IDC: Agentic AI to Dominate IT Budget Expansion Over Next Five Years

Year-over-year spending on AI will grow by 31.9% between now and 2029, according to IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence IT Spending Market Forecast. This investment, driven by the growth of Agentic AI-enabled applications and systems to manage agentic fleets, will reach $1.3 trillion in 2029, according to the Massachusetts-based market research company.

The research reveals an unprecedented surge in Agentic AI spending and signals a transformation within enterprise IT budgets—especially when it comes to software—to investment strategies led by products and services based on an agentic AI foundation. This conversion is further supported by anticipated growth in platform solutions that enable companies to build, manage, and operate their agents more securely and efficiently.

“An important takeaway from this forecast is the clear alignment between the growth in (AI) spending and IT leaders’ trust that effective use of AI can boost future business success,” said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. “Application and Services providers that are behind in putting AI into their products and not extending them with agents are risking market share losses to companies that made the decision to put AI at the center of their product development roadmap.”

Among the highlights of the report, service providers will account for 80% of infrastructure spend as they support massive increases in agentic workloads through 2029. The report also anticipates a 10x increase in the number and complexity of 3rd party and custom-built AI agents used by enterprises in the next five years. Meanwhile, spending on AI-enabled applications is expected to increase faster than any segment, triggering major competitive shifts in the software industry.

The forecast also indicates that the adoption of agents and Agentic AI will accelerate innovation in how companies use technology and code to transform their business. These investments and the evolution of related products will increasingly determine the success or failure of the business and tech leaders who put them in place, and the businesses that use them. For this reason, informed leadership will be critical to success during these next several years.

“This research reveals several important issues for businesses to consider about the interconnection between labor and AI investment,” said Crawford Del Prete, president at IDC. “As an example, business leaders will need to pay particular attention to employee roles in an enterprise, and how roles change as agents become more commonplace in business. Agents will change the nature of work, making some roles highly productive, and others obsolete. Workers and enterprises will need to be more agile than ever before to keep pace.”

Coinciding with this growth in AI spending is a massive increase in the amount of underlying compute capacity required to support this agent growth. In the short term, this will require significant and complex build-out from infrastructure providers, which will be led by cloud providers. Long term, the focus on AI will likely divert funding in other areas of the tech stack. Whether from an enterprise or a service provider, spending on IT, such as servers and storage, which are not related to AI, will be driven by efficiency and consolidation, limiting growth, according to IDC.

Channel Impact^®
The forecast signals an IT transformation from software to AI-Based products and services, thereby providing new opportunities and challenges for the channel.