According to the forecasts of the IDC consultancy, the investment in systems based on Artificial Intelligence (of software, hardware and services) will reach 118,000 million dollars in 2022 and will exceed 300,000 million dollars by 2026. Adding Artificial Intelligence to a wide variety of products will lead to an annual growth rate of 26.5% from 2022 to 2026. That is four times the annual growth rate of overall IT spending for the same period, figured at 6.3%.
In the last two years the use of Artificial Intelligence in systems has accelerated, and organizations are now more willing to take advantage of the efficiency benefits and enhanced capabilities offered by Artificial Intelligence systems. These can support human-friendly tasks, and enhance their capabilities with technologies like conversational AI and image processing, used to interact with customers and prospects in ways that people are ready to accept.
The growth observed in the use of Artificial Intelligence in all sectors demonstrates its importance for companies in the future. Banking and retail are the two sectors that will register the largest investments in AI throughout the analyzed period. Together, both sectors will account for approximately a quarter of all global spending on Artificial Intelligence.
The third sector in importance in the use of Artificial Intelligence is that of professional services, with more than 10% share of the total investment. It is followed by discrete and process manufacturing. Professional Services will also be one of those registering the highest growth in investment in Artificial Intelligence systems: 28.7% annual increase. It is only outperformed by the media sector, with 29.8% annual growth in spending on AI systems.
Among the 30 use cases for Artificial Intelligence systems that IDC has identified, Augmented Customer Service Agents will receive the most investment in the analyzed period, with an investment that will reach 35.9 billion dollars in 2026. Although it will be the main use case only in two sectors, retail and telecommunications, these agents are an area of investment for any sector. Other top AI use cases include recommendation and augmentation of sales processes, fraud analysis and investigation, and program advisors and recommenders. By 2026, these four use cases will account for more than 38% of all global spending on AI.
The United States will be the main market for Artificial Intelligence systems, since more than 50% of global spending on AI systems will come from that country until 2026. Retail and banking will be the industries that will invest the most in AI in the US. Western Europe will concentrate more than 20% of IT spending worldwide and will be the area with the highest spending on AI in the coming years, with an annual growth rate of 30% up to 2026. China will be the third largest market for AI investment, with one of the slowest growth rates: 21.1%.
Mike Glennon, IDC Market Research Analyststresses that «Artificial Intelligence is not the future, it is now. Most IT vendors have adopted AI solutions to complement their products, and are enhancing them to make Artificial Intelligence crucial to their success. These vendors who now only consider AI are at a considerable disadvantage compared to IT vendors who have AI-based products already in production, and AI is becoming crucial to the capabilities of many products.«.
As this analyst has pointed out, «three of the top use cases are sales-centric, showing that those adopting AI are doing so to grow their business significantly and with a strong focus on customers and sales, at a time when which the economy is struggling. The use of Artificial Intelligence in companies is moving from being simply a way to save costs to a strong component of business growth, which shows the increasing maturity of AI as an IT solution in a wide variety of systems.«.
