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Like many analyst firms, market sizing is one of the ongoing practices of AR Insider’s research arm ARtillery Intelligence. A few times per year, it goes into isolation and buries itself deep in financial modeling. One such exercise zeroes in on mobile AR revenues.
This is one of the main subdivisions of spatial computing – others include headworn AR and VR. They’re all related and share technological underpinnings, but are driven by separate market forces such as their respective hardware bases (see methodology and inclusions).
So what did the mobile AR forecast uncover? At a high level, global mobile AR revenue is projected to grow from $10.04 billion in 2024 to $15.45 billion in 2029, an 8.98 percent CAGR. This sum consists of consumer and enterprise spending, and their revenue subsegments.
Drilling down, our latest Behind the Numbers installment looks at enterprise spending in mobile AR. This includes see-what-I-see remote support or other productivity and guidance use cases on tablets and smartphones. The business case is strong, but there are still headwinds.
Complexity & Cost
Jumping right in, spending on mobile AR enterprise productivity is projected to grow from $3.07 billion in 2024 to $3.22 billion in 2029. This includes live guided support in industrial settings (e.g., assembly, maintenance) and collaboration in corporate settings (e.g., design, training).
These use cases cut across several industry verticals, which means a sizeable addressable market. But it’s also limited in that we’re talking about mobile AR-only. The above spending estimates track software but not hardware, as mobile devices aren’t counted as XR spending.
This contrasts headworn AR (tracked separately), such as Hololens 2 and Magic Leap 2, which is where enterprises stand to benefit most. However, the technology has greater adoption barriers and organizational inertia, given greater friction, learning curves, complexity, and cost.
Mobile AR therefore enjoys greater enterprise penetration — further amplified as it piggybacks on an installed base of 3 billion+ global smartphones. Enterprises are also more comfortable with mobile form factors, including key stakeholders like front-line workers and the IT department.
Business Case
Sticking with the theme of enterprise comfort levels, it’s a big gating factor in AR. Like many technologies, AR faces cultural resistance to change. But if anything will overcome that, it’s a strong business case that can overpower common patterns of organizational inertia.
But despite that, there’s still bad news. The elephant in the room is the slow revenue growth projected in the figures above. One reason for that slow growth is teased above — mobile AR’s adoption gains will be offset by a shift to headworn AR. That will be a gradual but important trend.
Whether it’s handheld or headworn AR, adoption is driven by the ability to help companies scale by doing more with less. This includes things like remote support in field maintenance — which has already gotten the chance to shine, given the remote work needs of the COVID era.
Similarly, retiring baby boomers cause a skills gap, which can be expensive for enterprises. AR can help fill that gap by placeshifting subject matter experts (remote support) while transferring institutional knowledge through immersive training. This will be enterprise AR’s biggest propellant.
We’ll pause there and circle back in the next behind-the-numbers installment with more numbers and narratives.
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