$200B AI Boom Ahead?

Artificial intelligence-led services could generate net new work of $100-200 billion by 2030, with much of the required talent already present within technology services firms, a report said on Thursday.

The report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said AI-led services are expected to contribute $300-400 billion in industry growth by 2030, offset by around $200 billion in existing revenue contracts, resulting in a net opportunity of $100–200 billion.

The report noted that the challenge is talent deployment, rather than talent availability. Applied AI accounts for 10–15 per cent of the AI-tagged workforce at technology services firms, compared with 90–95 per cent at AI-native firms. The remaining 85–90 per cent at technology services firms falls under Infused AI, where professionals use AI to enhance existing work.

The $300-400 billion in industry growth will be through building and running agentic solutions, work that becomes outsourceable as agentic tooling matures.

The global services market is projected to grow from roughly $1.6-1.7 trillion in 2025 to $2.2-2.4 trillion by 2030.

“The people who can deliver applied AI are largely already on the payroll, and clients are moving from paying for hours to paying for outcomes. That changes how work is staffed and rewarded,” said Sreyssha George, Managing Director and Partner at BCG.

The report identified 40 distinct applied AI roles, each linked to an existing technology role. A data scientist or full-stack developer can grow into a forward-deployed engineer, a DevOps engineer into an AI Ops engineer, and a data engineer into a semantic engineer.

It noted that moving a data scientist into a forward-deployed engineer role takes roughly three times the upskilling effort of moving a data engineer into an AI data engineer role.