Customer Analytics Technologies

What happened between two editions to turn Forrester's strongest criticism into its highest praise? The Forrester Wave: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2026, is published, and that question is the fastest way into it.

In the Q2 2024 edition, the report warned buyers not to be beguiled by genAI window dressing, and it told Adobe that its heavy focus on generative features was what kept it out of the top tier. Two years later Adobe is a Leader, and the report's own framing has shifted to match: the market has moved from static, retrospective insights to dynamic, in-the-moment orchestration.

The window dressing became the window. That is the story of the Q2 2026 Wave, scored across eight providers and thirty two criteria, announced in May 2026.

The scorecard in question: The Forrester Wave: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2026

Two placements are confirmed from the new field of eight.

SAS held its position as a Leader, and Forrester's opening line about it is the one every other vendor in the category would pay to own: "SAS remains the leader in analytical depth." The evidence runs through segmentation, churn prevention, and customer lifetime value, with the highest possible scores across customer data models, propensity modeling, churn analysis, decisioning, optimization, model monitoring, and responsible AI, plus the top strategy marks for vision, roadmap, and community.

The decisioning detail deserves the emphasis. Forrester credits SAS with making complex, multistep decisions transparent and governable through visual logic, and its responsible AI capabilities carry the same weight: autogenerated model cards, flexible fairness definitions, governance across the model lifecycle. Add the agentic layer, multiagent architectures and a no-code Retrieval Agent Manager, and the picture is clear. Analytical depth in 2026 means a decision an auditor can follow.

Adobe joined SAS as a Leader, and its promotion is the finding of this edition. Forrester cited enterprise-scale profile unification that stitches interactions across channels, anonymous sessions included, with Customer Journey Analytics working on raw event-level data rather than session aggregates, and derived fields that let users build custom logic directly on the profile for activation. The roadmap is openly AI-first, including openness through the model context protocol, and a Data Insights Agent that answers analytics questions in plain language with statistical explanations attached.

The third publicly confirmed placement is Treasure AI, the rebranded Treasure Data, as a Strong Performer with the highest possible scores in pricing flexibility and transparency, innovation, customer profiles, customized analyses, and customer data sources and type. The full 2026 roster sits behind Forrester's paywall; the placements made public so far are the two Leaders and Treasure AI.

The 2024 baseline, all eleven of them

To see what changed, hold the new edition against the last one. The Q2 2024 Wave evaluated eleven providers against thirty four criteria. The full field is known.

Two Leaders: SAS, the only pure-play analytics vendor in the field, whose references uniformly expressed extreme satisfaction, and Salesforce, whose Data Cloud earned credit for market-leading profile resolution and whose Einstein tools were positioned for organizations that are data rich and insights poor.

Four Strong Performers: Adobe, held back by that genAI focus; Microsoft, whose Azure ML custom modeling was called the real star and whose natural-language segmentation was ahead of the field, with advice to pivot from genAI upgrades toward its own predictive AI; Medallia, strongest on unstructured data and real-time call center audio, with unlimited seat licensing and a thin partner ecosystem; and Treasure Data, whose patent-pending clustering segmentation approach Forrester said glitters, with no unstructured data processing to back it.

Five Contenders completed the field: Amplitude, strong on journey analytics and bandit-style optimization, with a self-healing products vision that risked alienating marketers; FICO, with optimization capabilities few vendors can match and an interface the report called intimidating; Zeta, a data asset of more than 235 million individuals and a myopic focus on marketing; Oracle, which views its Unity platform as a CDP first and analytics as an afterthought; and Qualtrics, with best-in-class NLP and the standard analytics tooling missing.

The 2024 buyer guidance is the part to keep. Avoid being beguiled by genAI window dressing. Seek strong NLP for unstructured data. Consider industry-specific data models for time to value. And close the decision gap by favoring vendors that deliver propensity scores and proactive segment identification, not just reports.

The critique that expired

Now read that guidance against the 2026 placements. The vendor Forrester publicly told to temper its genAI enthusiasm is a Leader. The market framing the firm chose for the new edition is orchestration, in the moment, powered by exactly the technology it warned about.

This is not analyst inconsistency. It is what happens when a critique does its job. Forrester's 2024 warning separated vendors using genAI as a surface treatment from vendors wiring it into decisioning. Adobe spent two years on the second half: raw event-level analytics, derived fields, an agent that explains its own statistics. The 2026 Leader placement is the receipt.

The honest limitation for buyers follows directly. Analyst critiques are perishable. The report that told you what to avoid in 2024 can only tell you what was true then. Microsoft was told to pivot from genAI to predictive AI, Medallia was told its analytics were thin, Oracle was told responsible AI was missing. Some of those vendors will have fixed the critique by the next edition, and one of them will be the next Adobe. The scorecard cannot tell you which one. The vendor's own release history since 2024 can.

What analytical depth means now

SAS kept its Leader seat, and its citations define the category's new center of gravity. The praise is not for dashboards. It is for decisioning made transparent through visual logic, for model cards that generate themselves, for fairness definitions a business user can adjust, for governance that spans the model lifecycle, for agentic architectures that can assemble their own retrieval.

None of that is about looking back at customers. It is about acting on them and being able to prove, afterward, why the system did what it did.

For European buyers this is the part with legal teeth. Model documentation is moving from a differentiator to an artifact you may have to produce on demand, and the vendors that score highest on responsible AI are the ones whose paperwork you inherit. The 2026 criteria make that explicit. The audit trail is now a feature of the product, not a byproduct of the contract.

Three questions the report makes urgent

Can the vendor show you the audit trail of one real decision, end to end? Not a demo flow. A production decision, with the data lineage, the model version, and the fairness check attached. If the answer is a screenshot of a dashboard, you are buying the 2024 product.

What did the vendor fix since the last edition, and does it admit what it was told to fix? Every 2024 critique is a public to-do list. Ask each shortlisted vendor to walk the 2024 report's cautions against its own release notes. The vendor that can do this without flinching is the next Adobe. The one that cannot is the next casualty.

Who carries the accountability for the model when something goes wrong? Responsible AI is now a scored criterion, but scoring is not liability. The vendor's model cards do not transfer the obligation. In Europe, assume the regulator will want your documentation, not the vendor's, and buy accordingly.

The category has finished changing what it sells. The 2026 Wave scores decision engines with paperwork attached. The 2024 Wave scored analytics tools. Read the old scorecard for history. Read the new one as a map of who moved.

The providers side of this same broader market went through its own version of this shift: see Customer Analytics Service Providers, where the 2025 Wave dropped the word "providers" for "services" the same period decision engines replaced analytics tools here.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.