Austin, Texas, USA, June 25, 2026
According to The Futurum Group’s 1H 2026 AI Platforms Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast report, covering the global AI platforms market over the CY2025–CY2030 forecast horizon with CY2025 as base year, Operations & Workflow scales from $1.6B in CY2022 to $15.4B in CY2025 and reaches $92.2B by CY2030 Base, a 43.1% five-year CAGR that outpaces all other use cases including Software Engineering at 39.5% and Knowledge Management at 38.3%. Content Generation, an early flagship use case, decelerates to 26.4% CAGR as the category commoditizes.
Figure 1: AI Platform Revenue by Use Case — CY2025 vs CY2030 Base (US$ Billion)
“Operations and Workflow is where AI goals turn into real business results. Growth here is massive: the sector passed $15 billion in 2025 and is set to grow sixfold by 2030. Meanwhile, spending on Content Generation is slowing down. This shows that businesses are shifting their budgets away from just testing AI capabilities and toward projects that deliver clear operational results. Technology providers that focus on the tools to manage complex, multi-step tasks with appropriate governance controls in place will win the biggest share of future AI investment.”
— Nick Patience, Practice Lead, AI Platforms, The Futurum Group
The CY2030 use-case forecast highlights several structural shifts in agentic AI spend:
- Rocket-Ship pattern at the top: Operations & Workflow. The use case grows 57.6 times from $1.6B in CY2022 to $92.2B in CY2030 Base, and is the only one projected to exceed $90B by CY2030.
- Top mover by absolute revenue gain: Software Engineering. Software Engineering adds $70.6B between CY2025 and CY2030 Base ($16.5B to $87.1B) at a 39.5% CAGR, ranking second in absolute dollar growth behind Operations & Workflow.
- Plateau: Content Generation cools from early flagship to mid-pack. Content Generation grows from $14.3B in CY2025 to only $46.1B in CY2030-Base at a 26.4% CAGR, the slowest of any use case, dropping from fourth-largest in CY2025 to mid-pack by CY2030 as the category commoditizes.
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Author Information
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
