AI software revenue is forecast to top $200 billion in 2026—twice its 2024 level—as demand for generative and agentic AI accelerates; Omdia raised its outlook, while Gartner separately projects total worldwide AI spending of about $2.7 trillion, including infrastructure, software and services.

The expansion is playing out across the AI value chain, with foundation model providers growing revenue three to ten times year over year, hyperscalers’ AI cloud businesses posting triple-digit growth, and enterprise software vendors rolling out AI-enhanced and AI-native products.

Generative AI revenue is projected to rise 139% in 2026 as businesses adopt assistants, coding tools and AI features embedded in business software; agentic AI is growing faster, but from a smaller base.

By 2028, generative AI is expected to become the largest AI software revenue segment, overtaking predictive AI.

Omdia Principal Market Forecaster Neil Dunay said generative and agentic AI may become less distinct as assistants take on more autonomy and workflows handle multi-step tasks, with the market potentially organized around levels of autonomy instead.

The growth picture varies by category: spending forecasts show the overall market expanding rapidly, while web-traffic estimates offer a snapshot of where public demand is concentrated.

Among broad categories, AI recruiting grew fastest, up 290% year over year to about 962 million visits, followed by AI assistants at 1.09 billion visits, up 218%; education, research and data analysis each exceeded 1.1 billion visits after growing 136% to 179%.

AI chatbots and AI search engines each more than tripled their traffic, rising 259% to about 1 billion visits and 260% to about 998 million, respectively, pointing to growing use of AI for questions and research.

Established work-focused categories also expanded: writing reached 1.56 billion visits, marketing 1.50 billion, and automation and design 1.47 billion each; coding tools rose 15% to about 510 million visits, while AI agents grew 39% to about 269 million.

By contrast, Google search traffic fell year over year for AI music tools, sales tools, video tools, productivity tools and image tools, with declines ranging from 4% to 40%; the article suggests users may be shifting to general assistants or familiar apps, or going directly to tools they already know.

Specialist categories remained smaller and heavily U.S.-focused: healthcare AI drew about 99 million visits, up 8%, while finance AI drew 16 million and legal AI 6 million, down 6%; the United States accounted for roughly one-third of visits in each category.