In Forrester’s 2026 B2B Brand And Communications Survey, we asked CMOs and marketing leaders at companies with more than $100 million in revenue how they expect their agency investments to change. Our analysis shows that marketers are reining in agency investments compared to 2025, particularly in areas that historically drove the most investment growth. This reflects a more disciplined approach to agency spend as marketing teams operationalize AI and execute more work in-house. This report helps marketing leaders understand how agency investment priorities are evolving and where agencies continue to play a meaningful role.

Arrive at your intended future culture state through a clearly defined process for culture change. That process should combine the science of behavior change with the art that can engage and inspire that change. This report outlines a culture change approach that begins with understanding and offers simple activities to engage stakeholders and inform a path forward.

Over the next decade, banks, fintechs, and big tech companies will reinvent digital banking experiences by combining maturing and emerging technologies. New interaction models will make experiences more intuitive and natural, deepening customer understanding, expanding automation, and accelerating the orchestration and delivery of digital banking experiences. This report explores how digital banking experiences are becoming more human-centered and intelligent, redefining customer engagement, and empowering consumers in fundamentally new ways.

Canva treated genAI as a workforce capability to scale — not a cost lever. Leaders gave employees access to multiple genAI tools, invested in structured enablement, maintained clear messaging, and applied lightweight governance to keep experimentation moving without sacrificing oversight. The result was rapid, sustained adoption and early, quantified productivity capacity. This approach closely aligns with Forrester research on scaling AI through coordinated enterprise, business, and individual enablement, demonstrating how organizations can build AI value without sacrificing trust, flexibility, or workforce engagement.

Tech leaders struggle to identify which technology solutions will solve their operational problems. Vendors’ marketing messaging and a lack of standardization in the market amplify the challenge. Although there are standard market categories for tech, there have been no universal rules for the functions each category provides — until now. This report outlines Forrester’s Function-First Tech Buying Framework, which creates standards for the functionality included in each of the AI for IT operations (AIOps) and overlapping tech market categories.

To deal with messy, complex, and manual workflows, Southern Cross Healthcare embedded Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365. Southern Cross converted an email-driven referral process into a governed workflow that reads PDFs, prepares referral work for staff review, and preserves human approval for sensitive decisions. This accelerated processing, lowered privacy exposure, and created a repeatable architecture pattern for regulated operations that cannot wait for every external party to standardize. This report shows how CIOs and their teams can use AI to modernize messy workflows today while putting the controls in place to scale AI safely over time.

Sales leaders maximize commission ROI by aligning compensation to targeted growth and enforcing cost discipline. By evaluating both growth and cost, sales operations leaders can identify underperformance, optimize plan design, and improve rep productivity. This report introduces a measurement framework that balances sales growth against commission cost.

Designing, transforming, or optimizing your IT operating model, technology stack, or partner ecosystem can be intimidating due to the number of dependencies, interfaces, and moving parts. The concept of business capabilities gives technology executives the opportunity to simplify the problem and focus on what IT needs to enable or guide the business. This report uses Forrester’s existing research to guide tech execs through building a business capability framework that maximizes business value delivery.

Architecting agentic AI for the enterprise is challenging because teams must move quickly while designing for scale, governance, security, and flexibility. Successful architectures are modular, deliberate, and adaptable, rather than a monolithic ideal state. Core disciplines such as runtime design, memory, tool use, guardrails, access control, testing, and governance must be developed together rather than in isolation. This report helps architects understand the main components and emerging patterns of agentic AI so they can make better design decisions and avoid costly sprawl and risk.

Enterprise agentic AI architectures are shaped by distinct decisions that organizations often resolve implicitly through default vendor configurations or team habits. Implicit resolution produces architectures that resist scaling, governance, and cost control. Organizations that take explicit positions across all 20 decisions build coherent, governable agentic systems. This report provides a decision framework for choosing agentic AI architectures.