Artificial intelligence and process automation spending worldwide 2016-2021

Published by
Bergur Thormundsson
,
Jun 30, 2025

The statistic shows a forecast of spending on robotic process, intelligent process, and artificial intelligence automation worldwide, from 2016 to 2021. In 2017, expenditure on AI and process automation is expected to reach

***
billion U.S. dollars globally. In this sense, artificial intelligence is autonomous decision-making by a system or systems designed to simulate human thought processes. The process involves self-learning systems improved through data mining, pattern recognition, and natural language processing.

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Total automation and artificial intelligence (AI) operations expenditure worldwide from 2016 to 2021 (in billion U.S. dollars)

CharacteristicSpending in billion U.S. dollars
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Showing entries 1 to 6 (6 entries in total)
Statistic: Total automation and artificial intelligence (AI) operations expenditure worldwide from 2016 to 2021 (in billion U.S. dollars)

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Release date

November 2017

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2017

Supplementary notes

* forecast
The source defines the three categories as follows:
"RPA Definition: RPA describes a software development toolkit that allows non-engineers to quickly create software robots (known commonly as "bots") to automate rules-driven business processes...
Intelligent Process Automation Definition: Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is the use of technology to allow a business function or part of the operation of a process workflow work automatically...
AI Definition: AI refers to the simulation of human thought processes across enterprise operations, where the system makes autonomous decisions, using high-level policies, constantly monitoring and optimizing its performance and automatically adapting itself to changing conditions and evolving business rules and dynamics."

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