5 insights from Forrester’s latest DAM trends report

Marketing and content teams are under growing pressure to produce, govern, and distribute content across more channels and regions than ever. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is expected to keep pace, but new research suggests most organizations are still working out what “keeping pace” actually requires.

Forrester’s June 2026 trends report, Digital Asset Management Anchors Modern Content Operations, draws on its Q3 2025 DAM Survey of 313 global decision-makers and interviews tied to The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management Systems, Q1 2026. Here are five Digital Asset Management trends from that research – plus one regulatory deadline our team is flagging alongside it.

1. Integration, not features, is now the top DAM priority

For years, DAM selection centered on storage capacity, search features, and file format support. That calculus has shifted.

According to Forrester’s Q3 2025 DAM Survey, nearly half of DAM decision-makers (47%) name ensuring their solution is well integrated with adjacent systems as a top priority for the next 12 months (Source: Forrester, 2026). That figure outranks every other stated priority, including evolving DAM for go-to-market strategy (41%) and extending DAM into creative operations (39%).

Forrester’s interviews with mature DAM programs describe the same pattern: leaders position DAM as the hub for intake, approvals, rights enforcement, and distribution into CMS, product information management, commerce, and campaign tools. Teams still relying on email and shared drives report the lowest adoption – DAM that sits apart from daily workflows gets bypassed, regardless of how strong its feature set looks on paper.

Separately, Forrester’s Enterprise Applications Software Survey, 2025 found that 29% of enterprise application decision-makers are expanding existing DAM implementations rather than replacing them (Source: Forrester, 2026). About one-third of decision-makers (31%) go further, expecting DAM to orchestrate workflows across multiple other systems – routing approvals, managing localization and reuse, and controlling distribution rather than acting as a passive endpoint.

2. Findability failures are eroding trust in DAM

A DAM system can hold every asset an organization owns and still fail at its core job if people can’t trust what they find in it.

Roughly two-thirds of DAM decision-makers (67%) report difficulty reusing, updating, or retiring existing content, which Forrester links directly to discovery and metadata gaps (Source: Forrester, 2026). The report frames this plainly: search failures become trust failures. When people can’t reliably locate the right asset, they recreate it from scratch or pull from unofficial sources – the exact behavior a DAM system exists to prevent.

Forrester’s interviews point to the fix: better findability depends less on search technology and more on upstream discipline – consistent taxonomy, naming conventions, and required metadata captured at the point of upload.

3. Governance pressure is rising fast

Nearly two-thirds of DAM decision-makers (64%) cite legal or regulatory compliance as a significant challenge, and about a third (36%) plan to prioritize expanding digital rights management in the next year (Source: Forrester, 2026). Interviews add an important nuance: even where automation exists, most organizations still rely on human oversight for brand and rights governance.

Forrester’s conclusion is that successful governance works as an operating model – with clear roles and workflows – rather than a technical checkbox. Adoption follows the same pattern: teams that invest in training, documentation, and simplified portal experiences see governance rules actually followed, not worked around.

4. AI adoption in DAM is being paced, not avoided

AI is reshaping DAM product roadmaps faster than most organizations can absorb it, and Forrester’s data shows this gap is by design rather than reluctance.

Well over half of DAM decision-makers (58%) cite challenges with AI integration strategy, and 41% point to organizational restrictions as a hindrance to AI adoption (Source: Forrester, 2026). Interviewees told Forrester they’re impatient for AI features, but they’re prioritizing a deliberate sequence: fixing metadata quality, taxonomy, and integration patterns before scaling automation on top of them.

That caution isn’t the same as disinterest. Roughly two-thirds of decision-makers (67%) expect AI use in DAM to increase over the next two years, particularly for discovery, content operations, and content generation.

Teams are testing AI tagging, visual search, and transformation in narrow contexts first, then pausing when accuracy, brand risk, or regulatory exposure becomes unclear. This is a readiness problem, not an ambition problem – organizations that treat metadata quality and taxonomy as prerequisites are best positioned to move past pilots once the guardrails are in place.

5. DAM investment is rising, but only operational impact will justify it

Eighty percent of businesses plan to increase DAM investment over the next two years, and some expect increases of more than 20% (Source: Forrester, 2026). That spending is arriving alongside real pressure to prove impact – not just capability on paper.

A clear majority of DAM decision-makers (63%) expect DAM optimization to meaningfully improve customer experience, and interviews link that outcome to end-to-end integration: time savings, higher reuse rates, faster launches, and lower compliance risk (Source: Forrester, 2026). Forrester’s recommendation to DAM leaders is to clarify the system’s role as the system of record, invest in stewardship and change management, and stabilize metadata and workflow foundations before scaling AI ambitions on top of them.

Forrester also flags architectural ambiguity as a recurring blocker: when DAM overlaps with other systems on discovery or asset adaptation, ownership gets murky and teams end up duplicating uploads across CMS, creative, and collaboration tools. Positioning DAM clearly as the system of record – rather than one repository among several – is what removes that friction.

Beyond Forrester’s data: the EU AI Act is an arriving compliance deadline

Forrester’s survey captures where DAM organizations stand today. It doesn’t cover a regulatory shift landing within weeks, so we’re adding it here alongside the five trends above – not as one of Forrester’s findings, but as our own perspective on what else 2026 planning needs to account for.

From August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act introduces transparency obligations for AI-generated or AI-manipulated content: end users must be able to tell when the content they’re viewing was substantially produced by AI (Source: EU Artificial Intelligence Act, Article 50).

The obligation applies regardless of where the agency or vendor producing the content is based, as long as that content reaches an EU audience. Penalties for non-compliance reach €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, and they apply to both the providers of AI tools and the organizations deploying AI-generated content in market – brands and their agencies, not only the software vendors.

For DAM and content teams, this turns AI labelling from a brand-safety preference into a governance requirement with a hard date attached. Systems that can already track what was AI-generated, AI-assisted, or fully human – and surface that at the point of publishing – have the shortest path to compliance.

What these Digital Asset Management trends mean going forward

Forrester’s 2026 trends report makes one thing clear: DAM’s biggest opportunities and failure points both sit outside the feature list. Integration depth, findability discipline, governance operating models, and provable operational impact determine whether a DAM investment pays off.

Alongside those five trends, the EU AI Act’s transparency deadline adds a new, non-negotiable line item for any brand producing AI-assisted content: knowing what’s AI-generated, and being able to prove it.

For teams weighing where to focus next, the report’s own guidance is a useful filter: prioritize connection over collection, and readiness over novelty. This is the same principle behind how Papirfly’s Enterprise DAM approach is built – embedding DAM into the systems and workflows content teams already rely on, rather than asking teams to work around another repository.

If you’re assessing where your own DAM setup stands against these trends, our related guide on building a system of action for content operations is a good next step.

See how DAM becomes a system of action

Explore what integration‑first DAM looks like in practice.

See how DAM becomes a system of action

Explore what integration‑first
DAM looks like in practice.

Explore the guide

Explore what integration‑first DAM looks like in practice.

Explore the guide

Explore the guide

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