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This is the final post in Meet IDC Quanta, a short series showing what the product actually does, starting with the portal, then your inbox, and now when you’re already working in Claude.

Imagine you’re the account executive on a procurement software deal, and leadership on the buyer’s side just reached out: they want twenty minutes before the broader vendor review starts. Real conversation. No marketing slide deck, no long product tour. They’ll expect you to know their IT spending trajectory, where the competitive field is moving, and why now is the moment to act.

A fast reply won’t cut it here. You need an actual plan, reports pulled, trackers cross-referenced, findings stitched together. You could do that by hand, or you could open the AI tool sitting in front of you and ask it to build the whole thing.

One tool, every surface you’re already in

Most people assume IDC Quanta is a portal you visit. It’s actually a fabric: the same IDC intelligence, methodology, and research base, running everywhere you work. That’s Claude Chat, Cowork, and Code. It’s Claude for Chrome and the Microsoft Office add-ins, too. The deepest workflow integration lives in Cowork, which is where both scenarios below happen. One connection, live through Claude’s MCP integration (the open standard that lets Claude connect directly to outside data sources), with an IDC skill built in to handle the jobs sellers and buyers actually run.

You don’t switch tools to get IDC data into your work. You just ask.

Ask for the plan

Open Cowork and type it straight to Claude:

Build an account plan for a call with <your target account’s> procurement team, grounded in IDC’s data on their IT spending trajectory, the competitive landscape for procurement software, and any buying signals worth flagging.

Claude Cowork meets IDC Quanta MCP connector 1

Claude comes back with a couple of quick multiple-choice questions, like which vertical cut or which time horizon. Pick your answers, and it gets to work. A few minutes later, a fully structured account plan is sitting in a Word document. Spending trends are mapped out. Competitive positioning gets a clear read. Buying signals surface where they matter. The kind of document that used to take an analyst half a day now takes the length of your coffee.

Claude Cowork results from IDC Quanta Query

Watch it show its work

Here’s the part that actually matters. Open the document and you’ll notice something most AI tools never bother to do: it tells you which parts came from where. IDC-sourced data sits clearly apart from what Claude reasoned on top of it. Nothing blends together into an unlabeled wall of confident-sounding text.

That distinction is the whole point. When your VP asks where a number came from, you’re not guessing. You can point to the line and say exactly what it is: IDC research, or Claude’s synthesis. The document already told you.

IDC’s 2025 Worldwide C-Suite Tech Survey found that excessive time spent on forecasting and reporting ranks among sales leaders’ top three operational pain points (IDC #US54377226, March 2026). A sourced, labeled account plan is built to cut exactly that kind of drag.

Same intelligence, the other side of the table

Now flip seats. You’re the buyer, evaluating procurement software vendors, and you need an independent shortlist, not a vendor’s pitch deck dressed up as analysis.

Same tool, same Cowork window. Ask Claude:

Give me a shortlist of the top three options based on IDC’s worldwide procurement applications research, and generate an Excel evaluation scorecard I can share with my team.

Claude builds the scorecard from the same shortlist of the three vendors actually leading the field, sourced from IDC’s Worldwide Procurement Applications Market Shares, 2025 (IDC #US53723426, June 2026). The IDC-grounded data and Claude’s analysis are labeled separately again. Your team sees exactly what’s evidence and what’s reasoning, no matter which side of the deal they’re sitting on.

Everything You Need, in the Tab You’re Already In

Our first blog showed you a portal built for hard questions with real citations. Our second blog put that same intelligence in your inbox. This closes the series on the biggest move yet: IDC Quanta living inside the tools you use, Claude included, where the work happens. A seller and a buyer can each walk into the same negotiation better prepared, neither one leaving the screen in front of them.

If you’re already using Claude, the IDC Quanta connector is one prompt away. If you’re not yet a customer, book a demo and bring the account you’re working right now.

Ryan Smith - Content Marketing Director - IDC

Ryan Smith is the Director of Content Marketing at IDC, where he leads brand-level content and social media strategy, aligning research insights with compelling storytelling to engage technology decision-makers. With a background in both IT and marketing, Ryan brings a unique blend of technical understanding and creative strategy to his work. He’s also a seasoned storyteller, speaker, and podcast host who believes the right message, told the right way, can drive both trust and transformation.

At the IDC Quanta launch webinar, Joe Bradley, CTO at IDC, made the case for why trusting an AI-powered answer shouldn’t require faith; it should require an architecture you can actually inspect. You’ve heard “AI-powered” enough times this year that a healthy dose of skepticism is the right response. Fair. So instead of asking you to trust that IDC Quanta gets its answers right, here’s what Bradley says is actually happening under the hood when it does.

Bradley breaks it down into two layers. The first is an MCP server: essentially a pipe that gives Claude direct access to IDC’s data, the trackers, the forecasts, the market figures. It also carries instructions for how that data is structured and how to use it. The second is IDC’s own Claude plugin, which goes further, Bradley explains. It shapes how the AI reasons about that data, tells it what’s relevant for what purpose, and requires it to surface a source before handing over any answer. Put together, when someone asks a question, Claude isn’t searching a phrase in a database, Bradley says. It’s reasoning with IDC’s own methodology built into the process.

