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Interested in account-based marketing? Be sure to check out IDC’s on-demand webinar The Company is the Key: How Account-Level Intelligence Helps You Gain Share.

Why Competitors Matter to Your Account-Based Marketing Effort

Account-based marketing (“ABM”) is a strategic B2B marketing approach that targets a single company, division, or individual within a company. As such, it deploys far more targeted tactics than general marketing, designing campaigns around names and emails, individualized value propositions, and highly specific personas.

If your firm is engaged in ABM, it’s guaranteed your competitors are as well. This means you need to know what they are saying, how they are positioning themselves, and how they are engaging their prospects and clients so you can better align your own efforts.

Getting started by identifying the competitors you need to analyze can be a formidable task in crowded IT markets. Granted, for some technology areas, the number of true players is small enough that everyone knows who they are. For instance, in the Canadian market for notebooks, five manufacturers hold more than 85% of the market value.

 Identify Key Competitors In Busy IT Markets

For many IT markets, however, the list of competitors is long. For instance, in the U.K., IDC tracks more than 100 players in the market for financial applications. While the top 10 control around 58% of the market, the next 10 control less than 15%, leaving lots of room for ambitious software houses.

In China, the market for human capital management software is wide open, with the largest supplier holding less than 10% of the market. In the U.S., the market for custom application development is both enormous and fragmented, with the top 10 players accounting for only one-third of the value. In all three markets, there are lots of fast-growing players aiming to break into the top 10.

Figure 1: Market Analysis Example

To do ABM right, you need to identify the largest players and the fastest growing players both at the top of the market and in your revenue range. You then analyze their strategy and tactics for best practices and pitfalls.

* Only one supplier grew; the other was simply less negative.
** There are only 3 vendors in the top 11-20. Only one supplier grew; the other was simply less negative.

Source: IDC, 2023

Focus Attention on Priority Competitors

With so many tech suppliers, it can be hard to know on which of your competitors to focus your analysis. This is where market data comes in. IDC believes there are three primary ways you can use data to identify competitors worth your scrutiny:

Competitors Outperforming the Market: While you will already be aware of your largest competitors, it can be extremely useful to rank them by share. This reveals who has the most visibility and the messaging and approach you’ll need to position yourself against. You should also rank them by growth, as this is a strong indicator of the effectiveness of their go-to-market strategy, including ABM. For instance, in the U.K. market for financial applications, only two of the top 5 gained share in 2022. The rest lost share.
Fast Growing Competitors In or Near the Top 10: IT suppliers that are rapidly gaining share are doing something right. For smaller companies, a good year can give the illusion of exceptional growth. IDC therefore recommends looking at the fastest-growing suppliers in the top 20–30 (depending on the market), as these organizations are usually large enough to be dangerous. Returning to the U.K. market for financial applications, half of the top 20 software providers expanded much faster than the market; it’d be a good idea to catalog their ABM strategy and tactics for best practices.
Fast Growing Competitors In Your Revenue Range: If you are among the top performing tech suppliers or a fast-growing company nearing the top 10 or 20, the two points above have you covered. But if you are further down the list, identifying which firms in your revenue range are growing fast tells you who to watch out for — and perhaps who to emulate when it comes to ABM. In Germany, IDC tracks around 70 firms trying to steal share from SAP in the supply chain management space. In 2022, in the $2–5 million revenue range, five beat the market by significant margins. If you were in that range, these five would be worth examination.

In short, the right data can help you quickly identify which of your competitors to analyze for ABM best practices and the positioning and messaging to set yourself apart.

IDC Company Lens provided the data for this post.

Get Started With ABM Resources and IDC Data

ABM planning can be a time consuming and challenging process to get right, especially the first time. To help organize your thinking and make key decisions you can use this account-based marketing starter guide. This step-by-step guide can help you bring together marketing and sales teams to develop a cohesive ABM campaign by asking the right questions and identifying the necessary insights for planning.

