Digital Lifescapes

The global streaming industry has spent the better part of a decade chasing subscriber counts as the primary metric of success. That era is now formally over. New market data from Omdia confirms that the industry has crossed a decisive threshold; one that shifts the competitive playing field from growth-at-all-costs to monetization discipline. For senior executives navigating media, advertising, and technology strategy, the implications extend well beyond entertainment. A Historic Revenue Crossover Online video revenue increased 13.5 percent to $176 billion in 2025, while pay-TV revenue declined 4 percent to $170 billion; marking the first time in the industry's history that streaming has surpassed legacy pay-TV in revenue terms. This is not a rounding error or a statistical artifact; it represents the culmination of more than a decade of structural disruption to the traditional broadcast and cable TV model. Global subscriptions to online video services reached 2.24 billion by the ...

The global AI conversation has long been framed around American platforms and European regulation. That framing is increasingly inadequate. According to the latest market study by IDC, China has not only matched the pace of AI adoption elsewhere; it has structurally outpaced most other markets and is accelerating further. For technology leaders and corporate strategists watching from the sidelines, the window for comfortable observation is closing. China's AI lead is no longer a forecast. It's a fact. Artificial Intelligence Market Development The headline figure from IDC's research is striking: global enterprise AI spending will reach $940 billion in 2026, growing to $2.1 trillion by 2029, with China among the fastest-growing markets worldwide. But the raw scale of the numbers only tells part of the story. What distinguishes China's position is the phase of the cycle it has entered. According to IDC, the first phase of the AI Supercycle was about computing power, found...

The global smartphone market closed 2025 with a story less about recovery and more about transformation. Premium product, ecosystem lock-in, and manufacturing scale are now the forces shaping competition. For business and technology leaders, the latest IDC market study data confirms that smartphones remain a critical indicator of consumer demand, supply chain health, and AI commercialization at the edge. Smartphone Market Development Global smartphone shipments grew 2.3 percent year-over-year in Q4 2025, reaching 336.3 million units and bringing full-year volumes to 1.26 billion units — a modest 1.9 percent annual increase, according to IDC. This smartphone growth emerged despite a memory shortage crisis, tariff volatility, supply chain disruption, and macroeconomic headwinds. What stabilized demand? Two factors: sustained growth in premium devices and strong foldable momentum, combined with accelerated purchases as consumers bought ahead of anticipated price increases. Buyers weren...

New IT investment is aligned with digital business growth. The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has become a key growth catalyst across many industries. The latest growth forecast from IDC provides a compelling snapshot of the AI market's upward trajectory and underscores its pivotal role in shaping the future of business innovation. Worldwide spending on AI will more than double by 2028, reaching $632 billion. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29 percent over the 2024-2028 forecast period. Such rapid adoption is a clear indicator of AI's increasing importance and the willingness of business leaders to invest heavily in the strategic use cases that fuel net-new growth. Artificial Intelligence Market Development "AI-powered transformations have delivered tangible business outcomes and value for organizations worldwide and they are building their AI strategies around employee experience, customer engagement, business process, ...

The business technology landscape is undergoing a continued shift in IT infrastructure. The public cloud, once a fringe player, has become the undisputed engine driving IT innovation and digital business growth. As executives grapple with their digital transformation initiatives, scalability, agility, and cost-efficiency remain paramount. The public cloud delivers on all these fronts, and Gartner's recent forecast underscores this reality. Worldwide public cloud end-user spending is projected to reach $675 billion in 2024, a significant increase from  $561 billion in 2023. This growth is driven by Generative AI (GenAI) and software application modernization. Public Cloud Computing Market Development Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This foundational layer, comprising compute, storage, and networking resources, is anticipated to reach $180 billion in 2024. This underscores the continued demand for core cloud infrastructure as organizations migrate workloads and application...

Data has become the lifeblood of forward-thinking organizations. Market leaders leverage vast troves of data to inform decision-making, personalize customer experiences, and optimize operations. However, extracting value from this digital data requires analytics capabilities. Here's where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful tool to unlock actionable insights. AI Data Analytics Market Development According to the latest Gartner market study, there's a significant shift in how organizations approach data and analytics (D&A) due to AI's growing influence on business outcomes. The study found that 61 percent of organizations actively evolve their D&A operating models in response to AI capabilities. This underscores a critical realization: the traditional approaches to data management and analysis are no longer sufficient. The integration of AI into D&A offers several compelling advantages: Enhanced Data Exploration: AI tools can automatically analyze...