That’s the theory. Here’s what it looks like in practice.

The Moment It Earned Trust

In the product demo, Bradley walked through a fictional scenario: Marcus Chen, a Senior FP&A analyst at Vantix Security, is building a market forecast ahead of a CFO review. He is projecting 16% growth in a segment his company competes in. He asked IDC Quanta to check that number against an external benchmark, right inside Excel.

In under a minute, Quanta surfaced IDC’s actual forecast for that market: 12.1% growth through 2029, with the category decelerating to single digits in the later years. His model hadn’t caught up to where the market was actually headed. That’s the payoff of the architecture above. The answer arrived with its source attached.

Why Even Build an App

Technical buyers reasonably ask why IDC needs its own app when Claude and ChatGPT already exist. IDC isn’t positioning itself as a competitor to the assistants people already use daily. It’s building something with a narrower job.

The case for IDC Quanta comes down to control over how IDC’s own data gets handled and delivered. It exists because of what only a dedicated app can guarantee: a single place that collects everything relevant across an IDC relationship, a direct line to a live analyst when the automated answer isn’t enough, and data handling built on tenant isolation, enforced access controls, and audit logs that capture every user action. Which raises the next question technical buyers ask first.

Provenance You Can Check Yourself

Bradley’s last test for anyone skeptical of AI-generated answers is provenance. Can you verify where it actually came from? In a second demo, he showed IDC Quanta processing a strategy document sent over email, then breaking its answer down into cited data cuts, each one tied explicitly to the filters and definitions behind it.

Nothing here is asserted without a source attached, and nothing requires trusting the AI’s summary over the underlying data itself. That’s the actual answer to “how do you know it’s not confidently wrong”: you don’t have to take Quanta’s word for it. You can check.

See It Yourself

The architecture, the demo, and the sourcing are easier to evaluate firsthand than to take on faith. Request a demo, or talk to your IDC account team if you already have one.

Ryan Smith - Content Marketing Director - IDC

Ryan Smith is the Director of Content Marketing at IDC, where he leads brand-level content and social media strategy, aligning research insights with compelling storytelling to engage technology decision-makers. With a background in both IT and marketing, Ryan brings a unique blend of technical understanding and creative strategy to his work. He’s also a seasoned storyteller, speaker, and podcast host who believes the right message, told the right way, can drive both trust and transformation.

This is the second post in Meet IDC Quanta, a short series showing what the product actually does, starting with the portal, then your inbox, then wherever you’re already working in Claude.

It’s 4:47 PM. You’re prepping for tomorrow’s board meeting, and a question just landed that wasn’t on your list: how does your cloud infrastructure position compare to what’s shifted in the market over the last two quarters. You could open a portal, log in, run a search, filter by date, read three reports, and synthesize an answer. Or you could pull up your phone in the elevator.

Most executives don’t have a research workflow. They have an inbox. IDC Quanta was built on that premise: the fastest tool for a time-pressed leader is the one they never have to open, because it’s already open.

What it actually does

IDC Quanta in email lets you ask a question and get a sourced IDC answer back in about 60 seconds. It works the way you’d already expect email to work, which is exactly the point.

Emailing Quanta
  1. Compose an email to brief@quanta.idc.com, from your phone, your laptop, whatever’s in front of you.

  2. Ask the question in plain language. No query syntax, no keyword tricks. “Which cloud infrastructure vendors gained share in EMEA in the past 12 months?” is a complete request.

  3. Send it, and keep moving. A structured, sourced answer arrives in about 60 seconds, fast enough that you can send the question walking into a meeting and have the answer before you sit down.

  4. The reply carries its own receipts. Every claim in the answer traces to a specific IDC source. If you want to go deeper, “View in IDC Quanta” drops you straight into the full portal conversation, context intact.
A sample email response from IDC Quanta

No login screen to remember, no new app for IT to vet. And no tab-switching mid-meeting. The intelligence comes to the inbox. The inbox doesn’t change to accommodate it.

Where this earns its keep

The mechanic is simple. What makes it valuable is what it replaces across a week of an executive’s actual work:

  • Before the call.
    A prospect meeting is in twenty minutes and you need a current read on their competitive positioning. Email the question on your way to the conference room. The answer’s there before you sit down, cited and ready to use.

  • Benchmarking your own thinking.
    Attach a competitive deck or account plan to your email along with your question. IDC Quanta reads it alongside its own research base and flags where your internal view and IDC’s tracked data disagree. You’re getting your own analysis checked against the numbers.

  • The follow-up nobody has time to chase.
    Someone asks a sharp question in a meeting and the honest answer is “let me get back to you.” Now that follow-up takes one email and about a minute. Who else on your team wishes they had that?

  • Board and investor prep, compressed.
    The night-before scramble for one more data point doesn’t need the whole deck reopened. One email, one sourced answer, dropped straight into the slide.

