DEEPZERO (02723.HK): Named an IDC Global Agentic Marketing Leader, as Enterprise AI Competition Shifts to Operating Results

NewTimeSpace News: In September 2026, IDC published the IDC MarketScape assessment of worldwide B2C enterprise agentic marketing, in which DEEPZERO (stock code: 02723.HK) entered the Leaders category and became the only Chinese company among the vendors listed in the report. Over the past two years, the most watched question about enterprise AI was whether it could generate content; as large models have become a baseline capability, competition at the application layer is turning to another question: whether AI can enter a company's real business, take part in judgement, execution and review, and have an impact on operating results.

The subject of the IDC assessment is not all marketing software that uses large models, but platforms able to create, deploy and manage marketing agents and let them execute tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously in real business environments. A product in scope must connect enterprise data, marketing channels and business systems, support multi-step, multi-agent workflows, and provide production deployment, governance, audit, human-machine collaboration and human override mechanisms; Copilots that only generate content, deliver data insights or complete a single task do not fall within IDC's definition of an agentic marketing platform. This standard corresponds to a change in the buyer's perspective: when buying marketing AI, enterprises have moved from asking how smart the model is to asking whether it can run reliably, whether problems can be traced and whether the results it brings can be measured. Generating a piece of copy solves a content production problem; identifying audiences from customer data, judging the moment to reach them, designing marketing paths, calling channel systems to complete delivery and then adjusting strategy based on conversion results is participation in enterprise decision-making.

DEEPZERO was founded in 2009 and its long-term accumulation centres on complex decisions in marketing, sales and customer operations, with data and algorithm assets built around customer data, marketing automation, advertising delivery and performance optimisation; Deep Agent, launched in February 2025, reorganised those existing capabilities into an agent system for enterprise decision-making. According to the IDC report, Deep Agent covers six decision domains - product innovation, market entry, social marketing, advertising, sales and customer service, and CRM - includes more than 30 specialised agents, and uses a dual-layer architecture combining large language models with proprietary domain machine learning technology. AI VOC, AI Consumer, AI Survey, AI Persona, AI Ad Campaign Manager and AI Sales Assistant correspond respectively to consumer feedback analysis, user insight, market research, user profiling, advertising delivery and sales support. In the case of an automobile brand, the store visit rate of high-propensity users rose to about 2.7 times.

Huang Xiaonan said in an interview that what companies really need to solve is an operating question such as which products should be pushed to which of one million members and at what time, and she compared large models to a newly graduated PhD: broad in knowledge, but not necessarily understanding a particular company's customers, processes and historical data. This is also why DEEPZERO insists on combining large models with domain models: repurchase probability, conversion probability, churn risk and budget performance in marketing decisions require industry data, enterprise data and business feedback accumulated over a long period, and cannot rely on general language capability alone. The company's business is therefore divided into two ends: agent products for internal enterprise processes at one end, and agent-centred marketing services at the other; problems encountered in service in turn drive platform iteration, while improvements in platform capability support the scaling of services.

In IDC's global assessment, DEEPZERO appeared in the same market research alongside international vendors including Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Under global enterprise software standards, the comparisons its products face include whether they can connect complex systems, handle real data, establish governance mechanisms and keep running inside a client organisation. Operating data provides another reference point: in the first half of 2026, DEEPZERO recorded revenue of RMB 398.2 million, up 43.6% year on year, and profit for the period of RMB 8.195 million, up 125.2% year on year; the company has now been profitable for three consecutive years and listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May this year. IDC also pointed out that agentic marketing is still at an early stage and that enterprise buyers are still working out its budget ownership, ROI measurement and organisational impact. For a company based in China and developing for the global market, how to expand global market coverage, keep proving commercial returns and build long-term trust in accuracy, compliance and brand safety remain questions for the next stage. When the assessment was published, less than six months had passed since DEEPZERO's Hong Kong listing; the ticket into the Leaders category marks a change in competitive position, while the open questions flagged by IDC will determine whether that position endures.