Agents as Apps: An Opportunity for Greater Innovation, More Revenue, and Increased Market Share

This IDC Market Perspective looks at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors and their partners to completely rethink their products and markets and gain more market share. AI agents will double the TAM for enterprise software vendors. With the threat of tariffs, geopolitical strife, and inflation looming, organizations may pull back spending on enterprise applications and modernization efforts. While this is not good news for enterprise application vendors and their ecosystem of partners, it does open up the opportunity to bring forward AI agents to assist in migrations, manual and semi-manual processes, and gaps and white spaces within the business and in full business processes. While the advancement of AI has brought forward AI-embedded applications, it is only just beginning. "The world economy is in a state of flux causing organizations to relook at their investments, particularly IT investments. Just like the COVID-19 pandemic brought forward more digital transformation, the world changes are bringing more emphasis on AI and AI agents in particular," said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software at IDC. "Organizations are building their own AI agents in record numbers across back-office and front-office workflows and processes. The opportunity for software vendors to assist them is now, quickly helping the organization be more innovative as well as efficient and productive in the face of adverse conditions."