The Next Phase of AI Spending Is All About Business Value

Global AI spending is entering a new phase. While 2024 and 2025 were defined by massive investments in computing infrastructure, chips, and foundational models, 2026 is shaping up to be the year when enterprises focus on turning those investments into real-world business value.

According to Vention’s State of AI 2026 Report, every major AI category is growing in absolute spending. However, where the money is flowing is changing rapidly. The market is gradually shifting away from foundational infrastructure and toward software, applications, and AI-powered business workflows.

The Shift from Building AI to Using AI

One of the clearest trends is the declining share of spending allocated to AI services. While AI services accounted for 26% of worldwide AI spending in 2024, that share is projected to fall to 19% in 2025 and 16% in 2026.

This does not mean spending on services is shrinking. Rather, other categories are growing faster as organizations move beyond experimentation and begin deploying AI across their operations.

AI application software is expected to rise from 8% of total spending in 2024 to 13% by 2026, while AI infrastructure software grows from 6% to 11% over the same period. Gartner identifies these two segments as key drivers of the next wave of AI market expansion, reflecting growing demand for tools that can embed intelligence directly into business processes.

As Glyn Roberts, CTO of Digital Solutions at Vention, notes: “2025 has been the year of heavy investment in compute, but the real breakthroughs will come in 2026 when we see a similar scale of commitment to embedding AI into real business workflows. Hardware enables, but applied intelligence transforms.”

Big Tech Continues to Shape the Market

The AI investment landscape remains heavily influenced by a handful of technology giants. According to Crunchbase, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft collectively invested more than $90 billion in AI startups during the first half of 2025, representing over 40% of global AI investment activity.

Several notable trends stand out. Nvidia has emerged as one of the most aggressive AI investors, increasing its investment activity from $20.6 billion in 2024 to $27.7 billion in 2025. Meta has also re-entered the market aggressively, committing more than $14 billion through its investment in Scale AI after largely stepping back from startup investing between 2020 and 2023.

Meanwhile, OpenAI's landmark funding round, which attracted Microsoft and numerous other investors, accounted for roughly $40 billion of AI investment activity in 2025 alone.

The Bigger Picture

The composition of AI spending reveals an industry moving from capability building to capability deployment. The race is no longer solely about who can build the largest models or the fastest chips. Increasingly, the winners will be those that successfully integrate AI into products, workflows, and decision-making systems at scale. As spending shifts toward applications and enterprise software, the next chapter of the AI economy will be defined less by infrastructure and more by measurable business outcomes.