Why this isn’t just a fast AI reply

A lot of tools will answer an email question with confidence. Confidence isn’t the same as being right, and it isn’t the same as being defensible in a room full of people who will ask where the number came from. Every IDC Quanta answer draws on IDC’s research base: 1,000+ analysts across 100+ countries, tracking 15B+ data points and 800K+ companies annually. That’s the citation trail behind every answer. It’s what makes an answer dropped in your inbox worth repeating in the room.

Get it in your inbox

If you’re already an IDC Quanta customer, brief@quanta.idc.com is live. Send the question you didn’t have time to research properly and see how fast a sourced answer actually moves.

If you’re not yet a customer, request a demo, and we’ll show you what it looks like when your inbox starts acting like a research team.

Ryan Smith - Content Marketing Director - IDC

Ryan Smith is the Director of Content Marketing at IDC, where he leads brand-level content and social media strategy, aligning research insights with compelling storytelling to engage technology decision-makers. With a background in both IT and marketing, Ryan brings a unique blend of technical understanding and creative strategy to his work. He’s also a seasoned storyteller, speaker, and podcast host who believes the right message, told the right way, can drive both trust and transformation.

At the IDC Quanta launch webinar, Jamie Fiorda, SVP of Product Marketing at IDC, laid out why the gap between how fast markets move and how fast organizations understand them is becoming the defining challenge for companies trying to act before conditions shift again. He also laid out where AI-powered intelligence tools fit into closing it.

Fiorda’s starting point was access: who actually gets to use the intelligence a company already has. In most organizations, the market intelligence a company already invests in tends to serve a narrow slice of the business (a research team, maybe a strategy analyst or two), while the insights that could sharpen decisions elsewhere in the company never reach the people making them.

That’s the pattern Fiorda described: intelligence that exists, but sits in a portal most of the organization has no reason to open. The problem isn’t the quality of the research. It’s that the value of it is being rationed by who has access, right as every function in the business is under pressure to move faster on planning that used to have more runway.

Positioning AI as an Intelligence Layer, Not Another Tool

Fiorda’s case for IDC Quanta wasn’t framed as a new subscription or a new dashboard to learn. It was framed as infrastructure: a layer that sits beneath the tools an organization already uses, making the intelligence within them actionable and defensible.

Organizations already have plenty of AI tools. What most of them can’t do is prove their answers are trustworthy. That gap shows up largest in finance: nearly a third of global enterprises still run their finance analytics function with no formal structure at all, department by department, which is exactly where an M&A assumption or a market-sizing input gets challenged first by a board, an investor, or an auditor. Fiorda’s argument centers on embedding intelligence directly into the workflows where strategy is developed, backed by a source a leadership team can point to when that challenge arises.

What This Looks Like Across a Business

Fiorda walked through what that shift means function by function, not as a feature list, but as a picture of how fast an organization can move when intelligence isn’t gated to one team.

A market intelligence team doesn’t change what it does, just how quickly it does it: sizing markets and benchmarking with intelligence flowing directly into the tools they already use.

Finance picks up a use case that’s often entirely new: market sizing inside their own models, risk analysis, revenue validation, all backed by third-party data at the point of decision. IDC research points to real upside here: cognitive technologies applied across due diligence and predictive analytics are projected to drive a 25% increase in M&A returns by 2027, largely because AI-enabled screening surfaces viable targets faster than traditional methods can.

Product gains competitive benchmarking and roadmap validation the same way. Marketing builds segmentation and messaging grounded in actual demand trends instead of assumptions a real shift for CMOs navigating today’s pressure to justify every dollar: IDC research found 52% are already leaning harder into scenario-based planning and 41% report increased pressure to justify marketing ROI, both signs that assumption-driven messaging is no longer good enough. And sales walks into a room with validated, current talking points instead of a battlecard built last quarter.

The strategic point is that all five are pulling from the same source of truth, at the same time, without waiting on each other.

The Question Leaders Must Consider

Fiorda’s close reframed the pitch as a single question for leadership to sit with: if the intelligence an organization already values could reach five functions instead of one, what would that be worth? It’s worth sitting with the scale of that gap: IDC research shows nearly 60% of Chief Data Officers say their organizations need to rethink how they use analytics in decision-making, and only about a third of executives are active users of the intelligence tools already in place. That’s not just a research quality problem. It’s strategic value sitting untouched, simply because of where information lives.

In a landscape changing this quickly, the organizations that move fastest will be the ones where that research actually reaches every team that needs it.

Learn More

Organizations already working with IDC can talk to their account team about which teams could get access next. Those exploring IDC Quanta for the first time can request a demo at idc.com/quanta to see where this fits for your team.

Ryan Smith - Content Marketing Director - IDC

Ryan Smith is the Director of Content Marketing at IDC, where he leads brand-level content and social media strategy, aligning research insights with compelling storytelling to engage technology decision-makers. With a background in both IT and marketing, Ryan brings a unique blend of technical understanding and creative strategy to his work. He’s also a seasoned storyteller, speaker, and podcast host who believes the right message, told the right way, can drive both trust and transformation.