"The use of smart machines by enterprises can be transformative and disruptive. Smart machines will profoundly change the way work is done and how value is created. From dynamic pricing models and fraud detection to predictive policing and robotics, smart machines have broad applicability in all industries," said Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner. "For service providers, smart machines represent opportunities to help enterprises assess, select, implement, change, and adapt talent. For IT and business processes, they offer opportunity to successfully adopt smart machines for business benefits."

The opportunity for consulting and system integration (C&SI) services will range from advising organisations to help them sort through the hype to helping with strategic design, training of the smart machines, deployment, and integration and on to expansion and ongoing refinement. These opportunities will help drive spending on smart-machine-C&SI services from $451 million in 2016 to nearly $29 billion in 2021.

The spectrum of sub-technologies within smart machines will be adopted at different speeds and timings, with the majority of smart technologies being mainstream adopted in the 2020 through 2025 time frame. Organisations' investments into smart machines will span more than a decade, implying that the smart-machine-C&SI service market will be a long-term one.

"Over time, the increased C&SI opportunity created by the growing number of companies implementing more complex smart machine programmes is expected to be counter-balanced by the a reduction in costs of adoption, as every subsequent adoption of the same smart-machine solution will be less expensive and faster," said Ms Tan. "In the long term (about ten years), smart machines will be an integral set of tools in the toolkit of C&SI service providers and infused into all next-generation services offerings."