Whether you are approaching ABM from the perspective of marketing or sales—or through indirect or direct business channels—in today’s economic climate, objective insight and expert advice about buyers, partners, and competitors is vital to inform and accelerate decision making, campaign production, and account planning cycles. IDC Data & Analytics offer a broad array of solutions which detail company and ecosystem dynamics for the global tech market and that matter most to answering critical ABM planning and execution questions.

To get in contact with us to book a demo, please reach out here.

Wall Street’s top regulator has adopted new cybersecurity rules that require companies to disclose a material cyber breach within four days of determining that the breach is material. The 96-hour requirement has been on the table for months, but the materiality qualifier puts a critical onus on boards and CISOs to get specific on their cyber-risk tolerance.

Until now, breach notification has been driven primarily by regulations or industry rules requiring notification “without unreasonable delay.” That afforded a fair amount of bandwidth within which to understand and assess a situation and then determine the most appropriate path forward. The new SEC rules raise the bar for publicly traded companies, demanding that they not only know that an incident has occurred but also requiring boards to quickly get fact-based in the context of materiality.

Any situation where shareholders would consider the breach important, or where there is significant potential impact on the company’s financial position, operations, customer relationships, or reputation would clearly be material. But, often, data breaches or other cyber incidents are more nuanced. For example, a data breach that impacts a small number of customers or a denial of service (DoS) that impacts a small location and that is quickly remediated might not be considered material for SEC reporting purposes.

In 2022, for example, there were an estimated 490 million ransomware attacks, and Microsoft said that it mitigated an average of 1,435 DoS attacks a day; most of those incidents would probably not meet a standard of materiality. While we always must be beyond reproach on reporting, we should not fall into the trap of launching a disclosure cycle only to find out that the incident was not, in fact, material.

Here are best practices to follow to ensure compliance with the new SEC rule.

Consider Materiality as a New and Critical Element of Cyber Oversight

The interpretation of materiality should be provided by the board, in the form of clear risk tolerance guidelines. Defining risk tolerance is a normal practice at the board level; clearly define the triggers that would push an incident into the SEC four-day window by using scenario-based analysis, including:

Customer data: If the breach impact is known, contained, and minimal, is it material?
Operational impact: If a subset of operations is impacted, and impacts can be contained and recovered, is it material?
Reputational risk: If a disclosure occurred where there was a small impact and the awareness and response are beyond reproach, is that material?

Understand How the Board of Directors Interprets ‘Materiality’

Neither the CISO nor the technology team should be responsible for determining or interpreting materiality. What matters under the new SEC rules is very much subject to interpretation, so the team needs to know in advance how the board wants “materiality” to be interpreted.

In addition, be mindful of opportunities to proactively stay within approved risk tolerance. For example, notification is generally not required for encrypted data, so take advantage of data encryption as it continues to be your best defense. If you have not already encrypted personally sensitive information, consider taking action to encrypt the data that is most exposed from the board’s risk tolerance perspective.

Ensure that You Have the Data to Assess, Monitor, and Report in the Context of the Approved Risk Tolerance

Plan around the defined risk tolerance to know exactly how to bring together the necessary data to monitor and report. Then build the capability to produce a clear, concise, and meaningful report that could be used for management and the board in an incident situation. Develop communications templates in advance for use if you have an incident, including models for reporting on progress and incident closure with a consistent notification and reporting cadence. Understand how you would report to each of the risk tolerance elements and exercise the data sources to know how those boundary conditions will be tested and reported on.

The new SEC rules raise the risk that the board will be distracted by the clock in the heat of a cyber incident. Time pressures make it easy to say too much or to elaborate beyond what is required. By planning the critical data strategy beforehand and using templated communications to share the right message, you can ensure that nothing is missed but the situation is not exacerbated by oversharing.

We look forward to learning more as the SEC rules are absorbed, and sharpening our thoughts and guidance as more details emerge.

Enterprise leaders now see digital technology and capabilities as foundational to innovate and succeed in the digital business era. However, as enterprises continue to navigate economic uncertainty, we are seeing a greater emphasis on achieving clear business outcomes from technology spending.

