AI Market Growth: This Niche Will Expand 44% by 2030, While Web3 AI Skyrockets 89.7%

Sales teams and general customer assistance operators might not like this, but one of the key segments where artificial intelligence is having commercial impacts today is in the so-called "virtual agents" space.  They're getting smarter at handling problems. And the AI agent bot market is growing. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once described these autonomous agents as a "super-competent colleague" that can tackle simple tasks instantly.

"I think 2025 is going to be the year that (AI Agent) systems finally hit the mainstream," OpenAI's chief product officer, Kevin Weil, was quoted saying in October during a press conference.

According to a research report by business intelligence firm MarketsandMarkets published on Jan. 25, the AI virtual agents market is seen ascending from a value of $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030. This growth trajectory translates into a compound annual growth rate of 44.8% over the next five years.

Despite this, some of the pure plays in this space have massively underperformed the Nasdaq over the last year.  Israeli based NICE Ltd (NICE), makers of AI customer service tools, is down nearly 32% over the last 12 months. RBC Capital maintained its outperform on NICE as of Feb. 21.

UiPath (PATH) is down 41% and LivePerson (LPSN), isdown 51% and trading under $2 a share.

Other "Big Tech" players are in this space, but are quite diverse so no one is really going to call them an AI investment. But investors are liking these more traditional tech companies because of what they are doing with these new AI language models.

Salesforce (CRM) provides pre-built AI bots for sales and marketing automation. As does IBM with its watsonx product and Microsoft (MSFT) has its Power Virtual Agents that are used to manage their IT desks. These AI bots respond to basic support problems and are designed to reduce response times. Humans still do the more difficult tasks. AI investors that want less downside will go there.

AI Agents & the Web3 Market

Digital asset investors will also get a chance to seek out newcomers in this space as well.

"AI is a dominant theme in Web3 at the moment, particularly AI Agents, and we expect this to continue through 2025," said Shahaf Bar Geffen, CEO and Founder of COTI (COTI), a cryptocurrency and layer 2  blockchain focused on privacy. "More companies, products and services are leaning into this technology now. I think we are going to see a new generation of AI agent builders coming into the Web3 market now, empowered by the growth of AI and looking to create and launch their own decentralized Apps and services," he said from his office in Israel.

Coti does not make AI virtual agents. The company works with Web3 clients like decentralized finance trading platform, Bancor. Coti does privacy-on-demand for Bancor trades.

Another business intelligence group called GMI Research did a report specifically on AI in the blockchain market back in October 2023. They estimated the blockchain AI market to witness a larger compounded annual growth rate than in traditional software markets, growing at 58.9% compounded out to 2030. The report looked at different AI applications, including natural language processing, which is what AI virtual agents do.

Web3 is getting in on this action.

"We're anticipating significant growth this year," said Dr. Dinesh Pinto, Research Engineer at the Flare Network (FLR) based in Dubai.

Flare is working with Google Cloud currently on verifiable AI.  “Verifiable AI” refers to systems or methodologies that enable the transparency of an AI model, ensuring the system is working as intended and can be trusted. Next month's Flare x Google Cloud hackathon in Berkeley, California, will spotlight verifiable AI to some of the world's best software engineers.

"I think there is increasing market interest in blockchain-enabled AI solutions," Pinto said. "We expect to see more adoption and revenue growth for us."

Also this month, MarketsandMarkets released a report specific to AI language processing, forecasting this segment to grow from $28.5 million in 2024 to $1.32 billion by 2030, for a compound annual growth rate of 89.7% during the forecast period.

Traditional Big Tech leads here, with IBM and Qualcomm Technologies (QCOM) with its cloud-based AI Inference Suite product AI agents.

For the more fledgling digital assets corner of this market, Geffen said no one really knows how big AI will be for Web3. 

"The landscape is already shifting," he said. "Decentralized Finance AI is emerging." Earlier this year, Coti launched PriveX – a perpetual decentralized exchange – which deploys AI trading agents which they can train on customized trading data to to buy and sell crypto. "I really think 2025 marks the start of this new era of AI for Web3 companies," Geffen said.