IDC FutureScape: AI Will Reshape the IT Industry and the Way Businesses Operate

International Data Corporation (IDC) published its worldwide information technology (IT) industry predictions for 2024 and beyond. This IDC FutureScape report provides IDC’s top 10 predictions on the future of the IT Industry and how “AI Everywhere” will affect technology decisions as organizations seek to extend their digital business efforts.

This year’s predictions are largely centered around the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as a major inflection point in the technology industry. While AI is not a new technology – companies have been investing heavily in predictive and interpretive AI for years – the announcement of the GPT-3.5 series from OpenAI in late 2022 captured the world’s attention and triggered a surge of investment in generative AI. As a result, IDC expects worldwide spending on AI solutions will grow to more than $500 billion in 2027. In turn, most organizations will experience a notable shift in the weight of technology investments toward AI implementation and adoption of AI-enhanced products/services.

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“Every IT provider will incorporate AI into the core of their business, investing treasure, brain power, and time,” said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. “For CIOs, and digitally savvy C-Suite members, this pivot promises a cornucopia of new, innovative, AI-enhanced products/services but also threatens to inundate IT teams with many ‘now with AI’ options that increase risks associated with uncontrolled cost increases and loss of data control.”

IDC’s FutureScape 2024 research focuses on the external drivers that will alter the global business ecosystem over the next 12 to 24 months and the issues technology and IT teams will face as they define, build, and govern the technologies required to thrive in a digital-first world.

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A closer look at IDC’s top ten worldwide IT industry predictions reveals the following:

1. Core IT Shift: IDC expects the shift in IT spending toward AI will be fast and dramatic, impacting nearly every industry and application. By 2025, Global 2000 (G2000) organizations will allocate over 40% of their core IT spend to AI-related initiatives, leading to a double-digit increase in the rate of product and process innovations.

2. IT Industry AI Pivot: The IT industry will feel the impact of the AI watershed more than any other industry, as every company races to introduce AI-enhanced products/services and to assist their customers with AI implementations. For most, AI will replace cloud as the lead motivator of innovation.

3. Infrastructure Turbulence: The rate of AI spending for many enterprises will be constrained through 2025 due to major workload and resource shifts in corporate and cloud datacenters. Uncertainty about silicon supply will be joined by shortcomings in networking, facilities, model confidence, and AI skills.

4. Great Data Grab: In an AI Everywhere world, data is a crucial asset, feeding AI models and applications. Technology suppliers and service providers recognize this and will accelerate investments in additional data assets that they believe will improve their competitive position.

5. IT Skills Mismatch: Inadequate training in AI, cloud, data, security, and emerging tech fields will directly and negatively impact enterprise attempts to succeed in efforts that rely on such technologies. Through 2026, underfunded skilling initiatives will prevent 65% of enterprises from achieving full value from those tech investments.

6. Services Industry Transformation: GenAI will trigger a shift in human-delivered services for strategy, change, and training. By 2025, 40% of services engagements will include GenAI-enabled delivery, impacting everything from contract negotiations to IT Ops to risk assessment.

7. Unified Control: One of the most challenging tasks for IT teams in the next several years will be navigating the maturation of control platforms as they evolve from addressing a few basic systems to becoming a standard platform that orchestrates operations across infrastructure, data, AI services, and business applications/processes.

8. Converged AI: Today’s fascination with GenAI should not delay or derail existing or other AI investments. Organizations must contemplate, trial, and bring to production fully converged AI solutions that allow them to address new uses cases and customer personas at significantly lower price points.

9. Locational Experience: The accelerated adoption of GenAI will enable organizations to enhance their edge computing use cases with contextual experiences that better align business outcomes with customer expectations.

10. Digital High Frontier: Satellite-based Internet connectivity will deliver broadband everywhere, helping to bridge the digital divide and enabling a host of new capabilities and business models. By 2028, 80% of enterprises will integrate LEO satellite connectivity, creating a unified digital service fabric that ensures resilient ubiquitous access and guarantees data fluidity.

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IDC’s worldwide IT industry predictions are presented in full detail in the report, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2024 Predictions (IDC #US50435423). Copies of this report are available to qualified members of the media.

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