IDC's Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending – Industry Outlook (blogs.idc.com)

IDC released its Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide 2024 V2, reporting a global AI market of nearly $235B in 2024 that’s projected to exceed $631B by 2028. The top spenders this year are Software & Information Services ($33B), Banking ($31.3B), and Retail ($25B) — together accounting for $89.6B (38% of the market) and a five‑year CAGR of ~27% to nearly $222B by 2028. Generative AI already represents more than 19% of investment within those three industries, signaling rapid adoption of foundation models and content/assistant use cases. Technically, IDC highlights adoption across the AI lifecycle: software engineering is leveraging AI lifecycle tools and predictive models for defect reduction and faster development; banking is deploying ML for personalization, fraud detection, risk models, RPA and algorithmic trading; retail is using demand-forecasting, inventory optimization, personalized recommendations, chatbots and in-store AI (e.g., smart mirrors). Regionally, banking leads AI spend in the Americas and EMEA ($19B and $8B) with high CAGRs (30–32%), while APJ is led by Software & Information Services (~$11B). For the AI/ML community, these trends imply growing demand for scalable model ops, data engineering, domain-tuned and generative models, evaluation/safety tooling, and infrastructure to productionize models across verticals.