consumption, and ROI.
- Establishing orchestration frameworks so agents collaborate rather than compete across systems.
Without this discipline, organizations risk repeating the inefficiencies of early virtualization and multi-cloud sprawl. The winners will be those that can scale autonomy while maintaining oversight.
As agents multiply, governance and trust become essential.
Governance and trust: The foundation of the agentic enterprise
As agents gain independence, governance becomes a leadership priority. The more decisions AI systems make, the more critical it becomes to ensure they are made safely, transparently, and within defined boundaries.
Agentic AI also introduces new considerations for data sovereignty and collaboration. IDC expects data clean rooms—secure environments where organizations can analyze shared data without exposing it—to become foundational to multi-enterprise AI strategies.
“Organizations that underinvest in time, money, and training of AI governance, including transparent frameworks, these guardrails, auditability, and fail-safe escalation mechanisms, will be more vulnerable to these unexpected outages,” said Jensen.
Strong governance does not end inside the enterprise. It extends to every partner in the ecosystem and is redefining what CIOs should expect from technology providers.
The new CIO–provider dynamic
In this new era, IT leaders will need more than vendors. They will need partners who can lead by example.
IDC recommends that CIOs expect three things from every technology partner:
- Transparency about how they are using agentic AI internally and what they have learned.
- Operational guardrails for cost, data, and security across multi-agent systems.
- Human alignment, with a clear commitment to using AI to amplify human capability.
Partnerships built on these principles will reduce risk and accelerate innovation, helping organizations learn faster and execute with confidence.
Navigating the agentic future
Agentic AI is redefining how software is built, how services are delivered, and how humans and machines collaborate.
For IT leaders, success will require both boldness and balance:
- Boldness to reimagine how work gets done.
- Balance to govern what is automated, protect what is human, and demand accountability from partners.
Those who approach the agentic pivot with transparency, trust, and financial discipline will turn disruption into direction and set the pace for the next era of enterprise technology leadership.
Learn more about the trends shaping the tech industry’s agentic pivot in the IDC FutureScape 2026: The Agentic Pivot in the Tech Industry webinar.
