Fifty percent of organizations are already deploying AI agents in production across multiple business areas. Another 27% have them running in at least one. IDC’s latest Market Glance on agentic AI ecosystems maps the landscape that is making this shift possible. The picture it reveals is both more structured and more dynamic than many organizations currently appreciate.
A market built in layers
Think of the enterprise agentic AI market ecosystem as three interlocking layers. At the surface, there are agents themselves: specialized standalone agents built for specific domains, and in-application agents embedded directly inside the software your teams already use. These agents don’t need an external orchestration layer — they work within the host application’s environment, using its data and functionality to act autonomously on behalf of users.
Beneath that sits a rich set of creation and operation technologies. This is where organizations build, deploy, monitor, and manage agents throughout their full life cycle. It includes multiagent orchestration frameworks, agent discovery and inventory tools (so you know what you’ve deployed and where), and the data foundations (vector databases, knowledge graphs, real-time pipelines) that give agents the contextual grounding they need to work effectively.
Underpinning everything are the execution foundations: cloud and on-premises infrastructure, AI silicon from specialized semiconductor providers, and a growing set of security capabilities including AI security posture management, runtime policy enforcement, and identity and access management for agents. As organizations seek greater control over where and how AI runs, driven by privacy, regulatory and sovereignty concerns, architectural diversity in this layer is accelerating fast.
77% of organizations already have AI agents running in production. The question is no longer whether to deploy. It’s how to navigate what comes next. Read the report.
The convergence you need to understand
What’s making this market particularly dynamic right now is convergence. Enterprise software platform vendors and application providers are racing up the value stack, embedding agentic capabilities directly into their products. At the same time, professional services providers and systems integrators are moving in the opposite direction: building proprietary, asset-based delivery models anchored in the same underlying technologies.
The result is that buyers face a highly dynamic market space. IDC’s research shows organizations are evenly split between build and buy strategies, and most expect to source agents from multiple vendors simultaneously. That’s pragmatism. The agentic AI market is too young and too fast-moving for anyone to bet on a single supplier.
Your next move
Understanding where your organization sits in this ecosystem, and where your partners and competitors sit, is no longer optional. Agentic AI’s promise is the digitization of labor at scale. The organizations that navigate this landscape with confidence will be the ones that mapped it first.
IDC’s Market Glance gives business executives, product managers, and analyst relations professionals the structured view they need to assess opportunities, evaluate partnerships, and make the right decisions about where to place their bets. The ecosystem is moving quickly. Navigate your next move with the evidence to back it up.