Company

IDC operates as the premier global provider of market intelligence and advisory services for information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. Through six decades of continuous research, they've accumulated terabytes of analyst-vetted data on software trends, vendor capabilities, and market behavior that forms the foundation for enterprise technology decisions.

The Challenge

IDC possessed 60 years of analyst-vetted research on software markets and vendor capabilities, but that intelligence remained trapped in reports and databases requiring manual interpretation. Software buyers still needed weeks of consultant-led evaluations to make vendor decisions, unable to leverage IDC's research in real time despite the emergence of AI tools. The challenge wasn't vision but execution—like 94% of business leaders citing talent constraints as their top barrier to AI innovation, IDC needed leaders with hands-on experience building production AI systems, not consultants delivering strategy decks. Traditional hiring timelines of 3-6 months to find and onboard senior product leaders felt impossibly slow when AI innovation was accelerating and competitors were already launching solutions. IDC needed experienced AI builders embedded in their organization within weeks who could rapidly ship a working product.

The Solution

Within weeks, A.Team embedded two senior leaders—a project-specific CEO (Jim Spare) and a Head of Product—who joined IDC's daily standups and took direct ownership of building the AI platform. The team moved fast: they delivered a working prototype in two months that transformed IDC's research into an intuitive, queryable format, proving the concept worked before IDC committed major resources. Both leaders integrated so seamlessly that IDC converted them to full-time employees, with Spare stepping into a Senior Vice President role to lead the product to market. With momentum building, IDC expanded the A.Team engagement to complete the product team—bringing on a Product Marketing Manager, a Product Manager, and two Designers to turn the prototype into a market-ready platform. The resulting product, IDC TechMatch, uses OpenAI's GPT-4o to process six decades of research and deliver personalized vendor recommendations through an AI chatbot that explains its reasoning across 30+ software categories. What made this approach work was A.Team's ability to deliver experienced builders who had shipped AI products before, not consultants who theorized about them—turning IDC's vision into a live platform in months instead of years.