AI Services Set to Create $100-200 Billion Opportunity by 2030
New Delhi: Services built on artificial intelligence are poised to open up $100-200 billion in new business opportunities by 2030, a report released on Thursday has said. The findings suggest that the talent required for this transition is largely already employed by technology services firms.
The report estimates that AI-based services could add $300-400 billion to industry growth by 2030. It also cautions that existing revenue contracts may fall by nearly $200 billion, bringing the net opportunity down to $100-200 billion.
According to the findings, talent availability is not the main hurdle. Instead, the challenge lies in placing people in the right kind of work. Only 10-15 percent of AI-related employees at technology services companies are engaged in applied AI, compared with 90-95 percent at AI-native firms. The remaining 85-90 percent of staff at technology services companies fall under infused AI, where professionals use AI to improve their existing tasks.
The report explains that the $300-400 billion expansion will be driven by the development and operation of agentic solutions. As agentic tools advance, such work is likely to become easier to outsource.
The global services market is expected to increase from about $1.6-1.7 trillion in 2025 to $2.2-2.4 trillion by 2030.
Sreisha George, managing director and partner at the firm, said that professionals capable of applied AI work are already largely on corporate payrolls. She pointed out that clients are shifting from paying for hours worked to paying for results. This shift changes how talent is deployed and how it is rewarded.
The report outlines 40 applied AI roles, each mapped to a role in technology today. For example, a data scientist or full-stack developer could become a forward-deployed engineer. Similarly, a DevOps engineer could advance to an AI ops engineer, and a data engineer could grow into a semantic engineer.
It also observes that moving a data scientist into a forward-deployed engineer role requires about three times the skill development compared with upgrading a data engineer into an AI data engineer.