The thirty-ninth 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 Matt and Alan again this month, talking about new vendor profiles, a brand-new report on the AEC industry, and 4 key areas for agentic automation to focus on.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: New Vendor Profiles

It's time for new vendor profiles, and we've just published 6. In this podcast, Matt and Alan talk about 3 of them (when Dan joins Matt for the June edition, they'll cover the other three). This time, they discuss agentic automation and Hyland's content platform (and how it fits into their new strategy under their new leadership). Then, Papyrus's Owlfie conversation AI approach to automation, and finally, novel AI-led retail process automation from European start-up Duvo (whose profile is available to read for free on its website). The pair also hints at a number of related reports, including a market sizing report soon to come.

Topic 2: AEC Report

On top of those vendor profiles, we've also just released a new report on the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry and the technological approaches to managing the plethora of complex documents across a wide range of projects undertaken by the industry's piece-parts and processes. There's a blog post that explains the scope of the report both upfront and throughout the discussion. Alan decides that everyone should get access to the report and open-sources it on the fly. Matt also notes that there's a whole wealth of further AEC material to come from Deep Analysis over the next few months.

Topic 3: Runtimes and Processes

Last month you'll remember that Matt and Alan discussed the latest release of the Work Intelligence research and since, Matt has been writing a little about what the near-future looks like the all those runtimes and how agentic platforms start to fit within that future. Here he talks about 2 recent posts: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason". The second of these contains "4 potential points of value" that agentic automaton platforms need to fit in order to add real value: problem-solving, flexibility, inheritance, and fraternity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAElcD9k2w

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 5
New vendor profiles in a brief blog post: "Six New Reports. No Hype. Just the Good Stuff."
....and here's the one on Duvo, which you can read on their website for free right now.
Here's the blog post Alan wrote about the AEC report, which you can now also download for free.
Matt's 2 blog posts on automation, runtimes, and an agentic future: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason".
Finally, here's the blog post that Matt mentions in passing on the "elastic zone of plausibility".

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The thirty-eighth 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 Matt and Alan this month, celebrating the 3rd birthday of the pod (even if the episode numbers don't exactly add up), talking Salesforce, Work Intelligence and M&A.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: Salesforce Goes Headless

Starting off, Matt has remembered that it's the 3rd birthday of the pod, with the first episode being uploaded n the 19th April 2023 (just don't ask how come it's episode 38 when the pod has been running for 36 months). Alan has been in San Francisco at Salesforce TDX (the conference for Salesforce developers) and whilst he was there, he wrote a blog post about the announcements and Salesforce's technical progress, most notably the newly announced Headless 360. He explains the change in focus at the conference, from the core audience of Salesforce admins and Apex developers to increasingly opening up to developers that are not coming from a purely Salesforce background, in large part driven by Agentforce and Data 360. Matt points out that Headless 360 is an encapsulation of a technical approach, rather than a product and points to the 60+ MCP servers as the increase in potential complexity - as well as openness - for that extended developer community.

Topic 2: Work Intelligence 2026

Last month, we released the 4th edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, covering the period 2026-2031 (it's available right away for Deep Analysis subscribers as part of their cache of content, it's also available for non subscribers for one off purchase). If you're not familiar with Work Intelligence, there's a free primer from 2022 that's free to download for everyone. Here Matt summarises some of the content in the report, the projected value of the markets and the other details available in the report. Alan points out that even though the concept is now a few years old, it's now clear that the market is aligning with the basis of the world that we described in that initial report. Matt talks about some of the market growth data and then mentions that he's recently published an addendum to the report, which compares our market projections year-on-year. Finally Matt has some scary information about M&A data that's contained in certain other market reports - not written by Deep Analysis - that we've come across. Then there's some kind of related "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" chat.

Topic 3: M&A(&AI)

Whilst we're thinking about M&A, Matt has decided to mention one of the many pieces of content that Deep Analysis publishes, but sometimes forget to tell you all about. One such item is the quarterly M&A round up for the unstructured data automation market (i.e. the part of the market in which we specialise); who bought who and what market dynamics can be observed. This is available to all Deep Analysis subscribers, who get to see all the deals; large and small. In passing Alan mentions his blog post celebrating OpenText's new CEO's first day at his desk. Matt and Alan then go on to discuss how difficult to use the web as a reliable research tool (for rea

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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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