B2B spending on AI models and platforms will reach roughly $60 billion in 2026. At historical service attach rates, where every dollar of enterprise ERP, SaaS or cloud license generated $3–5 of services, that implies a $200–300 billion AI services market today.
Yet the actual AI services market is roughly $35 billion. The attach ratio hasn't reached even 1:1.
By 2030, with enterprise agentic-AI software spend projected to approach $1 trillion, historical attach rates imply an AI services market in the trillions, larger than today's entire global IT services industry.
Many winners across massive diversified eco-system
Not dissimilar from prior technology shifts (SaaS & Cloud) which were dependent on services firms to enable adoption, AI services will be no different, except much larger, across more vectors, producing more winners, large and small. As you can see below (and this is based on what we know today), there are many categories of services where value will be provided, and this will only evolve with time as the technology matures, and flushes itself out.
Acquisition spree has begun and will only continue
The supply-demand imbalance is already stark: forward-deployed engineering talent is the scarcest resource in enterprise AI. The proof is the past eighteen months of acquisitions, by global integrators, by private equity, and most tellingly, by the frontier model providers themselves. When the most valuable technology companies on earth start buying services firms, they are telling you where the bottleneck is.
Frontier Labs acquiring service firms and heavy investment in the channel demonstrates the mission critical nature of AI services and the bottleneck
The frontier labs aren't just buying services firms, they're building a formal channel of them. In the span of four months, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google each launched partner programs with published directories, tiered certification, and committed capital: over $1 billion between them.
Read that as an admission: the models don't deploy themselves. And read the directories as something rarer, a public, vetted, unpurchasable quality screen over a fragmented market. Sub-scale firms are already being acquired on the strength of partner status alone.
The earliest innings
Enterprise AI adoption is still in its earliest innings: most organizations have workloads in production, but few have scaled them, and the services attach ratio is a fraction of where every prior platform cycle settled. The firms that close that gap are being built right now.
Harbor Ridge Capital invests in this category as principal, and advises founders through financings as well as M&A. If you're building one of these firms, or interested in acquiring or financing players in the space, feel free to reach out: cyrus@harborridgecap.com.
Cyrus Maghami is the Founder & Managing Director of Harbor Ridge Capital, a SaaS- and tech-services-focused M&A advisory firm that has completed 69 transactions representing $2.3B in value.