According to GlobalData’s September 2025 forecast update, the AI market, in particular, consulting, will continue to see strong momentum through 2029, expanding from $131bn in 2024 to $642bn in 2029, a CAGR of 37%.
All segments of the market will see healthy growth, including generative AI (GenAI), specialised AI applications, consulting and support services, AI hardware, and AI platforms.
GenAI is the fastest growing segment of the market, with a five-year CAGR of more than 90%. After several years of experimentation with the technology, enterprises are now ready to move beyond ChatGPT and incorporate the plethora of small and domain specific language models being released, as well as explore options for multi-model environments and AI at the edge.
Consulting dominates the market
Consulting and support services make up the largest portion of the overall market. According to Rena Bhattacharyya, Chief Analyst and Practice Lead for Enterprise Technology & Services at GlobalData, “The AI skills gap has been challenging for many organisations. Skilled AI professionals can be hard to find and expensive to hire. To move ahead with AI plans, enterprises seek out third party expertise to not only to develop, train, and deploy models, but to help them craft roadmaps, analyse business processes, evaluate use cases, and ensure effective data management and governance.”
Specialised AI applications, which are horizontal applications embedded with AI-driven features, represent a sizeable portion of the market at present. According to Rohit Sharm, Lead Analyst for Technology at GlobalData, “Organizations are eager to reap the benefits of AI, and solutions that already incorporate it are more accessible and can be the most efficient path to leveraging the technology.”
Though smaller in size, the AI hardware segment will continue its robust growth, driven by the need for enterprises to invest in servers, storage, and processing to support their AI requirements.
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By GlobalDataAs organisations look to expand their use of AI, they will need to ensure that they have the infrastructure in place to scale deployments. The AI platform segment, which is an area that appeals to organisations with the expertise to develop and customise their own models, will maintain consistent growth.
AI platforms offer numerous capabilities, such as tools for improving collaboration, training and tuning models, implementing guardrails, and managing models in production. Organisations with limited AI skills will opt for solutions already embedded with AI instead of creating models from scratch.
