IDC – Agentic AI in Türkiye: 7 Shifts for CIOs to Watch
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Leadership Strategies
August 7, 2026
3 min
More than 400 CIOs and technology leaders gathered in Sapanca for the 17th IDC CIO Summit Türkiye, and the message was clear: the agent economy isn’t coming, it’s already here. IDC’s Eren Eser breaks down the seven shifts now defining how Turkish enterprises lead, govern, and compete.
Every year, the IDC CIO Summit Türkiye takes the temperature of the country’s technology leadership. On May 6–7, 2026, during the 17th edition of the summit in Sapanca, more than 400 CIOs, chief technology officers (CTOs), and digital leaders gathered under a single banner called “The Rise of Agentic Systems.” The mood in the room told the real story. Türkiye is not preparing for the agent economy; it is already inside it.
The numbers behind that shift are hard to ignore. IDC projects more than a billion AI agents in production by 2029, generating 217 billion actions and 3.7 trillion tokens every day at a delivery cost above $68 billion. Global AI spending is set to climb from $940 billion in 2026 to $2.1 trillion by 2029. The opportunity is obvious. The question that ran through every session was more grounded: What does it actually take for a Turkish enterprise to operate, govern, and compete when the workforce includes software that acts on its own?
The summit confirmed that Türkiye’s technology leadership community is firmly inside the agent economy, not preparing for it. Foundational investments in sovereign cloud, hyperscaler regions, AI-ready data platforms, and responsible AI frameworks are being committed to at scale. The question is no longer whether to act, but how to sequence the work.
In Türkiye, the CIO is becoming the chief value architect. CIOs who continue to lead with technical key performance indicators (KPIs) alone will lose ground to peers who lead with business outcomes (revenue uplift, margin protection, customer experience, and resilience) and treat technology metrics as enablers.
The CTO is becoming the chief transformation officer. The CTO title is increasingly a misnomer for what the role demands. The CTO mandate has evolved toward a chief transformation officer remit, with technology leadership evaluated on continuous business outcomes reported in real time at the C-suite. The most effective leaders will own transformation end to end.
Foundations, including data, infrastructure, and sovereignty, are the new battleground. The expanding footprint of hyperscaler-grade local infrastructure in Türkiye materially changes the latency, sovereignty, and cost calculus. IDC expects accelerated repatriation onto local sovereign and hybrid platforms over the next 12–18 months, with platformization (AI development platforms, data hubs, and low-code governance) outpacing point AI tooling investments.
Agentic AI is in production, and governance is the hard part. The next two years will be defined less by model selection and more by orchestration, observability, agent identity, model armor, and the human–AI interface. Enterprises that succeed will redesign roles, controls, and accountability rather than layer agents on top of unchanged processes.
Responsible AI is an operating discipline, not a slide. Mandatory AI literacy programs, continuous model life-cycle management, and use case–level authorization frameworks point to where the market is going: dynamic, embedded guardrails aligned with both personal data protection law and incoming local AI regulation. IDC recommends that CIOs in Türkiye treat responsible AI as a design constraint upstream of every initiative, not a compliance review at the end.
Talent and HR are now part of the technology stack. Bringing business unit shadow IT teams into formal partnership, running structured AI literacy programs, and rethinking IT–HR collaborations are no longer side projects. They are the operating model of the agent economy enterprise.
Resilience and innovation must be pursued together. Türkiye operates in an environment in which energy, geopolitics, currency, and demographics all introduce volatility. The CIO’s job is to design technology architectures (hybrid, sovereign, observable, and governed) that absorb shocks while still compounding business value.
Eren Eser – Associate Research Director, IDC Türkiye
Eren Eser is a seasoned analyst with over 22 years of experience in the ICT sector. As a core member of IDC’s Global Services Insights team, he directs all ICT research and consulting engagements in Türkiye and leads IDC’s sustainability…
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