AI associated with CRM activities poised to boost business revenue to $1.1tn in five years
AI adoption is predicted to witness landmark growth in the coming years, with increased computing power, big data and breakthroughs in machine learning, with AI predicted to alter 49% of job activities within the next two years.
An IDC report released this week forecasts a $1.1tn boost in global business revenues between 2017 and 2021 particularly in AI-related CRM activities for B2B and enterprise businesses including personalization of marketing campaigns, sales cycles, lead generation and lowering the cost of support calls.
"AI is impacting all sectors of the economy and every business. For the CRM market—the fastest-growing category in enterprise software—the impact of AI will be profound, ushering in new levels of productivity for employees and empowering companies to drive even better experiences for their customers," said Keith Block, vice chairman, president and COO, Salesforce. "For companies embracing AI, it's critical that they create new workforce development programs to ensure employees are prepared for this next wave of innovation."
The study of 1,028 organizations worldwide by IDC calculates that AI associated with CRM activities will create 800,000 direct jobs while also adding two million indirect jobs. Further, the report suggests that Salesforce customers should account for $293 bn of the total aggregated revenue and more than 390,000 of those jobs by the year 2021.
Companies adopting AI are planning to increase machine learning (25%), voice/speech recognition (30%) text analysis (27%) and advanced numerical analysis (31%). Cloud based services are favored by AI adopters, with 46% of those surveyed saying that 50% of their CRM activities are excited using the public cloud. IDC analysis believe that cloud solutions may lead the way, which are often embedded into solutions and user interfaces. This implies that adoption of AI technologies can be an easy add-on to existing applications or even free at the entry level.
Further, the US is predicted to benefit most from new business revenue growth from the adoption of AI in the coming year ($596bn), followed by Japan ($91bn), Germany ($62bn), the UK ($55bn) and France ($50bn).