The growing complexity and pervasiveness of technology within enterprises is also driving expectations for faster time to value. As a result, IDC sees a greater need for clarity on prioritizing technology investments, resource allocation and insight into achieving business outcomes.

These issues are far from only being affiliated with IT; they now extend upward into the remit of the C-suite and impact all functional areas; 44% of CEOs have told IDC they need help with their digital business strategies. Moreover, lack of skills both within the C-suite and across the organization remains a key hurdle to achieving business outcomes from their digital initiatives.

Unveiling IDC’s FoX Scorecard Unique Value Proposition

One of the tools IDC  believes will be instrumental in enabling business and IT leaders to navigate these obstacles is the IDC Future of “X” (FoX) Scorecard. The FoX Scorecard provides IDC clients with proprietary data and research to:

Understand Future Enterprise capabilities and their correlation to business outcomes.
Compare performance relative to peers and leading enterprises.
Identify areas for resource and process optimization and investment.
Implement recommendations from best-in-class organizations.

The FoX Scorecard methodology brings together the insights from our worldwide FoX analysts who have a deep understanding of the capabilities required to become a Future Enterprise. With the analysis expertise from IDC’s quantitative survey team:

The FoX research framework explains the processes, organizational structures, and enabling technologies that empower enterprises to achieve their top business goals.
The FoX Scorecard survey data identifies the investments, readiness, and performance across diverse enterprises across the globe.

For example, IDC’s Future of Work Agenda research reveals that organizations are struggling to implement the right balance of on-site and flexible work practices, understand what the best practices are to maintain company culture and how automation can make employees more productive.

Learn from Leading Organizations

The recently published IDC Future of Work Scorecard compares which approaches and technology deployments differentiate “Leading” enterprises from their peers. For example, best practices in hardware, software and services investment, driving increased operational efficiency, improved employee productivity and cost savings. These improvements arise not simply because of a single investment or deployment.  They occur across key areas of work augmentation that in turn have an impact on work culture as it evolves in office, remotely and in spaces in between. At the most advanced level, enterprises that lead the culture, space, and augmentation pillars quickly embrace work transformation and new ways of working.

IDC’s analysis reveals that only 11% of worldwide enterprises are at the “Leading” stage. KPIs such as employee and customer satisfaction, quality scores, improved skills-levels, innovation and task-based metrics are important to these Leading enterprises. The Scorecard shows the stark measurable differences in positive business outcomes achieved by Leading organizations compared to all others – especially those that are nascent in their work transformation journeys. The gap between the Nascent and Leading enterprises points to areas of improvement.

Another example comes from IDC’s Future of Connectedness agenda program. The Future of Connectedness Scorecard analysis reveals that just 8% of enterprises are at the Leading stage, highlighting the connectivity technology areas of investment that most enterprises need to accelerate innovation. The insights from this Scorecard identify areas for optimization and investment across three capabilities: (1) Connectivity Transformation, (2) Services Enablement, and (3) Contextual Experiences. The results show the largest gap between the Nascent and Leading enterprises today is in their ability to use real-time insights to improve business outcomes.

Relevance to the Most Pressing C-Suite Agenda Items

Our 2023 Global CEO survey revealed that economic pressures top the list of risks to organizations. This underscores the need to measure the outcomes from any business investments, including technologies, services, and new hires. The most successful enterprises in the digital business era will be intentional about their investments. Using a fact-based approach to decision-making is what IDC FoX Scorecards are designed to offer.

The connection to business outcomes is what really makes the Scorecard methodology so relevant in today’s economic climate. IDC has built a standard approach to measuring business value across all our research domains. Scorecards are being rolled out across the following IDC research programs this year:

Future of Operations
Future of Trust
Future of Customer Experience
Future of Enterprise Intelligence
Future of Connectedness
Future of Industry Ecosystems
Future of Digital Infrastructure
Future of Work
Worldwide Digital Business Strategies

Technology Suppliers are Part of the Equation

While the FoX Scorecards are designed to help end-user organizations, IDC believes that success will come when enterprises work closely with their trusted technology and service providers to advance their capabilities. The ongoing challenges facing the C-suite create an opportunity for suppliers to deliver targeted solutions and services to help enterprises drive business outcomes.