Generative AI is revolutionizing the way organizations work, boosting growth and unlocking unprecedented levels of productivity. From crafting hyper-personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with individual customers to automating tedious tasks and fostering seamless workforce collaboration, GenAI's applications are rapidly expanding across diverse industries. This evolution is particularly evident in areas like marketing, where GenAI can generate targeted ad copy and content that drives conversions, and in workforce collaboration, where it can automate repetitive tasks and streamline communication channels. However, unlike the broader AI landscape, GenAI's implementation has faced challenges in heavily regulated industries like banking and new fintech services. Adapting its capabilities to comply with strict regulations and ensuring data privacy remain key hurdles to overcome. As these challenges are addressed and GenAI's potential is further explored, we can expect e...

While the vast majority of CEOs anticipate a significant upside growth potential from artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, there are others in the C-suite who are fearful of the impact. Rapid Generative AI (GenAI) adoption is the top-ranked issue for the next two years for Legal, Compliance, and Privacy leaders, according to a recent survey by Gartner. "Increases in capability and usability have prompted rapid and widespread company adoption of GenAI," said Stuart Strome, director of research at  Gartner . Generative AI Market Development While AI regulation is still being developed, however, uncertainties and unforeseen risks abound. Businesses will have to contend with these challenges to ensure the ethical and legal use of this powerful new technology. Gartner identified four areas that business leaders need to address: Limited Visibility into Key Risks The ease of adoption, widespread applicability, and the ability of GenAI tools to perform a range of different busines...

Growing awareness of sustainability and the threat of a global temperature increase is motivating strategic shifts in government and commercial organizations. Leaders are adopting carbon management tools to address the anticipated 18 percent GDP loss from climate change by 2050. These carbon management tools are used to calculate, manage, monitor, and report emissions, and help measure operational results throughout the global supply chain. According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, the carbon management software solutions market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.7 percent, reaching $5.5 billion by 2032. Carbon Management Apps Market Development Scope 3 emissions, which can be 5 to 25 times higher than Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, constitute up to 90 percent of the overall environmental impact, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Accurate measurement of Scope 3 emissions is crucial for government and business leaders to enhance resilience and eff...

In an evolving era of rapid advancement, market demand for innovative technology in the industrial and manufacturing sectors is skyrocketing. Leaders are recognizing the immense potential of digital transformation and are driving initiatives to integrate technologies into their business operations.  These initiatives aim to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and ultimately drive growth and competitiveness in an increasingly digital business upward trajectory. The industrial and manufacturing sectors have been the backbone of the Global Networked Economy, contributing $16 trillion in value in 2021. Industrial and Manufacturing Tech Market Development   This growth represents a 20 percent increase from 2020, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of these sectors in the face of unprecedented challenges, according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research . The five largest manufacturing verticals -- automotive, computer and electronic, primary metal, food, and ma...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool to drive digital business growth, make better decisions, and personalize offerings to customers. As a result, forward-thinking CEOs are now actively pursuing AI investments to gain a competitive advantage. Generative AI apps originated with tools such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, Generative AI is forecast to add more than $450 billion to the enterprise market across twelve different vertical industries over the next seven years. Gen AI already has hundreds of compelling use cases across these enterprise verticals. But accuracy, performance, and enterprise readiness will mean that use cases will come in three distinct waves. Generative Artificial Intelligence Market Development "Content-heavy verticals like marketing and education are already seeing disruption across a range of job roles in the first wave of adoption," said Reece Hayden, senior analyst at ABI Res...

Savvy leaders in the C-suite continue to invest in digital transformation that fuels net-new growth, regardless of global economic volatility concerns. Other leaders, consumed by fear, are undecided or already retreating.  Rising prices and interest rates along with other economic factors beyond a company’s control are leading CFOs to show the most concern about profitable growth, inflation, and balance sheet health in 2023, according to the latest market study by Gartner. Yet nine out of 10 CFOs plan to fund organic growth in 2023 at the same level or greater levels than their investment in 2022. Digital Growth Market Development "Macroeconomic factors that companies can do little to nothing about have created an uncertain setting in 2023, and have also led to many sleepless nights among CFOs," said Shannon Cole, senior director at Gartner . Borrowing has become more expensive, and inventory and fixed-asset values remain volatile, which inevitably leads to downstream income ...

Across the globe, many employers are assessing their human resource policies to determine the most effective working model for their digital workers. While some CEOs still attempt to force employees to work full-time in offices, the enlightened leaders have embraced flexibility. According to the latest market study by Gartner, 77 percent of digital business workers want to participate in creating their Hybrid Work model, while 14 percent prefer to have their environment mandated. "One of the biggest challenges to hybrid work is the lack of alignment between the variability between what workers want and the predictability organizations, managers and workers need to be effective,” said Caitlin Duffy, director analyst at Gartner . Hybrid Work Market Development As employee wants and needs have shifted toward flexible working models, organizations must respond thoughtfully in order to maintain productivity and avoid attrition from oppressive mandates. Their fifth 'Digital Worker E...

