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Resource Regions: Western Europe

EMEA enterprises have stopped debating whether AI matters. The harder question – can they run it at scale, on budget, with trust intact – is where the next 12 months will be decided.

Ambition is no longer the constraint

Ask a CEO in EMEA whether AI will reshape their business model and you get near-unanimity: 99% of EMEA CEOs told us AI gives them a chance to reinvent how their organization makes money over the next three to five years. AI strategy now sits alongside security as one of the two topics boards want to hear about beyond the numbers.

So the interesting story isn’t appetite. It’s what happens after the mandate lands. Agents are already in production across cybersecurity, IT, HR, and customer service – not in a lab, in the business. And 95% of EMEA enterprises say they’re running agents in production today – which tells you about reach, not readiness.

Which raises the question every CIO and CFO in the region is now asking each other: what does this actually cost, and can we control it?

The execution gap is the real story

Our maturity benchmarking tells a blunter story than the boardroom optimism suggests. Roughly two-thirds of EMEA organizations are still in the early stages of AI maturity. EMEA matches the rest of the world on ambition – but not on maturity. The gap isn’t interest. It’s capability.

And it shows up in money. Enterprises are running over budget on agent spend, then increasing it anyway because standing still costs more. The pressure is showing up in four places at once: nobody can trace AI cost back to a specific workflow, nobody has staff for AI FinOps, pricing models are opaque, and agent usage across functions is outrunning governance.

Capping spend is not the same as controlling it. That distinction is where the next wave of value – and the next wave of disappointment – will be decided.

Funded ambition plus lagging capability equals stalled deals. Deals shrink, cycles stretch, and the organizations that close the gap win the cycle.

What separates the organizations pulling ahead

The pattern among AI-fueled enterprises is remarkably consistent, and it’s less about models than most people expect. Value-driven AI rather than bolt-on features. A funded roadmap with defined outcomes rather than a portfolio of pilots. Governance built in, not retrofitted. A modular platform with shared, connected data. And a continuous learning loop that adapts as evidence arrives.

There’s one more, and it’s the one that surprises people: the human premium lasts. Trust and human judgment don’t get automated away – they get more valuable. When we asked what agents are actually judged on before scale-up, reliability came first, and accuracy a close second. Raw execution speed ranked below both.

Agentic ROI, in other words, is a discipline – not a calculation.

Where we go deeper

In our upcoming webinar, we’ll open up the full data set behind this picture: the EMEA agent adoption curve out to 2030. What agents actually cost enterprises per month today. Where the extra AI budget is being pulled from. The use cases already widely deployed by function. And the capability gaps customers most want closed.

If you’re building the business case, pricing the workflow or writing the governance framework this planning cycle, this is the evidence base to bring with you.

Navigate your next move with confidence. Join us – and bring your hardest questions.

Register for the webinar: The state of the EMEA IT market, Q3 Update

Source: IDC Worldwide CEO Survey, March 2026; IDC Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey, Wave 4, August 2026; IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: The AI-Fueled Organization 2.0, May 2026; IDC Early Adopter Agentic AI Use Case Study, March 2026.

Lapo Fioretti

Lapo Fioretti - Senior Research Analyst, AI-Fueled Business Strategies

Analyst Profile
Lapo Fioretti is a Senior Research analyst for IDC's AI-Fueled Business Strategies team. In his role, he is the lead for Europe, Middle East and Africa AI-Fueled Business Strategies research, examining organizations' digital and AI maturity, key priorities and use…

Between 2023 and August 2025, European IT services buyers fundamentally reordered their priorities. AI capabilities jumped from sixth place to first. Digital expertise became foundational rather than leading. The shift wasn’t gradual. It signaled a market that had moved into new territory.

IDC’s survey of 700 European organisations in August 2025 captured this reordering of service provider selection criteria. When compared with the same evaluation criteria from 2023, the changes were clear. European firms were demanding AI capabilities as a core competency.

AI capabilities ranked sixth in 2023. By August 2025, they ranked first.

Three years ago, when European IT services buyers were asked what mattered most in selecting a strategic services partner, AI and generative AI capabilities ranked sixth on their priority list. By August 2025, they had moved to the top. This reflected a real shift in how European organisations had come to think about the value their partners could deliver.

Most organisations had experimented with AI tools by 2025. Many had run pilots. Few had successfully redesigned core processes to use AI at scale, which is where they needed their services partners to step in and help them navigate that gap. The implication for services providers was that AI competency could not be a future roadmap item. Buyers expected to see real AI capabilities embedded across the services portfolio, and for EMEA services providers, this had become a baseline expectation, not differentiation.

The third leading criterion in the August 2025 survey revealed something practical about buyer psychology: European organisations needed their IT services partners to act as trusted advisors on what was coming next. Firms often have limited internal bandwidth to stay informed about emerging technologies, to evaluate competing options, and to understand which trends genuinely mattered for their industry versus which were hype. They needed technology partners who could close that gap.

The buyer conversation had fundamentally shifted. They weren’t just asking “Can you build this?” They were asking “What should we build? What’s the market doing? What’s coming next, and what does it mean for our business?” Services vendors who could articulate a credible point of view on technology strategy, backed by real market insight, and more importantly, experience, had a competitive advantage.

Industry expertise and innovation rounded out the top selection criteria

The August 2025 survey showed industry expertise and a proven track record of helping clients innovate completed the top five selection criteria for European services buyers. These weren’t new requirements, but by 2025, their context had shifted. What counted as innovative five years earlier often didn’t anymore. Industry expertise that was purely historical wasn’t sufficient either.

European buyers were looking for services partners who combined deep industry knowledge with current thinking about how that domain was being reshaped by AI, regulatory change, and competitive disruption. For services vendors, the implication was clear: industry specialists needed to understand how AI was changing their sector, which business processes were good candidates for AI-led transformation, and why generic industry knowledge wasn’t a sufficient competitive base anymore.

What’s changed since then

The shift between 2023 and August 2025 was clear, but the services market doesn’t stand still. The real question is what happened in the 12 months that followed. Did European IT services buyers continue to demand more from their providers? Did AI capabilities stay at the top of the evaluation criteria, or have buyer priorities shifted further? Have services vendors made the repositioning moves that seemed necessary in late 2025? Have new evaluation criteria emerged? And critically: how have these changing priorities affected actual vendor selection decisions across EMEA?

These aren’t abstract questions. For services vendors, the answers determine whether your current positioning is ahead of the market or reacting to it. For services buyers, they determine how you should be evaluating partners right now.

On 6 October, IDC is presenting updated research that answers these questions with fresh data on how EMEA services buyer requirements have evolved. If you’re involved in selecting IT services partners, or if you’re positioning your services business to win in both today’s and tomorrow’s market, this is when you’ll get the insights you need.

Join the webinar: What will EMEA services buyers demand from their partners in the AI era?

This blog draws on IDC’s EMEA IT Services Survey conducted in August 2025 (n=700, Europe).

Matthew Wilkins

Matthew Wilkins - Research Director, European Services

Analyst Profile
Matthew Wilkins is a research director in IDC's Global Services Insights research team. Based in London, Matthew leads IDC's European Services research program, focusing on the trends and market dynamics impacting professional service providers in Europe, including the disruption and…

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.