In an increasingly crowded and competitive tech industry, we expect the winning tech companies and services firms to finely tune their offerings and engagement model to empower enterprise customers to achieve business outcomes. Becoming a trusted advisor means being engaged with customers, helping C-suite and group leaders identify strengths and shortcomings, and demonstrating the benefits of improvement from accelerated technology investment.  

Ultimately, when the economic picture begins to turn more universally positive, enterprise leaders will remember and reward the vendors that were there to help them during challenging times.

Summary: If You Don’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It

During this period of economic uncertainty, a time when inflation is high, geopolitical conflict threatens supply chains, and qualified workers are in short supply, enterprise buyers are seeking faster time to value and quantifiable business outcomes from their tech investments. IDC FoX Scorecards will serve as valuable tools for IT and business leaders, aiding them in prioritizing and optimizing technologies and capabilities that can maximize business outcomes. And for IT suppliers, FoX Scorecards will be instrumental in demonstrating and measuring the value of their technology solutions.

In large, complex IT organizations, there is a need for effective management of financial resources to support the organization’s IT initiatives. One crucial question in this management is whether there is an IT finance function embedded within the IT organization or whether it is centralized under the corporate Finance department. IDC sees the question, not infrequently, from IT organizations where Finance is arguing for assuming these staff in the interest of efficiency.

Based on IDC experience with large, complex, client IT organizations, we have observed that a majority of these organizations have embedded financial staff within their IT organizations. This embedding is crucial for efficiently and effectively rolling data up to a central finance department (FIN) while retaining an understanding of complex technical subjects. Below are some reasons our clients choose to retain financial functions within their IT organization:

Retention of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): IT staff who specialize in finance possess valuable expertise in both technology and financial processes. These individuals have acquired deep knowledge of the organization’s technology requirements, IT finance, and business requirements. When embedded staff are moved outside of IT to Finance, they rapidly lose key skills (particularly understanding the technologies) and connection to IT projects, which then necessitates additional work or staffing by IT BRMs to address the new gap. This loses any theoretical efficiencies or cost savings. By keeping specialized finance staff embedded in IT, the organization ensures the retention of critical knowledge and experience, promoting efficient collaboration and problem-solving.

Efficient Translation of IT Concepts: Translating complex IT concepts to finance professionals can be a time-consuming process. Relocating embedded finance IT staff to a central FIN department risks introducing communication gaps that impedes understanding and hinders decision-making. Keeping embedded IT finance staff ensures more seamless communication and collaboration, enabling efficient interpretation of technical jargon and facilitating effective alignment between IT and finance.

Cloud Technology Integration: The shift towards cloud computing represents a significant transformation for organizations, particularly in terms of financial management. The cloud introduces new financial considerations, such as subscription-based models, pay-as-you-go structures, and cost optimization strategies. It is crucial for finance professionals to have a strong understanding of IT and cloud technologies to effectively manage and optimize financial resources. By retaining finance staff within IT, the organization ensures that financial expertise is readily available to navigate the complexities of cloud adoption and effectively manage the associated financial implications.

Mitigation of Inefficiencies: Centralizing the finance function may introduce inefficiencies in the IT organization. With finance staff separated from IT, decision-making processes, financial planning, and budget allocation may become disjointed and convoluted. By keeping finance staff embedded within IT, the organization fosters a cohesive and streamlined approach to financial management, ensuring alignment between business goals, technology investments, and financial strategies.

Based on IDC experience with large complex client IT organizations, a majority of them retain dedicated technology-finance staff within their IT organizations. This is a recognition that organizations need to preserve critical subject matter expertise that enables efficient translation of IT concepts, facilitates the integration of cloud technologies, and mitigates potential inefficiencies. This approach promotes effective collaboration, informed decision-making, and optimized financial management within the IT organization.

