Dive Brief:
- Gartner projects global IT spending to grow 10.8% year over year to $6.15 trillion in 2026, according to a Tuesday report. The firm revised its prior estimate, which forecast 9.8% growth and $6.08 trillion in total spend, published in October 2025.
- IT services will remain the largest single tech spending segment, capturing just over 30% of the market, or $1.86 trillion, despite massive investments in AI infrastructure. While data center systems spending is expected to increase 31.7% year over year, the segment will only account for 10.6% of the total, or $653 billion, the analysis found.
- “The CIO’s entire lifecycle with tech is covered by services,” Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst John-David Lovelock said. “When they're thinking about changing a business strategy and how technology can enable that, they use consulting. It helps with implementation, with testing and with managed services to run the technology. In some cases, it’s taken over parts of the CIO’s job.”
Dive Insight:
AI adoption is the unstoppable force accelerating tech spend, as hyperscalers pour billions into cloud capacity buildouts and end users absorb incremental upticks in software subscription pricing.
Nearly half of all software sales will include a generative AI component this year, according to Lovelock. The AI services economy is booming, too, with Gartner expecting the category to capture nearly $600 million in spending, a 40% uptick over 2025.
AI strategies are shifting, however, as enterprises move on from failed initiatives to vendor-tested use cases.
“Last year we had a lot of moonshot projects fail,” Lovelock said. “We expect spending on direct AI services to grow but not greatly, while indirect AI services expand. It’s moved to business projects that include AI rather than AI projects to change your business.”
The desire for AI guidance is pervasive, according to DXC Technologies.
In a survey of roughly 2,500 business and tech professionals, the IT services found that three-quarters of organizations were on the hunt for partners to help guide AI projects. Respondents were looking to partners for AI readiness assessments, training programs, model customization and implementation strategies, the report found.
“We're going to see a lot of services companies coming out with their usual sales technique at this point in a technology cycle,” said Lovelock, pointing to cloud adoption as a model for AI deployment.
Service providers offered the fastest route to the cloud for many organizations and the same is true for AI. “Your software company is not going to get you as good a product or service as quickly as you want it, so you can either build something, use a third party or try a feature-rich point solution,” Lovelock said.
Software will also get a healthy boost this year, as AI add-ons drive up licensing fees.
Gartner expects software to be the second fastest growing tech category, with spending rising nearly 15% year over year to $1.43 trillion, right below IT services on the global balance sheet. The hierarchy should stand through the end of the decade, when software overtakes IT services.
“Consulting services pretty much hits every portion of technology,” Lovelock said. “It will be the largest category until sofware becomes bigger than services starting in 2029.”
