IDC outlines the top 10 AI predictions — highlighting a strong investment path, outcome orientation, and the rising importance of specialized hardware and software stacks. The report shows how companies are professionalizing their AI strategies, reallocating budgets to scalable platforms, and paving the way for broader, more productive use of GenAI and automation.
- Investment dynamics: Companies are shifting budgets from experiments to production-ready use cases and platforms. This fuels demand for compute, model and data operations, as well as integration-ready security and governance components in large-scale rollouts.
- Top themes through mid-decade: Broader GenAI adoption in core functions, agentic automation for end-to-end workflows, standardization on a few platforms and toolchains, and growing focus on cost/performance optimization (e.g., model distillation, retrieval, caching).
- Implications for G2000 companies: Success depends on portfolio steering based on business outcomes, architecture guardrails (APIs, reusability, security patterns), clear operating processes (SLAs, monitoring, FinOps), and a training agenda addressing both business and IT teams together.
Source: IDC (October 2023; updated release as PDF 2025): FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation 2024 Predictions. Study.
