Age of the Customer
Insights
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Can Automotive Brands Win Loyalty By Competing On Price Alone?
While affordability pressures remain prominent across the automotive industry, strong brands create value throughout the customer lifecycle, not just during vehicle purchasing.
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Consumers Rethink Value As Uncertainty And Inflation Persist
As Americans battle economic uncertainty and persistent inflation, they aren’t simply trading down; they’re choosing what is worth paying for. As pessimism peaks but spending remains resilient (a phenomenon we call the pessimism paradox), three distinct consumer value behaviors are emerging. 1. Maximizing to get the best — and paying for it When consumers exhibit […]
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Sovereign AI Will Decide The Future Of Sovereign Cloud Services
The sovereign cloud services (SCS) market reveals a fundamental shift: Sovereign AI is becoming the dominant force shaping buyer requirements. This change is being driven by growing geopolitical uncertainty, expanding regulatory obligations, and increasing dependence on cloud and AI platforms. Technology leaders are under pressure to reduce exposure to external dependencies, strengthen operational resilience, and […]
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Cloudera EVOLVE26: The Case For AI Anywhere
At EVOLVE26 in Singapore, Cloudera made a strategic statement that the next phase of enterprise AI will be defined by where AI runs, what data it can access, and how securely it operates at scale. Cloudera announced the Anywhere Cloud, positioned as the foundation of its “cloud anywhere, data anywhere, AI anywhere” strategy across public […]
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Announcing Forrester’s 2026 Security & Risk Enterprise Leadership Award Winner: CITGO
CITGO is the winner of Forrester’s 2026 Security & Risk Enterprise Leadership Award. See how the company embeds security, risk management, and trust into business decisions, operations, and emerging technology planning.
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Ten Rules For Building A Sustainable B2B Webinar Program
Webinars are one of the most effective ways to engage audiences at scale and should be a critical component of an integrated event strategy. Yet many B2B marketers still treat them as standalone broadcasts, focusing on delivery while underinvesting in audience development, follow-up, and content activation. In contrast, leading practitioners connect the live event to […]
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Make Customer Obsession Machine-Readable
My bread is flat — again. Every week, my online grocery delivery shows up. Every week, I return something fragile, like fruit, bread, or crisps (that’s potato chips to you), because a packing robot in the dark warehouse decided to put a five-kilo bag of cat litter or a 10-pack of beer on top of […]
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Marketing’s Next AI Challenge: Scale What Works Without Losing Control
At this year’s Marketing AI Conference (MAICON), I noticed a shift in how marketing leaders are approaching AI transformation. The conversation is moving beyond AI literacy and individual productivity toward building repeatable workflows, developing AI agents, and making these capabilities part of everyday work. Many of the sessions highlighted marketing’s next challenge: empowering teams to […]
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TalosCon 2026: The Winning AI Strategy Is To Preserve Choice
Enterprises spent the last decade reducing risk through multicloud and resilience strategies. AI could bring that risk back. One of the strongest themes at TalosCon 2026 was the increasing concentration of AI capabilities, infrastructure, and investment among a relatively small number of providers. For technology leaders, the bigger concern isn’t competition but rather dependency. Every […]
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For Service Providers, AI Giveth And AI Taketh Away
In Q2 2026, service provider revenues were up a little, bookings were mostly flat, and revenue/employee were up nominally. The technology services industry has struggled to grow over the past two years as AI accelerates service delivery, thus undermining its core engine of growth: headcount and billable hours. Beginning late last year, providers began to […]
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AI Won’t Save RevOps — It Will Redefine It
AI is absorbing many of the activities that have traditionally defined revenue operations. That doesn’t make RevOps irrelevant — it makes its current mandate obsolete. Learn why RevOps leaders must shift from operating processes to architecting how people, data, technology, and AI make and execute revenue decisions.
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So You Think You Have A Marketing AI Agent?
It’s time to delineate what is and what is not an AI agent for the marketing function. The ferocious pace of AI technology innovation, coupled with runaway AI hype and a relentless flood of vendors offering AI agents — most with de rigueur anthropomorphized names — creates an environment in which the meaning of AI […]
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Use Forrester’s Total Experience Score And Growth Grid To Accelerate Revenue
Forrester’s total experience framework is an excellent way for companies to measure performance with prospects and customers alike. Our growth grid (see below) maps brands into one of four quadrants: leading, churning, plateauing, and lagging. A successful growth strategy propels brands into the leading quadrant and, for brands already there, strengthens their position. But growth […]
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Prime Big Deal Days 2026: Retailers Pull Forward Holiday Shopping
We reviewed 116 brands and retailers to see how they responded to Amazon’s October Prime Big Deal Days 2026 event. Learn more.
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GRC Customers Have Spoken: Four Market Realities Vendors Can’t Ignore
This week, I published the Buyer’s Guide: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, 2026, summarizing how satisfied clients are with their governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platforms. The report is based on customer reference data from The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q2 2026. Speaking to customers during evaluative research processes is my favorite […]
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Multiplayer AI — Your Impending (And Accidental) Standard
Where you do work is changing. At the Dreamforce 2026 Slack keynote, Boris Cherny (the head of Anthropic’s Claude Code) approximated that 90% of his coding is done in Slack. Why is he using a chat tool to code? And how? Forgive the immediate use of a buzzword, but the answer to both questions is […]
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Infosys Bets On Trust As AI Reprices IT Services
Last week, Infosys brought clients and analysts to Geneva for its 25th Confluence event in EMEA. We expected the usual AI promises. Instead, Salil Parekh opened the event with a remarkably down-to-earth message: Infosys is a delivery organization, its foundation is client trust, and it intends to remain a stable partner in a world that […]
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SAM: An Acid Test For AI
Earlier this year, I had a conversation with Andreas Gieseke and Ragip Aydin of Raynet about software asset management and the specific value of generative AI there. Now, I spent some years at one of the largest US banks as the consulting architect for software asset management (SAM). I had a broader responsibility as the […]
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The Future Of Software Will Be Defined By Stewardship
This summer, my colleague Diego Lo Giudice and I explored a deceptively simple question: What happens to enterprise software when AI makes software creation abundant? We found a paradox: Get more of what you want, and you also get more of what you don’t want. Get More Of What You Ask For AI writes code, […]
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My Take On Open Source And Sovereignty From Open Source Summit Europe 2026
At Open Source Summit Europe 2026, one message surfaced repeatedly: Organizations and governments that merely consume open source remain dependent on others to shape their future. Those that govern, maintain, secure, and sustain open-source ecosystems gain influence, resilience, sovereignty, and strategic leverage. The conversation around sovereignty is evolving within and outside the open-source community: The […]
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