Interested in learning more? Click the button below for more content from our CIO Executive Council.

In the age of the digital buyer, most companies that prioritize customer experience face the ongoing challenge of meeting ever-evolving expectations, emotional needs, and practical requirements. This is where generative AI technology comes into play. Generative AI is a powerful tool capable of generating vast amounts of content, uncovering information based on natural language prompts, and bringing unique ideas to fruition.

While generative AI tools excel in summarizing and responding swiftly, they lack the essential human element of empathy that defines a truly engaging experience.

Instead of displacing knowledge workers and content writers, vendors are leveraging generative AI to enhance their capabilities.

Marci Maddox – Research Vice President, Digital Experience Strategies

Active Learning: Enabling Empathy at Scale in Generative AI

For most humans, the ability to demonstrate cognitive empathy is intuitive during in-person interactions. They continuously listen, learn, seek new knowledge, and refresh their understanding based on the information acquired during and after each interaction. This dynamic cycle enables them to intelligently engage with others and foster meaningful connections.

To be perceived as empathetic, one of the core capabilities that enterprises must develop is the ability to actively learn about their customers so that they can communicate and engage in an intelligent manner that best resonates with customers.
– Future of Customer Experience framework, IDC

This is a yet untapped opportunity for generative AI. Once the tool learns to recognize the sentiment of a customer’s inquiry and respond in an appropriate, empathetic way, improved customer experience becomes scalable.

One way to apply active learning to the content that is created by generative AI is to adjust the model’s underlying customer data inputs in real time so that the returned results are the most relevant at that moment in time. Language learning models (LLMs) in generative AI shouldn’t rely solely on static information.

Instead, they should incorporate a range of data signals, responses, transactions, and other customer data to continually train for future content requests. By leveraging insights gained from each interaction, the precision of personalization increases, leading to better outcomes for the business.

Harnessing Generative AI: Implications for the Enterprise

AI-based deep learning capabilities are particularly suited for situations where organizations strive to deliver an enhanced customer experience but face limitations in scaling their resources effectively.

Marketing teams have long struggled to keep up with the increasing demand for content creation across multiple channels while meeting personalized expectations. This challenge is compounded by the difficulty of responding to customers in real-time with relevant and valuable content.

As a result, content authors often feel overwhelmed and time constrained. Automation has demonstrated its potential in enabling marketers to keep pace with the digital era’s fast-paced environment. However, there is still a significant apprehension among content teams regarding the potential replacement of their role by generative AI. Bridging this gap remains a significant challenge.

Generative AI and the Empathetic Content Life Cycle

The integration of generative AI in applications is poised to revolutionize the life cycle of persuasive text and media-rich content. Instead of displacing knowledge workers and content writers, vendors are leveraging generative AI to enhance their capabilities.

While AI-powered content creation and recommendation technologies have existed for some time, the introduction of ChatGPT, with its user-friendly prompt-response system, quickly captured the attention of one million users within its initial five days. Since then, it has gained further momentum as an embedded prompt response in various content-related technologies.

Generative AI finds widespread application throughout the content life cycle, including in the following common use cases:

Produce unique personalized content
Faster branded content creation
Improved content quality
Better content discovery
Unified content management

Authenticity of Gen AI-created content

Trust and security regarding the data used and generated by generative AI technology are a top concern for many enterprise leaders.

IDC sees an opportunity for generative AI vendors to apply objectivity to the output by leveraging a portfolio of prior approved assets and training the AI model to score the results based on trusted source elements and business logic tied to the derived assets.

Utilizing untrusted data sources in generative AI poses certain risks and challenges. These sources may lack accuracy, appropriateness for commercial use, or compliance with legal requirements, and could potentially introduce bias or include copyrighted content that necessitates legal approval for usage.

Additionally, there may be undiscovered flaws or faulty logic in these data sources. Consequently, it is crucial for generative AI projects in marketing to establish clear and explicit guardrails to govern the selection and usage of assets in training the learning models.

