The Third Wave: Why Agentic AI Will Expand the Worldwide Services Market

This IDC Market Perspective argues that agentic AI will expand the worldwide IT services market, drawing on IDC's Worldwide Black Book Live Edition to trace the demand expansion pattern across the enterprise resource planning (ERP), cloud, and agentic AI waves and quantify the growth trajectory through 2029. It explains the mechanisms by which productization, lower buy thresholds, a continuous operations layer, and outcome alignment drive net positive demand across all three services foundation markets, and maps where transition pressure concentrates by subsegment and provider archetype. For services firm executives, this Market Perspective identifies five connected shifts in delivery, expertise codification, pricing, internal operations, and ecosystem partnerships that determine which firms capture the margin expansion side of a structurally enlarging market, and which do not."Agentic AI is shifting IT services from labor-led delivery to platform-led, outcome-based models. The result is an expanding services market, not a contracting one. Each great enterprise technology wave has enlarged the worldwide services market, and agentic AI is the third such wave. In all three services foundation markets, the net impact of agentic AI on services spending is positive: transformation demand, platform-enabled outcomes, and new buyer segments outweigh delivery automation and per-unit price compression. Transition pressure is real but is concentrated in commodity, effort-priced work and in firms that have not yet reshaped delivery, pricing, and their internal operating model. Services firm executives who complete those five shifts should land on the margin expansion side of a structurally expanding market. The pace is moderate, but the direction is decisive: The market keeps expanding through the transition while the bear case predicts contraction. Those who do not should expect margin contraction even as the market grows around them." - Lars Goransson, vice president, Worldwide Services Research, IDC