This IDC Market Presentation is our Industry Market Forecast for digital transformation (DX) spending by utilities in APAC. It provides technology suppliers with an overview of regional utilities’ spending on DX and insights into the market context influencing that spend for 2026. It helps technology suppliers understand regional utilities’ DX spending in the context of total DX spend. It also highlights how utilities are investing across industry-specific DX use cases in the region.

By looking at the size of the regional market and the largest use case by spend, tech supplier executives can better evaluate:

• Investment areas in product or service development
• Sales and marketing campaign prioritization
• Market penetration

Used in combination with the other IDC Industry Intelligence reports, this document can help tech providers gain a competitive advantage with utilities in APAC.

“Drones and robotics inspection is the standout use case in APAC utilities in 2026, driven by PRC, India, and Japan, and growing at nearly 18% annually through 2029. The scale of the opportunity reflects something unique to this region: transmission and distribution networks that span some of the world’s most challenging geographies, from remote Pacific islands to Himalayan corridors to hyper-dense urban grids, where manual inspection is simply not a viable operating model. As AI-powered analytics platforms mature and regulatory frameworks around unmanned systems catch up with technology readiness, drone and robotic inspection is poised to become as foundational to APAC utility operations as smart metering was a decade ago,” said Jean-François Segalotto, senior associate advisor, IDC Energy Insights.

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