Advice for Emerging Tech Vendors

Don’t use generative AI as a replacement for existing content teams.
Train LLMs to incorporate customer context, e.g. sentiment, behavior signals, and intent.
Take time to assess the repetitive content tasks that have become commonplace in the course of content management tasks.
Review the implications of generative AI on the authenticity and tracking of content sources.

If your organization is interested in partnering with IDC to better understand how Generative AI will impact the markets most critical to your success contact us.

We also recommend you take advantage of these recent resources from our thought leaders and tech market experts:

IDC Webinar: Unlocking Business Success With Generative AI

IDC Blog: No Turning Back: AI Everywhere Causes a Seminal Shift in the Tech Market

IDC eBook: The Tech Vendor’s Guide To Embracing Responsible Generative AI

IDC Research: Future of Customer Experience Incorporates Generative AI into the Persuasive Content Supply Chain

Strike the Right Balance of Direct and Indirect Channels To Maximize Potential in North America

As the region with the largest share of global tech spend, North America—including the United States and Canada—is a critical geo for tech vendors to nail down. Competing in this region means you must operate at economies of scale to afford competitive price points and offer solutions that meet needs both broad and niche. With nearly 20 cents of every global dollar spent on tech moving through North America’s indirect channels, achieving and maintaining desired performance levels here requires a balance of vendor-direct and ecosystem sales.  

Looking at the 2022 calendar year, of the more than USD $2.9 trillion spent on technology in North America, over 40% was facilitated through indirect channels including dealers and VARs, retailers/e-tailers, service providers, system integrators, and distributors. In the three years from 2020 – 2022, indirect channels revenues also grew at a faster CAGR than direct channels.

While IDC predicts a slight reversal in this growth rate trend, particularly as the PC market goes through a difficult year, it is still expected that more than USD $578 billion in North American tech spending will move through indirect channels in 2023, compared to USD $874 billion in direct business. Therefore, vendors must avoid the temptation to over-rotate on direct channels at the expense of indirect routes-to-market. In fact, it is expected that the slowing growth rate will drive increased competition within indirect markets as vendors take offensive and protective measures to ensure nominal financial metrics are reached and growth is maintained. The most successful tech businesses will be those that master both channels in their North American play.

Use the Classic 4 Ps of Marketing To Frame Your Go-To-Market Roadmap for North America

To set and achieve realistic go-to-market goals for their North American businesses, tech vendors must start with clear market understanding. The degree to which vendors can accurately identify, track, and meet market demands, set baselines against which to measure performance, and predict buyer and market responses relative to competitors, will determine the quality of market insight decision-makers have at their disposal. However, not all go-to-market decision-making domains are created equal – some, like the 4 Ps of marketing, have a greater impact than others.

First proposed by Edmund Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book “Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach” and popularized by professors like Philip Kotler of the Kellogg School of Management in the decades since, the “4 Ps” presents a mix of elements for consideration when developing go-to-market plans. This generally agreed upon model looks comprehensively at the four domains contained within, including:

Product
Price
Place
Promotion

The product domain considers the total value proposition offered to both those buying and those consuming the solutions in question. Here, vendors must look beyond the sum of their components and think about the whole benefit they deliver – from technology, services, and partnerships to pre- and post-sales consulting, engineering, and support and other ancillary considerations, like financial, process, and personal gains and pain relievers.

The price domain considers the amount of money, time, and effort required by the customer to effectively gain the benefits promised by the product. By reflecting upon not just the selling price and available pricing models, but the total cost of ownership and the people, process, and technology required to support the product on an ongoing basis, vendors can better justify their own price upfront, and become a strategic partner for customers in the long run.

The place domain considers the channels and formats in which the customer can access the benefits of product. Within their often vast and complex technology ecosystems, vendors must build out reliable supply and value chains across various routes-to-market to meet the expectations of modern tech customers. This long-tail marketing approach goes further than internal competencies to consider synergistic value offered through a robust partnership model.  

