IDC forecasts global revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, to reach US$432.8 billion, growing to 19.6% year over year in 2022. The market is expected to break the $500 billion mark in 2023.
Ritu Jyoti, group vice president, worldwide artificial intelligence (AI) and automation research at IDC says AI has emerged as the next major wave of innovation. AI solutions are currently focused on business process problems and range from human augmentation to process improvement to planning and forecasting, empowering superior decisioning and outcomes.
“Advancements in language, voice and vision technologies, and multi-modal AI solutions are revolutionizing human efficiencies. Overall, AI plus human ingenuity is the differentiator for enterprises to scale and thrive in the era of compressed digital transformation," she posits.
Where the money is going
Among the three technology categories, AI Software will see its share of spending decline slightly in 2022 as spending for AI Hardware and Services grows more quickly. This trend will continue into 2023.
Overall, AI Services is forecast to deliver the fastest spending growth over the next five years with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% while the CAGR for AI Hardware will be 20.5%.
Software bonanza
In the AI Software category, AI Applications accounted for 47% of spending in the first half of 2021, followed by AI System Infrastructure Software with around 35% share.
In terms of growth, AI Platforms are expected to perform the best with a five-year CAGR of 34.6%. The slowest growing segment will be AI System Infrastructure Software with a five-year CAGR of 14.1%.
Within the AI Applications segment AI ERM is forecast to grow the fastest over the next several years relative to AI CRM and the rest of AI Applications. Among all the named software markets published in the Tracker, AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to see the fastest growth with a five-year CAGR of 38.9%.
AI services
In the AI Services category, AI IT Services enjoyed 20.4% year-over-year growth in the first half of 2021 with worldwide spending reaching $18.4 billion.
This growth is forecast to improve to 22% in 2022 and remain there through the end of the forecast period. AI Business Services are not far behind in terms of growth with a five-year CAGR of 21.9%. By 2025, IDC expects overall AI Services spending to reach $52.6 billion.
Jennifer Hamel, IDC research manager for analytics and intelligent automation services adds that AI remains a key driver of IT investment, which in turn boosts spending on related services to ensure sustainable adoption at scale.
"Client demand for expertise in developing production-grade AI solutions drives IT services expansion, while the need to establish the right organisation, governance, business process, and talent strategies spurs spending on business services," she continues.
Don’t forget the hardware
Relative to Software and Services, the AI Hardware category grew the most in terms of market share in the first half of 2021 with a jump of 0.5% share. It is forecast to reach 5% market share in 2022 with year-over-year growth of 24.9%.
AI Storage saw stronger growth relative to AI Server during the first half of 2021. However, this trend will be reversed in 2022 with AI Server expected to see 26.1% growth compared to 19.7% growth for AI Storage. In terms of spending share, AI Server holds the lion's share of the category at over 80%.
"Of all the spending in the various AI market segments, AI Hardware is by far the smallest," said Peter Rutten, research vice president for performance-intensive computing at IDC.
He posits that what this should tell organisations is that nickel-and-diming purpose-built hardware for AI is counterproductive, especially given the fast-growing compute demand from increasing AI model sizes and complexities.
