The thirty-seventh episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts, and in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). Dan's back for an IDP special with Matt this month, focusing on the latest edition of the IDP Market Analysis and discussing this year's top trends.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: Agentic AI Will Transform IDP

To kick off, Dan explains the background to the IDP Market Analysis - now in its fourth edition - and that it provides an overview of how the market is performing and how it's looking towards the future, and, in the process, uncovers trends from both vendors and customers alike. Dan goes on to explain that the increase in the use of agents - now 66% of vendors saying that they are present in their product set - is helping those vendors move beyond being a single part of a pipeline process and to take on larger parts of those processes (and in the process, increase their potential for value generation). Dan also points out that 80% of vendors are now using foundation LLMs in their products; a state of affairs he predicted and is now pleased to be able to point to as a fact.

Topic 2: IDP Is the Low-Hanging Fruit for ROI

The second trend from the report is that IDP is ROI gold. Dan points out that people forget the I in IDP really means AI (which has been around much longer than the transformers that underpin LLMs) and also reminds people that IDP's transactional nature makes it well-suited to finding investment models that generate returns. Using data from our 2025 IDP MMI survey, Dan discussed how reducing processing time is the biggest measurement that customers use for IDP project success (51%), with straight-through processing success - where processes don't require human intervention, the long-time holy grail for IDP - at 47%. Indeed, Dan points out that the simplest way for anyone to find a quick ROI for AI in their organization is to look at IPD projects, especially as Matt points out, transactionally, these processes are often mature, well-understood, and have known cost bases. Finally, Dan points out that there's a potential reckoning coming as true LLM pricing becomes clear once any price discounting or token bundling from the foundation model providers ends.

Topic 3: Mo’ Projects? Mo’ IDP!

Cheating a little bit as Dan has 4 trends in his report, but we only ever have 3 topics on the pod, Matt's smooshed 2 of them together as "Mo' Projects? Mo' IDP!"; firstly, looking at the apparent boom in IDP projects, first identified within that 2025 MMI research, where that boom is largely made up of replacement projects for previous IDP platforms (legacy beware!). Matt points out that the double-digit growth projected for IDP through the analysis period should be contrasted with general IT inflation running at 5%; it's a strongly growing market segment. The second part of this topic is that there are more IDP vendors than ever; Dan's now managing a database of 500 individual vendors at the time of recording. The report itself has 24% more vendors than the 2024 edition and a number of interesting insights into revenue trends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_eCUOJUujY

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 3
The announcement blog post for the new IDP Market Analysis and the page where the report can be purchased (Deep Analysis customers receive this as part of their annual subscription).
Our 2026 Predictions download (in case you missed it).
The two-part (free) agents reports: AI Agents: What They Are, How They Work, and Where Organizations Might Best Use Them, and AI Agents Part 2: The Evolution from Single Systems to Complex Process Orchestration
Pod Episode Series 4, Episode 9, where Matt and Dan discuss the MMI IDP survey in detail.

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30 mins of biting the hand that feeds us - demystifying and debunking the enterprise software market.

The thirty-sixth (not the thirty-fifth, as Matt says) episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts, and in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). Matt and Alan are in the chairs, and they catch up on some recent blog posts on how software isn't dead (again), how crazy promises on AI's future are not helping things, and celebrate that Deep Analysis is now in its 10th year of operation.

In this month’s episode:

Software is Dead. Again.

It's been a year, but apparently software is deal again. And only 12 months since it was last dead. Here, Alan and Matt discuss the recent blog post "The 'Death of SaaS' Narrative is a Luxury the Enterprise Cannot Afford" that Alan posted in response to a lot of discussion about how current models for procuring software are over, and also, whilst we were there, software licensing is over too. The reality, of course, is somewhat different, and having discussed this, they touch on Matt's recent post "Beware the promises made by blank sheets of paper," where there are reminders that enterprises are complicated, and also, as a result, some companies are choosing to hold AI at the perimeter to keep things simple.

Stupid AI Predictions

Noting that software vendors usually rely on industry analysts to make really dumb predictions, but this time it's Microsoft (again). In an interview with the FT, head of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman suggested that many while-collar roles will be entirely automated by AI in 12 to 18 months. Matt in particularly is very annoyed by this suggestion, describing it as "deeply dishonest", and then explaining why. He also points out that Suleyman's hiring was noted in a previous blog post of his from almost 2 years ago, in which he also suggested watching the "cash at hand" figure for software vendors. That seems to be now attracting a bit more attention. Finally, he also points out that Jad Tarifi of Integral AI has said some equally dumb things, such as that doctors (or lawyers) shouldn't be trained because AI will overtake their knowledge during training.

Deep Analysis is (almost) 10

Finally, Alan's written about how Deep Analysis is in its 10th year of operation, some of the areas where we've led thinking ahead of the game, and why we do things the way we do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=darqcAv-Agw

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 2
Alan's blog post "The 'Death of SaaS' Narrative is a Luxury the Enterprise Cannot Afford".
Matt's accompanying blog post: "Beware the promises made by blank sheets of paper."
The FT interview with Mustafa Suleyman (subscription required)
"Ex–Googler says degrees in law and medicine are

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The thirty-fifth episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). It's a new year and the beginning of series 5 (despite what Matt says in the intro to this episode, because he lost count) and with Matt and Alan in the chairs, they catch-up on some recent blog posts on the need for specificity, not to ignore paper, how there's no new cash in IT and how to make your Information Management skill invaluable in AI projects.

In this month’s episode:

Specificity & Elephants

Alan's kicked off the new year with a blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant", which is a result of him pondering about 2025 over the festive period. First is the need to continue to focus on the specifics of the outcomes from technology, rather that the technology horizontal markets that might provide them. Focus on the fixes, the bottlenecks in the real world. Second is that there remains a lot more paper in the world that technologists. Our own quantitative research data points not only to a lot of paper being used in processes but also to that amount of paper likely to increase (you can read about this in MMI reports that are available here and here). Matt reminds us that the sole superpower that analysts have is the ability to talk to people.

Beyond the walled gardens

Matt's published a pair of blog posts; at the tail end of last year "Beyond the walled gardens; can business applications break out to be the ultimate agentic orchestrators?" and just this month a follow-up "The lengthy hikes awaiting AI and automation in 2026". As he starts to update the data model for the 2026 edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, he's pondering how AI-native, business application vendors and existing automation vendors are looking to develop their businesses against an tiny inflation in IT budgets (and big renewal numbers being demanded by the core suppliers). The pair also discuss maybe why there's been a lot of big M&A for security software firms lately.

How to not lose the AI opportunity

Finally, Alan wrote an Information Management focused blog post in December "How to not lose the opportunity that AI offers Information Management". Here he discusses the ways in which IM needs to inveigle itself into AI projects to be the good stewards of data; "own the data, own the data sourcing, the cleansing pipeline, and the metadata framework for the vector store".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZKtMA72r5A

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 1

Alan's blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant" on the need for extreme specificity and that paper isn't going away.
There a couple of MMI reports that talk about the amount of paper in contemporary processes;
Market Momentum Index: Intelligent Document

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