IDC MarketScape 2024 Highlights the Rise of Decision Intelligence

The decision intelligence (DI) market is rapidly expanding as businesses across all industries become increasingly decision-driven. This growth is a response to necessity, driven by the need to manage the complex decisions arising from massive data accumulation and advanced technologies.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) research, over the past 30 years, spending on all types of "big data” analytics, and AI solutions has been increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5%. This equates to about $2 trillion in spending over this period.¹

There are several trends particularly contributing to this expansion: Notably, the proliferation of AI models have allowed more and more organizations to collect their data and prepare it for meaningful use; in addition, a growing number of businesses are starting to understand the importance of DI, and investing in both data management technologies and data professionals in order to gain value from their data.

Despite this growth, choosing the right DI tools can be a challenge. In order to better connect enterprises with the providers who can best support their workflows, the IDC recently released a report, The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Decision Intelligence Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment,  which provides an in-depth evaluation of vendors in the market , in addition to highlighting DI trends and challenges and the growing demand for solutions that enable scalable, automated decision-making.

The expanding market opportunity for decision intelligence

 We’re in a period of data explosion; as of 2023, some 90% of companies were prioritizing data initiatives. And with good reason—a recent McKinsey study showed that companies that leveraged data analytics were orders of magnitude ahead of their competitors in a slew of tactical and strategic KPIs. 

With growing reliance on Big Data and increasing complexity and frequency of business decisions, particularly as today’s AI tools enable the harnessing and synthesis of ever more data, companies need more sophisticated platforms that go beyond traditional analytics. They need—and are looking to allocate significant resources towards—DI tools that will allow them to make complex business decisions at scale, and to automate with precision technology aspects of decision-making that were previously human-driven (even as they still rely on human oversight).

Business leaders understand that DI, as a category, is essential for future proofing operations and improving business outcomes. In fact, IDC predicts that, “by 2027, enterprise intelligence leaders will replace their homegrown decisioning solutions with those built on commercial decision intelligence platforms, accelerating their decision velocity by 2x."²

Why the IDC MarketScape Report matters

The reportuses the IDC MarketScape methodology to evaluate vendors in the worldwide decision intelligence software platforms market. The IDC MarketScape’s thorough evaluation methodology provides an objective view of vendor strengths, capabilities, and challenges, and offers enterprise leaders guidance on making the right technological investments for their businesses in an increasingly crowded playing field.

Key trends in the decision intelligence landscape

Within the IDC MarketScape report, certain trends for both vendor and customers in the current DI solution marketplace were surfaced:

• Generative AI: Decision intelligence uses AI to automate aspects of decision-making, and to enable users to determine whether human oversight is required (based on the complexity of that decision.) Therefore, while “traditional” predictive AI capabilities continue to be incorporated into these new applications, vendors have—in response to customer demand and interest—been adding functionalities around generative AI (GenAI) that would pertain to either specific roles (i.e., developer or user) or specific use cases.

• Low code/no code capabilities: Vendors are extremely concerned with ease of use within this space, and rightly so, as many customers highlighted the need for direct support from the vendor or their patterns in decision design. While investments are being made around low-code/no-code capabilities (requiring less reliance on outside technical teams), there remains a need for more support and training, as vendors expand their use case capabilities around data-driven decision-making.

• Scalability and flexibility: Vendors are now offering a range of deployment options for DI solutions, from on-premises to cloud, in order to support use cases that require customers to adhere to stringent data regulatory requirements or industry standards.

Quantexa’s position in the IDC MarketScape

The IDC MarketScape report positioned Quantexa in the “Leaders Category” due to the strength of our DI solution. In particular, the report noted, “The platform leverages entity resolution and knowledge graph capabilities to create a unified view of entities and contextual features for machine learning.”

The report noted, “Quantexa also offers prepackaged solutions to add additional vertical-specific business value to the decision workflow. Users tend to fall within the banking and government sectors, however, the vendor highlighted customers within insurance, healthcare as well as technology, media, and communications verticals.”

The report added, “Consistent client feedback around entity resolution given the volume of enterprise data that needs to be ingested for decision-making and strong integration around external and internal data sources as well as automation.”

The future of decision intelligence

Not only will investment in DI solutions continue to ramp up, but it will also expand to an array of new markets. The IDC MarketScape report notes that complex decision-making is becoming pervasive within all different industries; consequently, vendors are rolling out DI solution use cases across increasingly diverse lines of business. 

Moreover, DI vendors including Quantexa will continue to make use of AI; the IDC MarketScape report finds that many are actively expanding their platforms with features like generative AI, as well as improved process and decision orchestration tools. 

Finally, the IDC MarketScape notes that not only the strength of the technology, but of vendor partnerships, is crucial for implementing and scaling decision intelligence capabilities—not only in diverse business areas where new DI use cases are being rolled out, but in areas that have more traditionally relied on DI and data-driven decisioning.

If you’d like to learn more about the findings of the IDC MarketScape report, and about why Quantexa was recognized , please download the excerpt here.  

Note:

¹ Source: IDC, A Case for Decision Intelligence: From "What Data Is Needed?" to "What Decisions Need to Be Made?", doc # US50788523, June 2003.

² Source:  IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Enterprise Intelligence 2024 Predictions, doc # US51293423, October 2023.

IDC named Quantexa a Leader in Decision Intelligence