Precisely Named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software

Guest authors:

Marlanna Harringon, Senior Research Analyst, Data Platforms, IDC 

Stewart Bond, Vice President, Data Intelligence and Integration Software, IDC
 

From Governance Tooling to AI Infrastructure

For most of the last decade, data catalogs and governance tools sat at the edge of the enterprise architecture: useful for compliance and documentation, but rarely central to strategy. AI has pulled them to the center. When a model or an agent is only as trustworthy as the data behind it, the platform that catalogs, governs, and delivers that data stops being an operational afterthought and becomes a decision leadership has to get right. 
 

In IDC’s 2025 Office of the CDO Survey, 86% of organizations reported increasing their focus on data management specifically to support generative AI and agentic AI. The budget and the executive attention are following the same path, because the layer that assembles and delivers trusted data is increasingly where AI programs either succeed or stall. This is no longer a governance-only conversation. It is an AI readiness conversation, and it is against this backdrop that IDC positioned Precisely in the Leaders category of the 2026 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software Vendor Assessment.

The Trends Reshaping Data Intelligence

The 2026 IDC MarketScape evaluates 15 vendors and, across a diverse field, finds a notable degree of strategic alignment.

Every vendor described a plan to embed generative AI and, increasingly, agentic AI into cataloging, quality, and governance workflows, and nearly all now expose governed metadata to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol or an equivalent open interface.

The clearest signal in the market is the rise of the digital data steward: agents that take on the slow, manual work of documenting assets, drafting quality rules, and proposing remediation, with their reasoning surfaced for human approval. The real constraint most organizations face isn’t a shortage of tools but a shortage of people and hours.  Automation capable of executing stewardship work at scale is fast becoming table stakes.

A parallel shift is happening around openness, as data products and contracts are increasingly built on open specifications, and lineage and storage interoperate through standards such as OpenLineage and Apache Iceberg. This leaves buyers materially less exposed to lock-in than they were even two years ago, and moves the real separation between platforms to architecture and native depth. 

Looking ahead, two directions are pulling the market forward:

1. AI and model governance, which is growing out of established data governance practices as model inventories, risk tiering, and drift monitoring move from road map into native functions.
2. Unstructured content, as vendors extend data intelligence to bring documents, images, and other dark data into the same governed catalog that already holds structured data.

Together, they mark the shift from governing the data organizations already understand to governing everything AI now reaches.

Underneath every one of these shifts is a single job to be done: supplying context.

IDC treats context not as a separate market but as a new use case that data intelligence exists to serve. An agent that does not know what a dataset means, where it came from, or whether it can be trusted, will produce confident but ungoverned, and quite possibly incorrect, answers. Data intelligence is, ultimately, what turns raw metadata into context and reliably delivers it to both people and machines.

Why the Decision Now Drives AI ROI 

The stakes are measurable, and the link runs directly from intelligence about your data to the data products built on top of it.  

Cataloging, lineage, quality, and governance enable a team to turn a raw dataset into a data product with accountable ownership, discoverable access, and a defined purpose.  

IDC research directly links data product maturity to AI outcomes. Organizations with high data product maturity are 5.5 times more likely to have generative AI in production and 4.6 times more likely to have agentic AI in production than their low-maturity peers, and they report roughly three times the financial and operational improvement.  

That is why selecting a data intelligence platform is now a material driver of AI return on investment, not a strategic afterthought. 

Precisely was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape assessment for both its current capabilities and forward-looking strategy against the criteria that matter most as the market shifts toward AI-ready data and trusted context. Read an excerpt of the 2026 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software Vendor Assessment for IDC’s full view of the market and methodology.