IT spending worldwide is on track to hit $4 trillion. State CIOs want to be innovative, but find it hard to achieve. And IT infrastructure budgets are in the cloud.

That’s the latest in IT market research. Here’s your tech provider’s roundup.

Global IT spending: nearly $4 trillion

IT spending worldwide will total $3.9 trillion this year, Gartner predicts, an increase over 2019 of 3.4%.

Intel is making a big push into AI – make that several pushes.

Last fall, the company hosted an AI Summit at which it introduced AI circuitry.

And at the CES 2020 show earlier this month, Intel introduced AI-powered processors, demonstrated progress made by its Mobileye unit, and highlighted an innovative and possibly life-saving AI-powered project with the Red Cross.

Together, these events highlight AI’s determination to make advances for AI applications in business, society and research. Here’s your tech provider’s update.

Is there a mismatch between the way you sell storage and what your customers actually need?

Lots of tech providers sell parts. A new server. New storage drive. New PCs.

But your customers may not care about buying new server or storage hardware. What they definitely care about is a solution. That is, finding a combination hardware, software and services package that solves an important business problem.

Windows 7 standard support ends today, and it seems this deadline really helped drive demand for PCs in the fourth quarter of last year.

Worldwide unit shipments of PCs grew by a surprisingly strong 4.8% in Q4:19, according to new figures from IDC. That not only beat the market watcher’s earlier forecast, it also marked the highest quarterly shipment volume of PCs since the fourth quarter of 2015.

Were your customers among those who took advantage of the tech sales during the just-passed holiday season? If so, they were far from alone.

Overall digital spending during the 2019 holiday season increased 8% over the previous year, hitting $723 billion worldwide, according to a new report from Salesforce.

In-store shoppers shun help from robots. Brand loyalty is fragile. And smart speakers are proliferating.

That’s some of the latest research released in time for retail’s big show, NRF 2020. This conference and expo, sponsored by the National Retail Federation, gets started in New York tomorrow, Jan. 11. Its organizers expect nearly 40,000 people to attend.

Here’s your tech provider’s research roundup:

People, not robots

At the big CES 2020 show being held this week in Las Vegas, top PC vendors introduced their new laptops based on 10th Gen Intel Core processors.

Intel’s “Ice Lake” processors, introduced this past May, are designed for ultra-thin laptops and 2-in-1s, and they’re based on the company’s 10nm “Sunny Cove” architecture.

Intel today introduced the NUC 9 Pro, a compact workstation designed for creative tasks.

Part of Intel’s NUC family of mini-PCs, the new NUC 9 Pro includes integrated Intel UHD graphics. It's also the first in Intel's NUC line to support discrete PCIe graphics cards. That, along with its ability to run demanding design and engineering applications, makes the new Intel NUC 9 Pro a strong computing candidate for your most creative customers.

Technically, CES 2020 doesn’t get started until tomorrow, Jan. 7, but the big guns are already introducing exciting new computing devices.

That includes HP. Yesterday the company introduced 3 PCs that incorporate new features including 10th Gen Intel Core processors, 5G and an app that helps users find misplaced or lost devices.

Here’s your tech provider’s update:

Dell’s new laptop just might be the smartest, fastest PC around. Called the Latitude 9510, the device comes with not only the latest high-end Intel mobile processors, but also both AI and 5G built in.

The 9510 is part of a new Latitude family of PCs that Dell introduced this week, just a few days before the doors open onto the big CES 2020 conference. Dell says the Latitudes help usher in a “new era of PCs and displays.”