What is the opportunity for Channel Partners in AI at the edge?

We have learned quite a bit over the past few weeks about what AI at the edge is going to look like, including Apple's announcements on Monday. This presents a remarkable opportunity for channel partners around the world over the course of the next decade.

According to mega companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and others, the network topology (compute, storage, networking) for Gen AI looks to be very balanced from edge to cloud.

First, with 85% of the world's business data currently sitting on premises, the plans for training and tuning large language models (LLMs) will not involve forklifting this data into public clouds. The opportunity for Gen AI services will grow to $158 billion by 2027 according to Canalys, a 59% CAGR.

Second, with the on-device execution of these models at the edge (PCs, smartphones, smart devices, wearables, self-driving cars, drones, etc.) partner services opportunities will outpace the device growth (40% to 47% CAGR for smartphones and PCs over next 4 years).

Third, servers (already up 105.5% y/y last quarter), storage and networking opportunities to train and tune these models with business data will create a solid double-digit growth in related services. In fact, we recently highlighted our parent company Omdia research showing a 19.7% CAGR growth opportunity at the intelligent edge - pulling telco into the mix.

It is also important to take a deep breath. As the famous Bill Gates quote goes... we are overestimating the hype cycle in the first 2 years, but underestimating 10.