IDC’s latest FutureScape predictions for CMOs (pdf download) are largely correct. AI is becoming the primary interface between brands and customers. Decision cycles are compressing. Execution is fragmenting into automated systems and human oversight. Marketing is moving faster, becoming more complex, and demanding new forms of governance.

Where IDC is especially right is in recognizing acceleration as the defining condition of the next few years. Everything speeds up at once: insight generation, experimentation, personalization, and feedback. The old rhythms of planning and reflection no longer hold.

But this is also where something critical goes unexamined.

IDC treats acceleration as an operational challenge — a matter of architecture, skills, and governance. What it largely leaves unsaid is that acceleration first registers inside people, not systems. Before it becomes a dashboard issue, it becomes an emotional one.

As intelligence becomes abundant and instantaneous, human judgment does not automatically rise to a higher plane. Often, the opposite happens. Confidence erodes. People defer to outputs they don’t fully understand. Interpretation thins. Trust shifts from human sense-making to machine certainty.

IDC assumes that humans will smoothly transition “up the stack” — into strategy, creativity, ethics, and oversight. That assumption quietly depends on a human capacity that is never named: coherence. The ability to remain grounded in one’s judgment, connected to others, and aligned on meaning while operating at high speed.

Without that interior stability, higher-order roles don’t flourish. They hollow out.

The gap in IDC’s analysis is not a flaw; it’s an opportunity. Their forecasts describe what organizations must build. The unanswered question is whether the humans inside those systems can remain intact enough to inhabit the future being designed.

AI will continue to accelerate. That part is settled.

What remains open is whether organizations will invest not just in capability and governance, but in the emotional and cultural architecture that allows people to think, judge, and lead together under pressure.

That question — more than any prediction — will determine who actually succeeds.

See the full report here.