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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Payable Automation Software for Midmarket 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts payable automation software providers serving midmarket organizations with 100–999 employees. The study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology leaders selecting an AP automation platform.

For midmarket organizations, the AP technology decision is increasingly shaped by complexity rather than transaction volume alone. As companies add entities, suppliers, systems, approval structures, and financial requirements, AP platforms must help finance absorb that complexity rather than simply automate individual tasks.

"The midmarket AP challenge is no longer simply processing more invoices. It is keeping growing business complexity from becoming growing finance complexity." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Accounts Payable Automation Software for Small Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts payable automation software providers serving small businesses with 0–99 employees. The study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology buyers selecting an accounts payable (AP) automation platform.

Small businesses should increasingly evaluate AP automation based on the amount of organizational capacity the technology creates rather than the number of individual tasks it claims to automate.

"For small businesses, the real promise of AP automation is not simply processing invoices faster but allowing the business to grow without requiring the finance team to grow at the same rate," says Kevin Permenter, research director om financial applications, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Accounts Receivable Automation Software for Small and Midmarket Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of accounts receivable automation software providers serving small and midmarket organizations with 0–999 employees. This study evaluates the capabilities and strategies of vendors in the market and examines the criteria most important for technology leaders selecting an AR automation platform.

For small and midmarket businesses, the value of AR automation increasingly lies in shortening the operational distance between the invoice and usable cash. That requires more than automating collections. It requires a coordinated approach to customer payment experience, collections, disputes, cash application, and cash intelligence.

"The real measure of AR automation is not how much collection activity the software can generate. It is how effectively the platform removes the friction standing between an invoice and usable cash." — Kevin Permenter, research director, Financial Applications, IDC

IDC Survey: Worldwide SMB Technology Spending Outlook, 2026

Supriya Deka — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how SMBs worldwide plan to allocate their technology budgets over the next 12 months. It presents the direction of overall spending intent and the division of IT budget across hardware, software, third-party services, and cloud, along with the allocation within each area, segmented by small (1–99 employees) and medium-sized (100–999 employees) businesses and by employee size band.

Midmarket SMBs' Unified Communications and Collaboration SP Buying Trend and Outlook, 2026

Daniela Rao, Denise Lund — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an overview of the U.S. and EMEA midmarket (100–499 employees) SMBs' buying trends and outlook toward unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solution SPs by highlighting buying criteria and preferences. It also includes recommendations to address midmarket organizations with innovative propositions.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for Midmarket Organizations 2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates agentic marketing platforms available to midsize organizations and provides essential guidance for technology leaders in this segment. Midsize marketing teams typically run several tools across content, campaigns, and channels acquired at different times for different reasons and are looking for platforms that can coordinate that sprawl rather than add to it. This study defines the market, evaluates vendors serving midsize buyers and assesses how well current platforms handle multi-agent coordination and independent learning across channels, which are the capabilities that most affect a growing marketing team's ability to scale without adding headcount. IDC finds meaningful progress on integration and orchestration since the 2025 assessment of this segment, alongside a persistent gap in agents that improve their own performance over time without manual retraining. Midsize buyers should weigh both dimensions carefully when selecting a platform built to grow with them.

"Midsize buyers want a platform priced for their budget, built for how a midsized team actually works, and simple enough that value shows up in the first quarter instead of the fifth," says Roger Beharry Lall, research director on advertising technologies and SMB marketing applications, IDC.

How Company Size Shapes AI’s Impact on B2B Marketing

Sudhir Rajagopal, Roger Beharry Lall, Katie Evans, Supriya Deka — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective is a deeper dive into how AI’s impact on B2B technology marketing varies by company size. Using IDC’s 2026 Marketing Barometer Survey, IDC found that the variations and gaps between company sizes reflect structure, not capability. Each segment carries a distinct exposure: Small firms are expanding capabilities on a thin data foundation, midmarket is losing search traffic faster than its answer engine strategy can replace it, and large enterprises lack buyer visibility despite leading on AI discovery infrastructure. The document offers segment-specific budget and recommendations for CMOs.

“A high AI impact on marketing performance may not always be proof of a better strategy; it’s often proof of a more basic structure,” says Sudhir Rajagopal, research director, CMO Advisory Service, IDC. “Smaller organizations, unrealized technical debt, and more basic buyer signals can make an organization look further ahead on AI than it actually is. In prioritizing and sequencing marketing investments, CMOs must calibrate their existing performance against structural position, technical debt, and AEO visibility to see more sustainable AI returns in marketing.”

Market Analysis Perspective: U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Business Communications Services, 2026

Daniela Rao — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the small and medium-sized communications services market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, technology leader perspective, a market outlook, and IDC's advice for technology suppliers in this market.

Although the digital maturity of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) continues to improve, the segment's sheer size, industry fragmentation, and diverse business needs make it one of the most challenging markets for telecommunications providers to drive sustainable revenue and profit growth.

Today, as hybrid work has become the norm and economic uncertainty continues to increase pressure on operating costs, SMBs are placing greater expectations on telecommunications providers for scalable, cloud-based, and cost-effective solutions that enable seamless communications, operational agility, and business continuity.

Optimized high-speed internet, mobile data plans, reliability, and seamless convergence bundles are reshaping the telecom providers' competitive strategies and tactics as the primary catalysts of the SMB service portfolio innovation.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for Small Businesses 2026 Vendor Assessment

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates agentic marketing platforms available to small businesses and provides essential guidance for technology buyers in this segment. Small businesses have historically been caught between consumer-grade marketing tools that are too limited and enterprise platforms that are too complex to adopt without dedicated technical staff. Agentic marketing platforms are beginning to close that gap, offering AI agents that plan, execute, and adjust campaigns with limited manual intervention. This study defines the market, evaluates vendors serving small business buyers, and assesses how close current offerings come to genuine agentic capability, the ability to learn and adapt without manual reconfiguration, versus sophisticated automation carrying an agent label. IDC finds real, practical value available today, alongside real gaps small business buyers should weigh carefully, particularly around ongoing technical requirements and governance that works without a dedicated administrator.

"The small businesses winning with agentic marketing aren't the ones chasing the most sophisticated platform. They're choosing vendors that work out of the box, solve one clear use case, and prove value within weeks. This market is moving fast, and the vendors pulling ahead are building specifically for what small businesses need, not retrofitting enterprise tools for a smaller buyer." — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications

Market Forecast: Worldwide and U.S. Managed Print and Document Services and Basic Print Services Forecast, 2026–2030

Robert Palmer — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides the five-year forecast for the managed print and document services and basic print services market and delivers insights into the drivers and inhibitors of growth.

"Ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty continues to weigh on IT budgets and dampen growth across the managed print and document services market. Yet this same pressure is pushing businesses to modernize print environments, adopt AI-driven capabilities, and embrace the emerging AI MFP. These investments will help stabilize the market as organizations balance cost discipline with long-term efficiency gains." — Robert Palmer, research vice president, Imaging, Printing, and Document Solutions, IDC