Marketing teams in 2026 are operating under more pressure than ever - expected to generate pipeline, prove ROI, and personalise buyer journeys at scale, while managing an increasingly fragmented technology stack. The marketing automation market has responded with a wave of AI-powered capabilities that go far beyond scheduled email sends, and the range of platforms available to enterprise and mid-market buyers is broader, and more complex to navigate, than it has ever been. Th

Enterprise AI assistants have become one of the most actively evaluated technology categories in 2026. Organisations that spent the last two years exploring AI in controlled pilots are now facing a practical decision: which platform to deploy at scale, to which teams, and in support of which business outcomes. The market has matured significantly. Where early enterprise AI conversations centred on productivity gains from drafting and summarisation, the focus has shifted to ag

Organisations deploying AI at scale are facing a question that did not exist five years ago: how do you govern something that makes decisions, produces outputs, and influences outcomes in ways that are not always predictable or explainable? The EU AI Act has moved from regulation in principle to regulation in practice, and boards, risk committees, and regulators are all asking harder questions about how AI models are validated, monitored, and controlled. For many enterprises,

Retailers and ecommerce teams are operating in a market where the cost of getting merchandising wrong has never been higher. Excess inventory ties up working capital, out-of-stocks drive customers to competitors, and promotional missteps are immediately visible across digital channels. In 2026, AI-driven merchandising platforms are reshaping how buying, ranging, pricing, and space planning decisions are made - shifting them from periodic, intuition-heavy processes to continuo

Supply chain planning has rarely been under more scrutiny than it is in 2026. The disruptions of recent years - from pandemic-era demand shocks to geopolitical instability affecting sourcing and logistics - have exposed the fragility of planning processes built on static models, annual cycles, and spreadsheet-driven assumptions. The organisations that came through those disruptions best were those that could sense change early, model scenarios quickly, and replan at a speed t

Customer service teams are caught between two competing pressures: customers who expect faster, more personalised resolutions across more channels, and organisations that cannot continue adding headcount every time service volumes grow. AI customer service agents have emerged as the most direct response to that tension - software that can handle enquiries, resolve issues, and guide customers to outcomes without a human agent needing to be involved at every step. The market ha

For most B2B sales organisations, the SDR function is simultaneously one of the most important and most expensive parts of the revenue machine - responsible for generating the qualified pipeline that feeds everything downstream, but also carrying high attrition, long ramp times, and significant per-head cost. AI sales agents have arrived as a direct challenge to that model. Unlike AI tools that assist human reps, these platforms act autonomously: they research prospects, writ

Most enterprise IT and customer experience teams are managing more communication channels than ever before, without necessarily having the infrastructure to connect them reliably. Selecting a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider is no longer a niche technical decision - it sits at the heart of how businesses authenticate users, notify customers, run marketing campaigns, and deliver support across SMS, voice, email, and chat apps. The CPaaS market is growing f

Enterprise IT teams are under growing pressure to deliver consistent, high-quality customer communications across an increasing number of digital channels. Sinch is one of the largest Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers in the world, offering the infrastructure, APIs, and applications that businesses need to send and receive messages at scale across SMS, voice, email, and chat apps. Listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and processing over 900 billion customer interac

Enterprise brands spend significant time and budget on customer communications without always being confident the messages are getting through. Mitto is a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider built to solve exactly that problem, offering enterprises a reliable, globally connected platform for SMS, voice, and chat app messaging at scale. Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Mitto has built a reputation for delivery quality and carrier reach that larger, more gen

Tax functions in large organizations are a complex area. Cross-border transactions, evolving transfer pricing rules, Pillar Two global minimum tax requirements, e-invoicing mandates across Europe and beyond, and a relentless pace of domestic tax law change have made manual or fragmented tax processes increasingly untenable. If your tax team is still relying on spreadsheets, disconnected point tools, or a basic ERP tax module to manage a complex compliance and reporting obliga

Audit functions are under growing pressure. Regulatory requirements are expanding, audit cycles are accelerating, and the expectation that internal and external audits will surface real risk - rather than just tick a box - has never been higher. If your current audit management process still runs on spreadsheets, shared drives, or a bolt-on module inside a legacy GRC platform, 2026 is a good year to take stock of what purpose-built audit software can do. The audit management

Most organisations have a strategy. Fewer have a reliable way of connecting that strategy to what every team and individual is actually working on. The OKR framework - Objectives and Key Results - exists to close that gap, giving businesses a structured method for setting ambitious goals, tracking measurable outcomes, and maintaining line of sight from the boardroom to the front line. The problem is that the framework only works if it is embedded in the rhythm of the business

Employee engagement has moved from an HR metric tracked annually to a business performance indicator monitored continuously. The organisations that understood this shift early - building listening infrastructure, acting visibly on feedback, and connecting engagement data to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes - have a measurable advantage in the competition for talent. Those still relying on the annual engagement survey to tell them how their workforce feels are ty

Getting demand wrong is expensive in both directions. Too much inventory ties up working capital, drives markdown exposure, and fills warehouses with stock that erodes margin. Too little means lost sales, emergency freight costs, and customers that go elsewhere and do not always come back. For most businesses, the gap between what their demand planning process can reliably predict and what the market actually does has widened in recent years - driven by supply chain volatilit

The point of sale is no longer just where a transaction happens - it is where customer data, inventory, loyalty, and payments converge in real time. For retailers and hospitality operators that got this right, the POS has become a source of genuine competitive advantage. For those still running legacy till systems or disconnected island architectures, the gap between what their technology can do and what their customers now expect is widening fast. What is driving change in

Many banks and financial institutions are operating technology stacks built for a world that no longer exists. Legacy core banking systems designed decades ago are being asked to support real-time payments, open banking APIs, embedded finance, and AI-driven credit decisioning - all at the same time. The result is a technology estate held together by integration middleware and manual workarounds, running up costs and slowing down the product and service changes the business ne

Choosing the right retail technology in 2026 is harder than it looks. The landscape has expanded dramatically - unified commerce, AI-driven demand forecasting, and real-time inventory visibility are no longer differentiators, they are baseline expectations. Retailers that committed to fragmented, best-of-breed stacks five years ago are now facing painful re-platforming decisions as those point solutions fail to talk to each other at the speed the business demands. What is c

Data volumes are growing faster than most organisations can handle, and the pressure to turn raw data into reliable business insight has never been greater. Choosing the right data warehouse platform sits at the heart of that challenge - get it wrong and every downstream analytics, reporting, and AI initiative suffers for it. In 2026, the data warehouse market is being reshaped by the rise of the cloud lakehouse architecture, the commoditisation of columnar storage, and the e

Salesforce is the dominant force in enterprise CRM, used by organisations of every size and sector across the world. For many, it delivers genuine value. But Salesforce is not the right fit for every business, and the decision to explore alternatives is more common than many sales and technology leaders expect. Whether the concern is cost, complexity, the depth of customisation required, or a shift in strategic direction, the case for reviewing the market is clear. Viewpoint