IDC FutureScape - Critical Inflection Point of Digital Supremacy

The impact on companies will be enormous: Those who cannot compete in digitally dominated areas of the economy will then often also be unable to survive in their core markets - because this part is dependent on the digital area.

"With more than 50 percent of the global economy expected to be digitized by 2023, a new breed of enterprise is needed to compete and succeed. Our 2020 forecasts show that companies are preparing for the digitized economy by pushing investment in key technologies and new business models to become hyper-fast, hyper-scaled and hyper-connected enterprises"

says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

By 2024, more than 50 percent of all ICT spending will go toward digital transformation and innovation, up from 31 percent in 2018. Despite increasing investment in innovation, companies will also optimize their traditional ICT budgets by moving to less labor- and capital-intensive business models - such as cloud solutions.

To survive in the digital-first economy, digital applications must be able to run anywhere, anytime. This requires greater integration of applications, data and management across all cloud providers and locations. Therefore, by 2022, 70 percent of enterprises will unify their public and private clouds using unified hybrid/multicloud management technologies, tools and processes.

Also, by 2025, 90 percent of new enterprise apps will already incorporate artificial intelligence. Most of these will use AI techniques for incremental improvements to make apps "smarter" and more dynamic.

Disruptive, mainly AI-based applications will take longer to develop and reach the mass market. They will account for around ten percent of total enterprise applications by 2025.

By 2024, over 50 percent of user interactions will be via AI-powered computer visualizations, natural language and text interpretation, and AR/VR.