If you pay vendors to build, modernise, or test software, you are part of a €96 billion market this year, and on the analysts' own growth rates a €193 billion one by 2030. That is the spend autonomous software delivery competes for. It is also the smaller of the two numbers that matter.
Organisations will pay vendors €96 billion this year to build, modernise, and test software, doubling by 2030 on the analysts' own rates. Europe is a quarter of it, the UK and Ireland are about €7 billion of it, half in regulated sectors – and in Ireland, few enough buyers that a handful of them will set the standard for how autonomous delivery is bought. Behind it sits a far bigger number: the €710 billion a year Western Europe spends on its own developers.
What the €96 billion is made of
The market is three services pools, not the market for AI tools, and the distinction changes what the number means. Custom software development services were $43.2 billion in 2024 and are growing at 22.5% a year, which puts them at about €55.7 billion in 2026 once converted at the European Central Bank's rate of 4 September 2026. Application modernisation services were $22.7 billion in 2025, growing at 14.6%: €22.4 billion. Software testing is a $54.4 billion market this year, of which 38.3% is bought as a managed service: €17.9 billion. Together they come to €96 billion – about 7% of the €1.35 trillion the world will spend on IT services in 2026, inside total IT spending of $6.37 trillion, up 14.2% on the year.
What we left out matters as much as what we put in. Low-code platforms are a €38 billion market, AI coding tools €8–10 billion across four analyst houses, and agentic AI platforms €9–17 billion. None of those is where your budget sits. When you commission an application, the money comes from the services budget, not the tooling budget; the tooling figures tell you how fast work is moving from people to agents, and the services figures tell you what you are actually paying for. Adding them together would inflate the total by more than half and mislead you.
On growth the components diverge – 22.5% a year for custom build, 14.6% for modernisation, 12.9% for managed testing, a blended 18.9% – and applied to the 2026 base they take the pool to €193 billion by 2030, with custom build alone rising from €56 billion to €125 billion. Those rates were published before or during the shift to agents; the next article explains why they are more likely to understate than overstate.
Figure 1: Three services pools define the addressable market.
Where Europe, the UK and Ireland sit
Europe is about a quarter of the pool, the UK and Ireland about €7 billion of it, and half of that sits in regulated sectors – which is where the verification problem in the first two articles bites hardest.
Europe's share is 27%, or €25.9 billion. We anchored it on the one component with a published regional split – Europe is 26% of application modernisation spend, $5.9 billion of $22.7 billion – and cross-checked it against Gartner's forecast of €465 billion in European IT services spend this year, up 10.1%, which is about a third of the world figure. The UK is 26.6% of European IT services, or €6.9 billion. Ireland is our own estimate at 1.5% of Europe, about €0.4 billion, weighted by enterprise counts and ICT employment. Together, €7.3 billion.
Because Ireland is an estimate, we checked it from the bottom up. The Central Statistics Office counts 935 large enterprises of 250 or more staff and 4,662 medium ones. Assume half the large ones commission external bespoke work in a year at an average €600,000, one in five medium ones at €120,000, and about €150 million of public-sector spend, and you reach roughly €540 million. The same method in the UK – 8,335 large and 38,435 medium enterprises, plus 15% of a £16.8 billion public-sector digital market – gives about €6.3 billion against the top-down €6.9 billion. So Ireland is €0.4–0.55 billion. In the UK the two methods land within 10% of each other; in Ireland the bottom-up figure is about a third higher, which is why we publish a range rather than a point. We would lean towards the lower end: many of Ireland's large enterprises are subsidiaries of multinationals whose software budgets are held outside the country.
Apply the UK sector mix – financial services alone is around 20% of IT services spend – and, on our estimate, regulated sectors are about 47% of the UK and Irish pool, or €3.4 billion a year: banks, insurers, public bodies, health, utilities, and telecoms. That is the segment in which nobody can accept ‘passing’ as a claim, and in which the compliance calendar for 2027 lands. It is also small enough, in Ireland, that a handful of buyers will set the evidential standard for everyone who sells to them. If you run software delivery at an Irish bank, insurer, or public body, that probably includes you.
Figure 2 : Europe represents a significant share of the global addressable market.Where Europe, the UK and Ireland sit.
The number behind the number
The services market is the smaller number. The larger one is what organisations spend on their own engineering teams. Western Europe has about 9.5 million developers of 47.2 million worldwide. At an illustrative fully loaded cost of €75,000 a developer, that is about €710 billion a year – more than 25 times the €25.9 billion Europe spends on the services market – and every ten points of productivity on it is worth about €71 billion, more than the entire global custom-build market.
And it is not enough. The EU-27 employed 10.45 million ICT specialists in 2025 – 5% of all employment – against a Digital Decade target of 20 million by 2030. On those numbers, few organisations will hire their way to the roadmap their board has already approved. So the question is not whether agents replace engineers. It is how much more each engineer's work can deliver, and how you would prove it.
That is why the productivity evidence is the number to watch. Bain measures the realised gain from coding assistants at 10–15%, notes that it often fails to convert into business value, and points out that coding and testing are only 25–35% of the time from concept to launch. DORA's return-on-investment work models 35–40% gains for AI on greenfield tasks against 10% or less on complex legacy code. The distance between what assistants deliver today and what AI can reach on suitable work is 20–30 points – €140–210 billion a year in Western Europe alone. That is the pool the €96 billion services market is competing to capture.
What this means if you are buying
Three things follow. The money comes from your services budget, so compare any autonomous delivery offer with what you pay today for each change that reaches production, not with the price of a tool seat. The gains sit on the whole cycle, so ask a provider what share of concept-to-launch they shorten, verification included, rather than how fast they generate code – which is only a quarter to a third of the work. And treat any market or savings figure as a range with published assumptions, or as marketing: if it adds tooling to services, or quotes a single point for Ireland, ask how it was built.
What we hold ourselves to
We should say plainly where we stand. SevTech sells services from this €96 billion pool. If autonomous delivery does what we think it can, part of what companies like ours bill for today gets smaller. We built Forge anyway, because we would rather change our own model than wait for a client's procurement team to change it for us.
It also means our numbers deserve the scrutiny we are asking you to give everyone else's, so we sized this market by three rules. Size what the buyer actually spends: we left out low-code and AI tool spend, even though including it would have added more than half again to the headline. Reconcile top-down with bottom-up and publish the assumptions: our Irish figure is a range, every SevTech estimate is labelled as one, and where two methods disagree we say so rather than average them. And judge value on the whole cycle, not the code: the productivity that matters runs from concept to verified release. That is the standard our own engine is built to be measured against, and when we publish results, they will follow the same rules as every other figure in this series.
The €96 billion is real and it is growing at close to 19% a year. But the reason to care about it is the €710 billion behind it, and the fact that most organisations still cannot say what share of the second number they are getting back.
So, a question for your own organisation: of what you paid vendors last year to build, modernise, and test software, how much came with evidence that it worked – evidence you could put in front of your auditor or regulator?
Sources:
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Made with AI, not by it. Claude researched and drafted; I rewrote and verified it. The charts are Claude's.