The promotion domain considers all factors related to creating and maintaining a products’ “position” in the minds of customers – i.e., the unique standing or reputation one vendor occupies relative to competitors in the same market. In this domain, vendors need to think through the full experience they deliver across the entire buyer journey as customers become aware of, show interest in, drive sales for, and use a product, including their messaging, communications, events, and product-led strategies.

Modern incarnations of the 4 Ps have expanded the model, breaking down certain domains to provide a more granular decision-making model. Whether the classic marketing mix is followed, or an expanded version, the goal is the same – to develop a plan that comprehensively addresses all relevant considerations. Smart vendors will do this early and often in their process, while those less experienced vendors will find themselves with the implications of other vendors’ decisions thrust upon them.

Even though the 4 P marketing mix model is straight-forward, knowing which considerations are relevant and performing proper assessments can be anything but. To help, the IDC Data & Analytics team has developed a guide to assessing the 4 Ps of marketing for technology vendors. Read on to learn more about this template and how you can access it for free.

Give Your GTM Roadmap for North America a North Star with Insights from IDC

To get the most out of their North American play, tech suppliers must look beyond internal capabilities and work with other vendors and providers in the greater tech supply ecosystem. Without a partnership model, vendors risk losing out on a significant portion of the market—the indirect channel accounts for an average of over 40% of tech sales in North America.

Historically, indirect tech channels tend to grow faster than direct-to-buyer channels. However, recent market shifts have seen a slight reversal in this trend begin to emerge. Even if this is a temporary phenomenon, it could be enough pressure to disrupt the order of things in North America for years to come. Regardless of their ecosystem orientation, vendors and providers must pay attention to both sides of the tech spending coin to properly contextualize and strategize for their businesses.

Setting and achieving realistic goals starts with accurate market understanding. Tech suppliers must give themselves a clear baseline against which to measure performance, an understanding of what is possible given various market conditions, and an ability to predict likely buyer and competitor behaviours for both direct and indirect channels. Once this is confidently assessed, effective go-to-market actions for both channels can be planned across each of the classic “4 Ps” of marketing – product, price, place, and promotion.

To make it easy, IDC is giving away a go-to-market research and strategy template specifically designed for strategists within corporate, product, channels, marketing, and sales strategy teams for technology suppliers. Use this template to guide your high-level North American analysis and serve as an input to your strategic plans. To access the form, please fill-out the form available on this page.

Need a little inspiration? Read the Eaton customer success story to find out how the power management giant leverages data from IDC’s North America Distribution Tracker product to inform activities ranging from emergent trend analysis and market sizing to price skimming and acquisition evaluations. To get instant access to the story, please visit this page.

You can also learn more about IDC’s flagship market intelligence products that include coverage for North America by visiting our product pages, reading overview documents, and scheduling live demos with analysts and experts through our Data & Analytics site.

For more information on IDC’s North America Distribution Tracker, please visit this page.

For more information on IDC’s Black Book solutions coverage in North America, you can get started here.

IDC believes that the tech industry is at a seminal moment. Never have we seen a technology emerge with this much executive support, clearly defined business outcomes, and rapid adoption. In eight short months, Generative AI has simultaneously captured the attention, imagination, and concern of most tech and business leaders across the world. However, as Generative AI becomes front and center of conversations in the technology industry and beyond, the underlying question being asked by the market is: how do organizations accelerate their journey to deliver business value?

…the ambiguities over the authorship and copyright of AI-generated content are creating question marks around intellectual property management and ownership. All these risks need to be incorporated into a well-orchestrated trust and oversight program to ensure that these technologies can be deployed in a sustainable manner.

Philip Carter – Group Vice President, Worldwide Thought Leadership Research

To help answer this question, IDC has developed a framework highlighting the path to business impact. This framework helps organizations work through the key activities that need to be put in place, provides an explanation of the core technologies required, and proposes how organizations should be thinking about the new use cases to accelerate their own path to business impact for Generative AI technologies.

