According to a new study from ABI Research, annual global sales of dual-mode mobile phones -- which can connect to either a conventional cellular service or a Wi-Fi network -- are likely to exceed 100 million during the final year of this decade. Such dual-mode handsets have been virtually unknown to consumers until now, and have not penetrated the enterprise space to any degree either. But according to ABI, some of the leaders of global telecom -- notably British Telecom and Korea Telecom -- plan to offer dual-mode services by the end of 2005. That could start a very large ball rolling. Though the full spectrum of capabilities won't appear in the first generation of products, when these services are mature you will be able to start a phone call at home (where your phone connects to your residential Wi-Fi network and then to your broadband Voice over IP phone service), continue it in your car (where the phone switches to your cellular provider's network), and wind it up at work, where the phone once more switches to your organization's 802.11 LAN, and VoIP.
What started as a convenience tool for developers writing faster software boilerplate code has evolved into something considerably more consequential: an autonomous layer of software engineering capability that is beginning to restructure how organizations design, build, and govern technology at scale. Gartner's latest market study and analysis of this market makes one thing clear. This is no longer a story about productivity enhancement at the margins. It is a story about competitive realignment at the platform level, with trillion-dollar implications for the vendors who supply these tools and the enterprises deciding which ones to trust with their core development infrastructure. AI Coding Agents Market Development The scale of the market alone signals how far this category has matured. Enterprise AI coding agents are now capturing a growing share of enterprise software engineering spend, with the market estimated at roughly $9.8 billion to $11 billion annualized as of April 2026...