SE5E03 - IDP Special Edition!

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.