Artificial Intelligence Market to Reach $47 Billion by 2020

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IDC:

The industries that will invest the most in cognitive/AI systems in 2016 are banking and retail, followed by healthcare and discrete manufacturing. Combined, these four industries will generate more than half of all worldwide cognitive/AI revenues in 2016, with banking and retail each delivering nearly $1.5 billion. Healthcare and discrete manufacturing will deliver the greatest revenue growth over the 2016-2020 forecast period, with CAGRs of 69.3% and 61.4%, respectively. Education and process manufacturing will also experience significant growth over the forecast period.

Nearly half of all cognitive/AI revenue throughout the forecast will go to software, which includes both cognitive applications (i.e., text and rich media analytics, tagging, searching, machine learning, categorization, clustering, hypothesis generation, question answering, visualization, filtering, alerting, and navigation) and cognitive software platforms, which facilitate the development of intelligent, advisory, and cognitively enabled solutions. As both the largest and fastest-growing category, cognitive applications spending is forecast to reach $18.2 billion in 2020. Cognitive/AI-related services (business services and IT consulting) represent the second largest revenue category while hardware revenues (primarily from dedicated purchases of servers and storage) will grow nearly as fast as software with five-year CAGRs of more than 60%.

On a geographic basis, North America (the United States and Canada) is by far the largest region for cognitive/AI spending with 2016 revenues approaching $6.2 billion. Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will remain the second largest region throughout the forecast, but cognitive/AI revenues from Asia/Pacific including Japan will nearly close the gap with EMEA by 2020.