Enterprise demand for data analytics insight and IT optimization continue to drive applications for business intelligence solutions. Meanwhile, CIOs consider new use cases for neural networks, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Overall spending on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the United States will grow to $120 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26 percent over the 2021-2025 forecast period.
Moreover, all 19 U.S. industries in the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC) are forecast to deliver AI spending growth of 20 percent or more. The U.S. also accounts for more than half of all AI spending worldwide.
Artificial Intelligence Market Development
Retail will remain the largest U.S. industry for AI spending throughout the forecast, while Banking will be the second-largest industry.
Together, these two industries will represent nearly 28 percent of all AI spending in the United States in 2025 and will account for nearly $20 billion of the amount added to the U.S. total over the forecast.
The U.S. industries that will see the fastest growth in AI spending will be Professional Services, Media, and Securities and Investment Services, all of which will have CAGRs greater than 30 percent.
Within Retail, the AI use cases that will receive the most investment will be Augmented Customer Service Agents, and Expert Shopping Advisors or Product Recommendations.
These two use cases encourage and assist increased spending by retail customers and account for nearly 40 percent of AI spending in the industry. The shift to online shopping contributes considerably to the adoption of AI within retail.
AI spending in the Banking industry will be spread across several different functional areas, including customer service (Program Advisors and Recommendation Systems), operations (Fraud Analysis and Investigation), and security (Augmented Threat Intelligence and Prevention Systems).
Among the 30 AI use cases IDC reviewed, two will remain the largest in terms of total spending throughout the forecast period – Augmented Customer Service Agents and Sales Process Recommendation and Augmentation. Together, these two use cases will account for more than 20 percent of all AI spending in the U.S. in 2025.
In terms of growth, two AI use cases (Public Safety and Emergency Response and Augmented Claims Processing) will have five-year CAGRs greater than 30 percent while a third use case (IT Optimization) will ride a CAGR of 29.7 percent to become the third-largest AI use case in 2025.
"The greatest potential benefit for the use of AI remains its use in developing new business, and building new business models," said Mike Glennon, senior research manager at IDC.
Outlook for Artificial Intelligence Applications Growth
However, according to the IDC assessment, existing businesses are hesitant to embrace this potential, leaving the greatest opportunities to new market entrants that have no fear of change and can adapt easily to new ways of conducting business.
IDC analysts believe that the future for business is AI and those companies that can seize this opportunity could easily become the new U.S. industry giants.
That said, I anticipate some legacy IT vendors will develop the skills and experience to apply AI technologies in their digital business transformation solutions, and then the role of these capabilities will mainstream over time. Eventually, AI becomes a foundational component of most enterprise digital services.