Key Activities

Before any of the core technologies are explored, IDC believes that the following set of key activities needs to be put in place:

A Responsible AI Policy that includes defined principles around fairness, transparency and accountability relating to the data that is being used to train models as well as the usage of the results. This activity should also include a methodology to provide explainability of any generative AI model output with clear transparency on roles and responsibilities of developers, users and any stakeholder involved with these initiatives.
Strategy and Roadmap with a set of defined and prioritized use cases to align the organization on the key areas that will most likely deliver the maximum business impact in the short, medium and longer term.
Intelligence Architecture to manage the lifecycle and governance of data, models and business context for every use case. This should also include protocols around data privacy, security, intellectual property (IP) protection.
Reskilling and Training to create a skills map for core AI technologies, adjacent AI tech as well as broader tech and business capabilities to deploy Generative AI at scale across the organization.  This activity should also include a training program personalized for key roles and an organizational readiness assessment to ensure that a change management program is incorporated.

Core Technologies

Once the foundational activities are in place, it is critical to develop a clear understanding of the core Generative AI technologies. At the center of this are the generative foundation models – including the well-known large language models (LLMs). The ability for these models to be trained on extraordinarily large amounts of data (primarily semi-structured and unstructured content) and then generate new content based on previously created data in response to prompts is the real game changer in the market. And we are not just talking about text (which is the basis for ChatGPT); it’s also about generating and managing images, videos, structures (e.g. DNA), audio and software code. The model lifecycle including ingesting, training, tuning, inferring, and running these models is hugely important, and will determine their quality over time. From the changing dynamics in the platforms and infrastructure down to the shift from CPUs to GPUs at the semiconductor level really highlight how this transformative set of technologies is impacting every part of the technology stack. The way these models are being infused in custom applications, generic enterprise applications, and other software development platforms are critical ‘sub-paths’ to impact that also need to be explored.

The Emerging Use Cases

IDC defines a use case as a business funded initiative enabled by technology that delivers a measurable outcome. There are three broad types of Generative AI use cases that need to be assessed:

Industry-specific – these use cases will generally require more custom work (and in some cases may even require building your own generative AI model). Examples include generative drug discovery in life sciences, or generative material design for manufacturing.
Business Function – these use cases will tend to integrate a model (or multiple models) with corporate data for a specific function (e.g. marketing, sales, procurement etc).  Many organizations are testing these types of use cases but are concerned about IP leakage and data governance.
Productivity – these are basic use cases such as summarizing a report, generating a job description or code generation in Java. This functionality is being infused into existing applications (E.g. Co-Pilot for Microsoft, or Duet AI for Google).

There are a mix of internal and externally facing use cases – each with their own level of potential risk and business impact which needs to be incorporated into a use case prioritization framework.

Trust & Oversight

Finally, there are numerous well-founded concerns around ethics, regulatory compliance, and governance associated with generative AI.  Due to its ability to generate fake code, data and images closely resembling the real thing, generative AI is likely to increase identity theft, fraud, and counterfeiting cases. The models are also vulnerable and will likely be a source of attack and manipulation and often generate hallucinations. Additionally, the ambiguities over the authorship and copyright of AI-generated content are creating question marks around intellectual property management and ownership. All these risks need to be incorporated into a well-orchestrated trust and oversight program to ensure that these technologies can be deployed in a sustainable manner.

As the industry moves forward with this fundamental transition, IDC believes that every CEO will need to have an AI strategy – and generative AI is the trigger. It is best to get started quickly; we are hopeful that this framework will help every organization develop their own ‘path to impact’.

If your organization is interested in partnering with IDC to better understand how Generative AI will impact the markets most critical to your success contact us.

We also recommend you take advantage of these recent resources from our thought leaders and tech market experts:

IDC Webinar: Unlocking Business Success With Generative AI

IDC Blog: Generative AI: Mitigating Data Security and Privacy Risks

IDC eBook: Unlocking the Power of Generative AI

IDC Blog: Can ChatGPT Transform the Customer Experience?

IDC Blog: No Turning Back: AI Everywhere Causes a Seminal Shift in the Tech Market