As organizations find themselves in an uncertain era of rapid change, CXOs need to be able to identify trends, plan accordingly and effectively execute strategies. It is more important than ever before that executives stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making predictions about changing business conditions.
Gartner has predicted that there will be big changes in technology and business in the years to come. Business leaders should think about how these changes will affect their plans.
Top 10 strategic predictions for 2023
- By 2027, 30% of the investment growth by enterprises in metaverse technologies will be for fully virtual workspaces.
Virtual workspaces help companies hire employees from all over the place. Virtual spaces provide a way for people to meet without having to travel. Eventually, virtual workspaces will replace offices and become the main way people work. This will be especially true for remote-first or hybrid companies.
2. By 2025, “labor volatility” will lead to 40% of organizations reporting material business loss, which will shift the talent strategy from acquisition to resilience.
“Material” is a term that accountants use to mean something important and worth explaining in financial disclosures. As many as 40% of organizations will have trouble ensuring consistency and stability in their operations. To ensure success, organizations will need to shift their focus to be more flexible.
3. By 2025, organizations remediating documented gender pay gaps will be able to decrease women’s attrition by 30%, in turn reducing pressure on talent shortages.
Many organizations have a hard time finding employees with the right skills to do their work. They also want more diversity in their employees due to investors and society’s pressure on them to change. Employees usually want to be paid fairly, so they will often change jobs to get a better salary. Businesses benefit when they have more women working for them, such as increased profits, greater revenue, and better productivity.
4. By 2025, employee value metrics such as well-being, burnout, and brand satisfaction will be more important than ROI evaluations in 30% of successful growth investment decisions.
Some companies that focus on creating a good employee experience also do well on customer experience metrics. This leads to higher revenue growth and loyalty from customers. However, most companies use a model that only looks at short-term outcomes, like reducing costs or improving revenue. Companies that use a more expansive set of metrics will shift their focus to long-term growth, disruption and innovation.
5. Without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the human workforce by 2025, significantly offsetting carbon-zero gains.
AI’s energy consumption is growing quickly as it is used more to automate human activities. Machine learning models need to be trained and executed, which requires more cloud data centers. To reduce the amount of energy AI uses, people are coming up with new practices. It’s important to remember that the benefits of AI may outweigh its footprint, but only if AI is applied effectively in many places.
6. Social media platform models will change from “customer as product” to “platform as customer” of decentralized identity by 2027, sold through data markets.
People need to prove their identity many times online, but this is not efficient, scalable, or secure. So, people will move toward using digital identity wallets. In these wallets, people only have to prove their identity once. Then they can use that identity many times. This will require new markets for identity data. With these markets, users will release their identity data and set the terms of usage and payments for it.
7. Citizen-led denial of service (cDOS) attacks, using virtual assistants to shut down operations, will be the fastest-growing form of protest by 2026.
Some people think that denial-of-service attacks should be allowed because they are a form of free speech. However, other people think that these attacks should not be allowed because they violate international policies and laws. This debate will become more complicated in the future as more people start to do these attacks for social reasons instead of just to cause damage. If this trend continues, it could lead to new legislation being created. However, virtual assistant providers like Amazon, Google, and Apple may face pressure to remove the skills or actions that allow a virtual assistant to contact organizations.
8. Shareholder acceptance of moonshot speculative investments will double by 2025, making them a viable alternative to traditional R&D spending to accelerate growth.
Leading enterprises will take advantage of uncertainty or disruption, using new and unknown mindsets, capabilities, and skills for capturing growth opportunities. A moonshot is enterprise and shareholder acceptance of high-risk or speculative technology investments that have greater potential for return. Traditional practices using defined innovation budgets and predicting future outcomes through business cases will be replaced by this radical new way of solving an existing or new problem using disruptive measures.
9. Powerhouse cloud ecosystems will consolidate the vendor landscape by 30% through 2025, leaving customers with less number of choices and less control of their software destiny.
Most cloud ecosystems integrate the tools of a cloud solution provider (CSP) or an independent software vendor (ISV) and are incomplete, missing functionality, maturity, and adoption. Even though most organizations develop a blended ecosystem for improvements, as the primary ecosystem vendors mature and add to their tools, organizations will replace third-party ISV tools. And as CSPs continue to improve their tools and add new features faster than anyone else, there will be even greater cost savings from reduced integration, time to market, and training.
10. Jointly owned sovereignty partnerships sanctioned by regulators will increase stakeholder trust in global cloud brands by 2024 and facilitate continued IT globalization.
As governments and regulators become more aware of the importance of privacy and data protection, they are implementing tighter policies and higher requirements for data sovereignty and control. This is driving the demand for digital sovereignty.
People are changing their expectations of sovereign cloud solutions. They used to only care about data sovereignty and privacy, but now they’re also worried about whether they will be able to keep using the same cloud solutions in the future. Government officials and cloud providers need to work together to figure out what the best approach is and what measures should be taken. Joint ownership of a cloud provider between governments and regulators could help rebuild trust in global cloud brands and encourage more people to use them.
As business leaders work to make their organizations more flexible and adaptable, these 10 predictions will help them turn uncertainty into opportunity. Business leaders must make sure to include these in their roadmap so that they can stay ahead of the competition and excite their teams with new ideas.
Source: Gartner