The global financial services sector continues to grow as more progressive organizations seek to gain a meaningful competitive advantage from their digital transformation initiatives. Across the globe, many regions are seeing a significant rise in 'instant issuance' activity from a physical and digital perspective, from both traditional and emerging innovative banking institutions. Digital Payments Market Development Customers increasingly demand instant access to banking services, with physical instant issuance enabling them to leave their branch equipped with a ready-to-go payment card. According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, the market for instantly issued physical payment cards will increase from 243.2 million shipments in 2022 to a forecast of 471.1 million in 2027. "Critically, instant issuance of payment cards is no longer limited to the physical," said Sam Gazeley, industry analyst at ABI Research . Indeed, the growing digitization of p...

Even the savviest CEO's desire for a digital transformation advantage has to face the global market reality -- there simply isn't enough skilled and experienced talent available to meet demand. According to the latest market study by IDC, around 60-80 percent of Asia-Pacific (AP) organizations find it "difficult" or "extremely difficult" to fill many IT roles -- including cybersecurity, software development, and data insight professionals. Major consequences of the skills shortage are increased workload on remaining digital business and IT employees, increased security risks, and loss of "hard-to-replace" critical transformation knowledge. Digital Business Talent Market Development Although big tech companies' layoffs are making headlines, they are not representative of the overall global marketplace. Ongoing difficulty to fill key practitioner vacancies is still among the top issues faced by leaders across industries. "Skills are difficul...

Wireless communication solutions in the enterprise continue to gain momentum from new technologies and associated software applications. Across all industries and geographies, the demand has increased substantially over the last couple of years. Meanwhile, the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) market is growing in complexity with the new Wi-Fi standards, 6 GHz spectrum availability, Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity integration, disruptive business models, and more value-added services. Enterprise WLAN Market Development Furthermore, the evolution of cellular and WLAN technologies is pushing CIOs and CTOs to consider deploying heterogeneous Wi-Fi + 5G networks that can optimize performance, cost, reliability, and enable new use cases fundamental to digital transformation. These market dynamics and innovative solutions can drive enterprise WLAN infrastructure revenues to reach $14.5 billion by 2028, according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research. ABI analysts will n...

Throughout most industries, CEOs are focused on their digital transformation initiatives. While the economic outlook for this year includes many uncertainties, one thing remains certain -- the role of technology as the enabler for digital business growth. With that reality in mind, worldwide Information Technology (IT) spending will total $4.6 trillion in 2023, an increase of 5.5 percent from 2022, according to the latest market study by Gartner. Despite continued global economic turbulence, all regions worldwide are projected to have positive IT spending growth in 2023. Business technology investment is somewhat resilient to market conditions. Business Technology Market Development "Macroeconomic headwinds are not slowing digital transformation," said John-David Lovelock, vice president at Gartner . "IT spending will remain strong, even as many countries are projected to have near-flat gross domestic product (GDP) growth and high inflation in 2023." Prioritization ...

The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector is somewhat resilient to the current volatility in the Global Networked Economy. Forward-thinking CEOs will continue to invest in their high-priority strategic initiatives. For example, here is a case in point on the European continent. ICT spending in Europe will reach $1.2 trillion in 2023 and will surpass $1.4 trillion by 2026, posting a 5.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). European ICT Market Development Overall European ICT spending is forecast to grow by 4.2 percent year-on-year in 2023, driven by the Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, sanctions imposed by the EU and the growing number of companies leaving Russia will result in the Russian ICT market shrinking by 9.4 percent year-on-year. "While organizations in most countries are anticipating a recession this year, the outlook for European ICT spen...

Available Internet access at an affordable cost is essential for everyone to participate in the Global Networked Economy. The deployment of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications infrastructure is enabling the introduction of lower-cost broadband services in some markets. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) allows mobile network operators (MNO) to deliver high-speed Internet connections in areas that have either insufficient or no prior wireline broadband access services. It's also used in urban, suburban, and rural areas where fiber optic communication is considered too expensive to install and maintain. With this new technology, MNOs have the potential to provide broadband capability at similar levels to fiber optic networks. Fixed Wireless Access Market Development Therefore, FWA can be used to supplement existing wired broadband Internet service offerings, provide additional broadband capacity, or act as a backup service for home or business applications. Although FWA is well es...

Some leaders reject the notion that "wait and see" is the best response to disruptive change. Savvy senior executives are already driving digital business transformation throughout their organization in an effort to gain a bold strategic advantage. According to the latest market study by International Data Corp (IDC), Digital-First CEOs plan to drive at least half of their income from digital business products, services, and experiences by 2027 -- that's ahead of the market average of 39 percent. Driven by their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these business leaders have changed how they think about the relationship between business and technology, and how they approach the next digital transformation era -- from scaling digital technology to guiding a viable digital business. Digital Business Market Development IDC defines digital business as value creation based on technology, which entails: 1) Automated customer-facing processes and internal operations; 2) Provision...