Artificial intelligence (AI)1 , a technology almost as old as the computer industry itself, has come into widespread awareness with the advent of personal assistants and bots (Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant), image recognition (Facebook), personalized recommendations (Netflix, Amazon), and more. These innovations have been driven by a manifold increase in processing power, lower-cost hardware, and the exploding creation and availability of data. IDC's forecast for cognitive and AI systems calls for the global market to jump from $7.9 billion last year to $46.3 billion in 2020.
June 2017, IDC #US42749217
White Paper
A Trillion-Dollar Boost: The Economic Impact of AI on
Customer Relationship Management
Sponsored by: Salesforce
John F. Gantz
Gerry Murray
David Schubmehl
Dan Vesset
Mary Wardley
June 2017
IN THIS WHITE PAPER
Artificial intelligence (AI)1, a technology almost as old as the computer industry itself, has come into
widespread awareness with the advent of personal assistants and bots (Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri,
Google's Assistant), image recognition (Facebook), personalized recommendations (Netflix, Amazon),
and more. These innovations have been driven by a manifold increase in processing power, lower-cost
hardware, and the exploding creation and availability of data. IDC's forecast for cognitive and AI
systems calls for the global market to jump from $7.9 billion last year to $46.3 billion in 2020.
This White Paper uses IDC market data, IDC's AI/CRM Economic Impact Survey of 1,028
organizations worldwide, and 20 years of IDC's economic impact modeling to forecast how AI will
affect the global economy. It forecasts business revenue growth and job creation (or destruction)
based on AI applied to customer relationship management (CRM) activities.
In addition to the economic impact of AI on CRM as a broad category, it also includes an estimate of
the economic impact attributable to Salesforce's customer base.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Extrapolating from survey responses and IDC's economic impact model, IDC calculates that AI
associated with CRM activities will boost global business revenue from the beginning of 2017
to the end of 2021 by $1.1 trillion.
Net-new jobs associated with this revenue could, if respondent opinions bear out, reach more
than 800,000 by 2021 in direct jobs, and 2 million if you add in indirect and induced jobs. This
is a net-positive figure in that it includes an estimate of jobs lost to automation from AI.
Salesforce customers should account for $293 billion of the total aggregated revenue and
more than 155,000 of those