The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to Wedbush's review of financial results for the first quarter, artificial intelligence (AI) related spending will increase significantly by 2024, accounting for 8% to 10% of corporate IT budgets. This forecast highlights the rapid growth in AI spending after accounting for less than 1% of IT budgets in 2023. The bank's analyst Daniel Ives (Daniel Ives) pointed out in a report that although the early AI revolution was mainly driven by AI pioneers such as Jensen and NVDA.US (NVDA.US), the commercial application of AI has now entered a new stage. He anticipates that the tech industry will usher in a decade driven by AI, including a wave of $1 trillion in spending.

Ives and his team observed that companies such as Arm Holdings (ARM.US), Palantir (PLTR.US), and Oracle (ORCL.US) are leading an unprecedented wave of AI spending, which has further strengthened the corporate AI spending cycle.

Meanwhile, a wave of AI spending is spreading across the corporate world, including companies such as Salesforce (CRM.US), MongoDB (MDB.US), and Snowflake (SNOW.US).

Furthermore, tech giants Meta (META) and Apple (AAPL) are investing resources in consumer-grade AI products, which indicates that many software companies will also join this competition.

Among them, Apple (AAPL.US) is regarded as the next member of the seven major US stock companies to fully enter the AI field. Ives is looking forward to next month's World Developers Conference (WWDC), where he believes Apple will announce its highly anticipated AI strategy to its loyal user base and developer community. This strategy is expected to launch an AI-driven supercycle, starting with the new iPad series, followed by the iPhone 16 this fall.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has gained a firm foothold in the AI field. Wedbush believes this is Microsoft's “iPhone moment,” and AI will change the growth trajectory of Microsoft's cloud business in the next few years. Wedbush's recent review has further strengthened their confidence in this trend.

Wedbush specifically anticipates that this will bring more deals to the Azure cloud as more Microsoft customers adopt GenAI and CoPilot. Ives estimates that for every $100 increase in Microsoft's spending on the Azure cloud over the past few years, its AI spending will increase by $35 to $40.

Notably, Gartner's forecast also shows that global AI software spending will surge to $297 billion by 2027 as software vendors continue to integrate AI tools into their products.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, more than 70% of independent software vendors will embed general AI (GenAI) into their enterprise applications, and this number is less than 1% in 2023.

Today, AI is becoming an important part of enterprise IT spending, heralding the dawn of a new era driven by technological innovation and enterprise investment.