Worldwide Spending on AI is excepted to reach $110 billion in 2024

Global spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is forecast to double over the next four years, growing from $50.1 billion in 2020 to more than $110 billion in 2024.

According to the IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, spending on AI systems will accelerate over the next several years as organizations deploy artificial intelligence as part of their digital transformation efforts and to remain competitive in the digital economy. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2019-2024 period will be 20.1%.

“Companies will adopt AI — not just because they can, but because they must,” said Ritu Jyoti, program vice president, Artificial Intelligence at IDC. “AI is the technology that will help businesses to be agile, innovate, and scale. The companies that become ‘AI powered’ will have the ability to synthesize information (using AI to convert data into information and then into knowledge), the capacity to learn (using AI to understand relationships between knowledge and apply the learning to business problems), and the capability to deliver insights at scale (using AI to support decisions and automation).”

Two of the leading drivers for AI adoption are delivering a better customer experience and helping employees to get better at their jobs. This is reflected in the leading use cases for AI, which include automated customer service agents, sales process recommendation and automation, automated threat intelligence and prevention, and IT automation. Combined, these four use cases represent nearly a third of all AI spending in 2020. Some of the fastest growing use cases are automated human resources, IT automation, and pharmaceutical research and discovery.

The two industries that will spend the most on AI solutions throughout the forecast are Retail and Banking. The Retail industry will largely focus its AI investments on improving the customer experience via chatbots and recommendation engines...