AI Impact Will Come Mostly from Consumer Products and Services, Not Enterprise

It is fair enough to raise questions about whether the coming investment in AI compute infrastructure is matched to new AI revenues that investment is expected to generate. 

“Two trillion dollars in annual revenue is what’s needed to fund computing power needed to meet anticipated AI demand by 2030,” according to researchers at Bain and Company. “However, even with AI-related savings, the world is still $800 billion short to keep pace with demand.”

Bain’s sixth annual Global Technology Report predicts that, by 2030, global incremental AI compute requirements could reach 200 gigawatts, with the United States accounting for half of the capability. 

So here’s the thinking: even if companies in the U.S. market shifted all of their on-premise information technology budgets to cloud and reinvested the savings from applying AI in sales, marketing, customer support, and research and development into capital spending on new data centers, the amount would still fall short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment, as AI’s compute demand grows at more than twice the rate of Moore’s Law, Bain argues. 

The return on investment arguably looks different if we look at AI impact on consumer products, though. 

PwC estimates that up to $9.1 trillion of the total global GDP gain from AI by 2030 will come from consumption-side effects (increased demand due to personalized, higher-quality products and services). 

In other words, productivity improvements are part of the story, but not the whole story. 

AI-Influenced Consumer Spending: A report by Cognizant and Oxford Economics projects that U.S. consumers who embrace AI could drive $4.4 trillion in AI-influenced consumer spending in the US alone by 2030.

The global consumer AI market size is projected to reach approximately $674.49 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 28.3% (NextMSC forecast). 

Feature	Bain Argument (B2B/Enterprise Focus)	Consumer AI (B2C/Consumption Focus)
Primary Metric	Annual revenue needed to fund AI compute capital expenditure ($2T needed, $800B shortfall).	Increased consumer spending and consumption-side GDP boost (e.g., $4.4T influenced spending in the United States, $9.1T global GDP from consumption).
Key Conclusions	Supply-side funding shortfall to build the necessary data centers and computing power.	Demand-side explosion creating massive new market value and consumption.

Study Name	Date	Publisher(s)	Key Conclusion on Consumer Impact	Web Link
Sizing the Prize	Oct 2017	PwC	AI will boost global GDP by $15.7 trillion by 2030. Crucially, $9.1 trillion (58%) of this gain will come from consumption-side effects (increased consumer demand for personalized, higher-quality products and services).	https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/analytics/assets/pwc-ai-analysis-sizing-the-prize-report.pdf
New Minds, New Markets	Jan 2025	Cognizant & Oxford Economics	Consumers who embrace AI could drive $4.4 trillion in AI-influenced consumer spending in the U.S. by 2030, accounting for 46% of total U.S. spending. AI will revolutionize the purchase journey (Learn, Buy, Use).	https://investors.cognizant.com/news-and-events/news/news-details/2025/Cognizant-Study-Shows-Consumers-Who-Embrace-AI-Could-Drive-4.4-Trillion-in-Spending-Over-Five-Years/default.aspx
The economic potential of generative AI	June 2023	McKinsey Global Institute	Generative AI could add an equivalent of $400 billion to $660 billion annually to the retail and consumer packaged goods sectors across the 63 use cases analyzed globally.	McKinsey
The State of Consumer AI	June 2025	Menlo Ventures	The consumer AI market has reached $12 billion in the 2.5 years since generative AI went public. The low conversion rate (3% paying for premium) indicates a massive monetization opportunity, especially for specialized AI tools and Voice AI.	https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-consumer-ai/
AI's transformation of consumer industries	Apr 2025	World Economic Forum (WEF)	GenAI could yield an extra $1.2 trillion in economic value across seven geographies within consumer industries by 2038. Projected impacts include a 10−20% revenue uplift and a 60% reduction in content production costs.	https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/04/ai-transformation-consumer-industries-wef-report/

The point is that we do not yet know the size of markets and benefits of AI, to evaluate against the cost of computing infrastructure to support AI use cases. But enterprise impact is likely the lesser of the drivers. Consumer products and services are where most of the returns are likely to happen.