Digital Transformation Investment Will Reach $7.4 Trillion by 2023

In this year's digital transformation (DX) predictions, IDC highlights the critical business drivers accelerating DX initiatives and investments as companies seek to effectively navigate business challenges, compete at hyperscale, and meet rising customer expectations.

"Direct digital transformation (DX) investment is growing at 17.5% CAGR and expected to approach $7.4 trillion over the years 2020 to 2023 as companies build on existing strategies and investments; becoming digital-at-scale future enterprises. Organizations with new digital business models at their core are well positioned to successfully compete in the digital platform economy," said Shawn Fitzgerald, research director, Worldwide Digital Transformation Strategies, IDC.

The predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Worldwide Digital Transformation are:

1. Future of Culture: By 2024, leaders in 50% of G2000 organizations will have mastered "future of culture" traits such as empathy, empowerment, innovation, and customer-and data-centricity to achieve leadership at scale.
2. Digital Co-Innovation: By 2022, empathy among brands and for customers will drive ecosystem collaboration and co-innovation among partners and competitors that will drive 20% collective growth in customer lifetime value.
3. AI at Scale: By 2024, with proactive, hyperspeed operational changes and market reactions, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered enterprises will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than their peers.
4. Digital Offerings: By 2023, 50% of organizations will neglect investing in market-driven operations and will lose market share to existing competitors that made the investments, as well as to new digital market entries.
5. Digitally Enhanced Workers: By 2021, new future of work (FoW) practices will expand the functionality and effectiveness of the digital workforce by 35%, fueling an acceleration of productivity and innovation at practicing organizations.
6. Digital Investments: By 2023, DX spending will grow to over 50% of all ICT investment from 36% today, with the largest growth in data intelligence and analytics as companies create information-based competitive advantages.
7. Ecosystem Force Multipliers: By 2025, 80% of digital leaders will devise and differentiate end-customer value measures from their platform ecosystem participation, including an estimate of the ecosystem multiplier effects.
8. Digital KPIs Mature: By 2020, 60% of companies will have aligned digital KPIs to direct business value measures of revenue and profitability, eliminating today's measurement crisis where DX KPIs are not directly aligned.
9. Platforms Modernize: Driven both by escalating cyberthreats and needed new functionality, 65% of organizations will aggressively modernize legacy systems with extensive new technology platform investments through 2023.
10. Invest for Insight: By 2023, enterprises seeking to monetize benefits of new intelligence technologies will invest over $265 billion worldwide, making DX business decision analytics and AI a nexus for digital innovation.