The Applied AI Playbook:
Where Adoption Is Real and What Comes Next for Technology Leaders

AI adoption is advancing rapidly across enterprise and industrial markets, but the opportunities and requirements vary widely by technology domain. From growing infrastructure demand and production-scale inference to autonomous agents and Physical AI, technology providers need to understand where adoption is gaining traction and how enterprise expectations are changing.

This ABI Research playbook examines the AI trends shaping cloud infrastructure, enterprise workflows, manufacturing, robotics, telecommunications, and cybersecurity. It highlights where demand is growing, the challenges influencing adoption, and the strategies technology providers can use to align their product roadmaps with the next phase of applied AI.

Topics Covered

• AI Computing Demand: How AI-dedicated workloads are reshaping global computing capacity and infrastructure investment
• Inference: The growing importance of inference performance, open-source models, hardware diversity, and production-scale AI delivery
• Agentic AI: How long-running autonomous agents are evolving toward shared enterprise use and hybrid local-cloud execution
• Industrial AI: Where AI is improving workflows, knowledge capture, engineering, execution, and supply chain resilience
• Physical AI: How Robotics Foundation Models are expanding automation opportunities across manufacturing and logistics
• Telecommunications: The potential role of distributed infrastructure and low-latency processing in the AI economy
• Cybersecurity: How AI is creating new opportunities for security automation while increasing governance, sovereignty, and risk requirements

Download the playbook to explore where applied AI adoption is gaining momentum and the cloud infrastructure, workflow, security, and market considerations technology leaders should be preparing for next.