Age of the Customer
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Make CX A Business Mandate In Financial Services
Many customer experience (CX) leaders struggle to get executive buy-in. A conversation about customer loyalty or a dashboard highlighting month-over-month channel performance just doesn’t have the sway. That’s because CX is not just about survey results or incremental improvements to channels or touchpoints — it is a primary lever for growth, trust, and long‑term competitiveness. […]
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Oracle Embraces AI At JavaOne
If you couldn’t make it to NVIDIA GTC this year, you could still find plenty of AI at JavaOne. About 400 people attended the keynote in person, with more online. That keynote was called “Java for an AI World.” Oracle thinks Java is a great programming language for AI, and it claims its strength over […]
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Why IBM Paid $11B For Real-Time AI, Not Kafka
IBM just closed its $11 billion acquisition of Confluent on March 17, 2026, acquiring the data streaming platform that more than 6,500 enterprises — including 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on to power real-time operations. Confluent was also named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025. The deal could […]
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Your Essential “Pack” To Select A Digital Analytics Solution: Start From Use Cases, End With Feature Comparison
When organizations set out to select a digital analytics vendor, the process often starts in a familiar place: comparing technology capabilities. Buyers naturally gravitate toward current offering and strategy comparisons to understand how vendors stack up feature by feature and where platforms are headed. This is exactly where The Forrester Wave™: Digital Analytics Solutions, Q3 […]
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Apparel And Footwear Brands Must Own Their Destinies To Survive
In the midst of disruption, the brands that will thrive are those that actively seize control of how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy their products.
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Geopolitical Volatility Has Become A Technology Leadership Test
Geopolitical volatility is testing and redefining technology leadership, demanding sharper trade-offs, stronger resilience, and faster decisions from CIOs and CISOs. Read guidance from our new research to help navigate these challenges.
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HIMSS26: A Shift From AI Optimism To Operational Reckoning
Healthcare is moving beyond fascination with AI and into a far more consequential phase. AI was everywhere at HIMSS26, but the conversation shifted decisively from promise to preparedness. Speakers, vendors, and attendees spent less time debating what is possible and more time confronting what is scalable, governable, and culturally sustainable. The most important signals were […]
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Your Employees Aren’t Ready For AI — And It’s A Problem
Forrester’s AIQ Reveals Severe Gaps In Employee Readiness For AI Employers aren’t successfully equipping their employees with the understanding, skills, and ethics to succeed in a world of AI. And it’s becoming a bottleneck that inhibits productivity and return on investment. We measure this with AIQ, Forrester’s artificial intelligence quotient, and we’ve got alarming new […]
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A Product Leader’s Roadmap To B2B Summit North America
The pressure is on product leaders to reimagine and reinvent for a new GTM reality. B2B Summit North America is designed to help you do just that. Here are the sessions and experiences you should prioritize.
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Virtual Event Platforms In 2026: The Live Event Is No Longer The Product
Questionnaire responses submitted by vendors for The Virtual Event Management Platforms Landscape, Q1 2026, show a clear transformation in the market. During (and following) the COVID-19 pandemic, vendors primarily focused their differentiation efforts on the ability to deliver. In 2026, buyers simply assume that this capability exists. Therefore, the real competition has shifted to what […]
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Banks Are Losing Their Place In Small Business Decisions — Here’s How To Reclaim It
Small businesses face more volatility than ever, yet banks are becoming less present at the moments when owners make critical financial choices. This growing gap is why relationship sovereignty in small business banking has become the defining challenge for 2026. Small business owners now rely on the platforms they use every day — accounting, payroll, […]
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Mastercard Makes Its Stablecoin Move: The BVNK Acquisition
Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK seizes on the opportunity of stablecoins to disrupt cross-border payments. Learn what the move means for banks, card networks, payment fintechs, and B2B firms.
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Why Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol Signals A Turning Point For Micropayments
For 30 years, micropayments failed for one reason: The payer was human. Humans hesitate; they abandon carts, resent friction, and perform mental accounting before every small transaction. The smartest engineers and best-funded companies in technology couldn’t engineer their way around human psychology — so they stopped trying. On March 18, 2026, that constraint disappeared. Stripe […]
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The Five Capabilities CX Leaders Need Now — And How To Build Them At CX Forum West
As AI accelerates customer expectations, legacy CX playbooks are losing their effectiveness. Organizations are discovering they need a sharper, more modern skill set to drive clarity and alignment. Read this blog to uncover the five capabilities CX leaders need now — and how to build them at CX Forum West.
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The Five Capabilities CX Leaders Need Now — And How To Build Them At CX Forum East
AI is exposing cracks in journey strategy, personalization, and alignment faster than teams can patch them. Most CX organizations feel the pressure, but few know which capabilities will actually change their trajectory. Read this blog to learn the five capabilities CX leaders need now to adapt — and how to build them at CX Forum East.
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Twitter’s Twentieth: It’s Complicated
Tomorrow (March 21, 2026) marks two decades since Jack Dorsey (Twitter cofounder) posted the very first tweet. I created my Twitter account in January 2008 while working for one of the first social media marketing agencies. Back then, Twitter was a delightful enigma — a first-of-its-kind media platform that each of us in the advertising […]
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Agent Control Planes Still Need A Robust Standards Stack
This post is a follow-up to my earlier announcement of our coverage of the agent control planes market. Research questionnaires for the landscape report will formally go out in the second week of April 2026. We are in the “dial-up internet” phase of the agentic era. The architecture is emerging faster than the standards needed […]
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Apple Turns 50. Now Comes The Reckoning.
Milestone anniversaries invite reflection when what's required is foresight. Apple is at a crossroad — and the way forward may require challenging some of the very principles that have made it so successful.
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Word On The Retail Street: What To Watch In 2026
Retail is in a tough spot: economic pressure, rapid tech change, and customers who are harder to read than ever. After dozens of conversations with executives, fresh consumer data, and time on the floor at events such as NRF, CES, and vendor showcases, here are my three takeaways for retail in 2026 on the consumer environment, Google search, and agentic AI solutions.
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When Things Go Wrong With A Commerce Task, Many Consumers Will Blame The Answer Engine
We asked consumers in the US, the UK, and Canada who they would hold responsible for issues when they use an answer engine to complete commerce-related tasks. Consumers might take personal responsibility for some issues (such as feeling that their prompts hadn’t been targeted enough) or might even hold the brand they ordered from responsible. […]
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