Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, IDC predicts a 12.3% rise in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) business worldwide.

According to the analysts, the global AI market is expected to generate US$156.5 billion worth of revenue in 2020.

Despite the growth being lower than previous years, IDC expects investment in AI to undergo a quick recovery.

In fact, IDC forecasts revenues of more than US$300 billion in 2024, a five-year compound annual growth rate of 17.1%.

CRM and ERM are expected to be the AI applications generating the most revenue.

“While the overall market has seen a slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, investments for AI and analytics infrastructure will continue, and perhaps increase, in specific industries such as life sciences, healthcare and media and entertainment. Storage will see stronger growth than servers owing to new data generation, along with existing datasets that will be curated to support AI models with increased adoption of high-performance parallel file systems and all-flash object stores, Amita Potnis, research director in IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure Practice, said.

According to Peter Rutten, research director in IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure Practice, the AI server market is “expected to return to its previous growth trajectory in 2021, but with the US not having the pandemic under control, 2021 growth in the US will be lower than in China and Western Europe”.