Software Eats The World, And AI Eats Software

We know, as you do, that artificial intelligence is driving a lot of spending at IT organizations and is probably the fundamental driver of spending by the hyperscalers and cloud builders that have, thus far, benefitted most from the machine learning revolution. But just how much money are companies sinking into AI, and how will that grow over time? We have not seen a lot of good data on this, and the market researchers at IDC, as usual, have been the most vocal about how they dice and slice the AI market in their public statements, which dribble out some insight here and there to keep their name out there and to drive deeper engagements with AI startups, their investors, IT suppliers who are chasing this market, and large enterprises that are on the forefront of commercializing AI in their application stacks. What sent us down this AI spending rathole was some numbers that IDC released on March 7, which talks about worldwide spending on AI-Centric systems, including hardware, software, and services. AI-centric means that without the AI component, an application will not function.