SAP has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc #US54113426, September 2026).
We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s commitment to helping enterprises deliver intelligent, personalized customer experiences, enhanced by AI, built on trusted data and connected end-to-end business processes, and grounded in real-life business context. Joule Agents, Joule Assistants, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Engagement Cloud together provide the agentic marketing backbone to advance this vision of the Autonomous Enterprise.
AI is evolving from assisting marketers to executing and acting on their behalf, creating a fundamental opportunity for organizations to completely rethink how they engage customers. Agentic marketing enables AI agents and assistants to understand context, take action, and help brands deliver more relevant personalized experiences.
Trust is the foundation to this shift. As AI takes on greater responsibility, organizations need solutions built with security, compliance, governance, and trusted business data so customers can confidently rely on AI-driven interactions and decisions.
Why agentic marketing matters
Consumers are becoming more comfortable using AI, reshaping their expectations of the brands they love and the organizations they interact with. SAP’s 2026 Global Customer Loyalty Index indicates that 33% of consumers now trust AI assistants to complete purchases on their behalf, while 31% say interactions with AI assistants make them more loyal to a brand. The trend is even more pronounced across younger consumers. Across generations, we see AI playing an influential role in purchasing decisions and long-term customer loyalty. For example, a consumer might ask an AI assistant to reorder a household product, book a trip, or recommend a new product based on past preferences. For those interactions to succeed, customers must trust that the AI is acting on accurate information, protecting their data, and making decisions within appropriate guardrails.
Organizations from manufacturers to fashion brands are seasoned in using generative AI to create content, build audiences, and improve marketing efficiency. Attention is turning to agentic marketing: moving from AI that recommends to AI that acts.
Marketing context meets business reality
Most marketing platforms understand customer interactions well: clicks, opens, purchases, and browsing behavior. Those signals matter, but they only tell part of the story. The most valuable signals often live elsewhere across the enterprise in inventory availability, order status, fulfillment performance, product profitability, return behavior, and subscription and replenishment cycles.
Marketing often sees customer behavior, while ERP systems see business reality. The greatest opportunity for AI emerges when those worlds come together. Because SAP sits at the heart of how many of the world’s leading enterprises operate, marketers can access the operational intelligence that lives within the systems running the business, enabling AI to make decisions based not only on what customers are doing, but on what the business can actually deliver. In an age of agentic marketing, that distinction matters.
Why SAP was recognized as a Leader
SAP was recognized for the following strengths by the IDC MarketScape:
- With the agentic layer of Joule, marketers get real-time, context-aware personalization without having to reconcile SAP and non-SAP data themselves, since Joule Agents and Joule Assistants draw on a harmonized SAP Business Data Cloud foundation. Teams receive role-based guidance for navigating complex workflows across Autonomous Domains, while everyday tasks such as retrieving information, connecting enterprise data, and completing multi-step processes happen independently, freeing staff from manual execution. In SAP Engagement Cloud, this means personalization and segmentation scale on their own, and the 4Q25 CX release lets customer service issues resolve autonomously, backed by SAP’s enterprise data layer and SAP Knowledge Graph, instead of requiring escalation.
- Because Joule Studio is low code, organizations with reasonable levels of in-house development capabilities can build custom agents themselves, without waiting on IT or writing code, while still connecting to Joule, the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, and third-party systems grounded in SAP Knowledge Graph and SAP Business Data Cloud. For sales and marketing teams, this means faster deal cycles and higher conversion: a sales-assistant agent, for example, automatically surfaces buying patterns and product recommendations from purchase history, sparing reps the manual analysis.
- Marketers running campaigns across email, digital ads, wallet, conversational, and web can manage them all from a single platform instead of stitching together point solutions. Because the engagement events service connects external data sources into real-time segmentation, campaigns stay relevant as customer behavior shifts. AI-assisted tools such as natural-language product search, AI-generated consumption summaries, and an AI-assisted report builder cut down the manual work of building segments and reporting, enabling marketers to focus on strategy while AI handles recommendations, translation, prediction, and reporting at scale.
AI that drives business results
Organizations around the world are using SAP’s AI-powered customer engagement capabilities to create more connected experiences and drive business results. For example:
- Adler Mannheim uses an AI-powered data foundation to boost fan subscriptions by 50% and improve pre-game fan engagement by 80%.
- Molton Brown combines AI-enhanced commerce and personalization to create seamless customer experiences that strengthen loyalty while maintaining 100% uptime during peak periods.
- Douglas connects AI-driven shopping experiences, such as virtual beauty tools, and personalized product recommendations to deliver engaging and elevated customer experiences.
Advancing toward the Autonomous Enterprise
Being named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment is an important milestone for SAP and the evolution of agentic marketing as a category. As organizations move from experimenting with AI to deploying agents that can reason, recommend, and act, we believe this recognition validates SAP’s approach of combining AI, trusted business data, and connected business processes to help customers navigate this next phase of transformation.
The vision of the Autonomous Enterprise is one in which AI-powered agents help organizations connect customer, operational, and business data to make and execute decisions with greater speed, relevance, and scale. In this future, AI doesn’t replace human expertise; it amplifies it. Intelligent assistants and agents can help teams act faster and more effectively, with governance and guardrails that keep people responsible for the strategy, creativity, and judgment that build lasting customer relationships.
Ultimately, the success of agentic AI will depend not only on what it can do, but on how much customers and businesses trust it to act on their behalf.
Learn more
Download the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt.
Sara Richter is chief marketing officer for SAP Engagement Cloud at SAP.
