The editors at Solutions Review have compiled a summary of the Act! Advantage features that can help small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) create a smarter, more connected front office.

Maintaining an organized and connected front office environment is easier said than done. Whether it’s keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned, curating memorable experiences for customers, or ensuring all your technology platforms are speaking to each other, companies of any size are bound to have their hands full. While smaller businesses might have more flexibility in how they manage their processes, they also tend to have tighter margins that require them to do more with less, as the classic saying goes.

That’s where a platform provider like Act! can help. With the Act! Advantage solution suite, SMBs can centralize their customer data, sales, marketing processes, website, accounting system, and business apps to provide teams with the unified ecosystem they need to succeed and thrive in competitive markets. With that in mind, the Solutions Review editorial team outlined some of the key features that make Act! uniquely equipped to help SMBs transform their front office functions.

How Act! Advantage Can Improve Front Office Processes

Centralized Customer Data

Customer data fragmentation can be one of the most expensive operational failures modern businesses encounter. When customer information exists across multiple systems, spreadsheets, email folders, and individual team members’ files, organizations are forced to operate with incomplete intelligence about their most valuable asset. Act! Advantage aims to eliminate that fragmentation with user-friendly data centralization that makes it easy for teams to track calls, emails, notes, tasks, documents, quotes, and other information from a single, organized place.

For example, Act!’s contact management system goes beyond basic name and phone number storage by capturing and organizing everything from communication history to purchase patterns, interaction preferences, and more. Centralizing these data sets will empower front office teams to access customer profiles and pinpoint the insights they’re looking for without wasting time hunting for information across multiple sources.

The platform’s Custom Industry Tables are another feature engineered to provide teams with the insights they need to develop targeted sales and marketing strategies. Specifically, these Tables can help users across departments:

• Gain additional insights into customers by associating support contracts, service engagements, and more with individual contacts.
• Manage business and customer data with spreadsheet-like tables.
• Create targeted sales campaigns that leverage the insights gathered from Act! Custom Industry Tables.
• Leverage pre-built industry and job-specific templates to get started faster.

Attract New Prospects

Prospect attraction with Act! goes outside traditional lead generation approaches by implementing systematic methodologies that optimize every touchpoint in the prospect journey. The platform’s primary tools for attracting new prospects are its email marketing and automation capabilities. Its email marketing features are a highlight of the platform, as they make it easier than ever for users of all experience levels to create custom, professional-level emails. Those features include over 170 sample templates, a drag-and-drop interface requiring no formal coding skills, a visual workflow designer, drip marketing campaigns, and real-time email performance metrics for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and other relevant data.

Act! Advantage’s email marketing tools integrate seamlessly with its marketing automation capabilities. Together, these feature suites empower businesses to turn their digital marketing engagement efforts into prioritized sales activities in real-time. It does this by scoring leads based on their engagement with marketing materials (i.e., emails, lead forms, surveys), automatically creating activities to ensure rapid follow-ups, and developing a closed-loop connection between sales and marketing teams to ensure each team focuses its attention where it’s most valuable.

Convert Relationships Into Sales

Relationship conversion is a critical function within front office operations, which is why Act! provides teams with the structural framework necessary to turn the interpersonal connections created by the marketing team into revenue-generating transactions. With features for opportunity tracking, pipeline management, interactive quotes, and sales process management, Act! helps sales and marketing teams forecast confidently and keep prospective customers moving through the sales funnel.

These collaboration-centric features are crucial to ensuring that every customer relationship will benefit from organizational knowledge instead of relying solely on individual sales representative capabilities. When team members can share prospect intelligence, coordinate multi-person sales efforts, drive follow-ups, and maintain continuity when account ownership transfers occur, they’ll set their business and its customers up for continued success.

Maintain Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty can be the most cost-effective growth strategy available to organizations, yet traditional front office operations often neglect systematic retention efforts in favor of new customer acquisition activities. The customer relationship doesn’t stop at a sale, and failing to prioritize that relationship after a sales conversion can result in higher customer turnover. To help, Act! Advantage provides multiple capabilities for maintaining proactive loyalty programs that protect revenue and create expansion opportunities. These tools include:

• Response-driven nurture marketing capabilities analyze customer response patterns to email campaigns, content engagement, and communication preferences to create personalized retention sequences. This response-driven approach adapts messaging frequency, content type, and communication channels based on individual customer behavior rather than applying uniform retention strategies across diverse customer segments.
• Website activity tracking enables front office teams to recognize customers whose digital engagement patterns suggest declining loyalty before traditional metrics would detect problems. The Act! Advantage platform will correlate website activity with purchase history and support interactions to create comprehensive loyalty risk assessments that trigger proactive retention interventions.
• Progressive profiling functionality enhances loyalty maintenance by continuously expanding customer knowledge through strategic information collection. Act! gradually builds comprehensive customer profiles through multiple touchpoints over extended periods to capture evolving customer preferences, changing business requirements, and shifting decision criteria that influence loyalty and retention.
• Asset tracking within the Act! makes it easy to maintain detailed records of customer-owned assets, including purchase dates, warranty information, service histories, and upgrade opportunities.

Learn More About How Act! Can Improve Your Front Office Processes

The post 4 Ways Act! Advantage Can Create a Smarter Front Office for SMBs appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

The editors at Solutions Review highlight and summarize the key takeaways and updates in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the latest version of its Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC). Gartner defines CRM CECs as “a cohesive set of software built around core case management tools, dedicated to providing customer service and support by engaging with customers, and intelligently orchestrating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization.”

According to Gartner’s report, a CRM CEC’s mandatory capabilities include case management, digital engagement, knowledge management, automated customer engagement, real-time continuous intelligence, workflow management, intelligent voice support, and business process management. Other standard capabilities in these suites include low-code development, composability functionalities, collaboration tools, usability, globalization, and workforce engagement management.

You can find coverage of an earlier iteration of this report here.

What’s Changed: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Centers

In this updated Magic Quadrant, Gartner identifies some of the most significant CRM Customer Engagement Centers providers in the marketplace. The researchers behind the report—Pri Rathnayake, Drew Kraus, and Wynn White—evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each provider listed and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph, which illustrates each vendor’s ability to execute its vision. The diagram includes four quadrants: leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries. However, Gartner did not identify any vendors that fell into the Challengers category for this iteration of the report, so that section is not included in this summary.

To qualify for the report, each vendor must meet specific criteria by December 2023. Those criteria include generating a minimum of $45 million in total CEC software license revenue and a minimum of 10 percent year-over-year growth in total CEC software license revenue, being recognized by the CRM CEC market, having the technology to support an extension to cross-channel customer service, and providing thought leadership (i.e., webinars, market-related white papers, blog articles, and user communities), among others.

Leaders

Salesforce is the first Leader in Gartner’s report. The Salesforce Service Cloud is the core of its CRM CEC offering. It provides organizations of all sizes with extensive process automation tools unified with interaction orchestration features capable of managing data from other systems of record or engagement. Salesforce’s strengths as a CRM CEC include its extensive deployment resources, its collection of industry-specific offerings, and the pace and scale of its CEC innovations, including a GenAI assistant, Unified Knowledge solution, and more.

Microsoft earns its spot in the Leader category with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service solution, which uses AI technologies to help companies drive customer, agent, and administrator automation efforts. The company also received high marks for its innovations, ranging from AI Assistant capabilities to service representative experiences, voice and messaging tools, supervisor experience functionalities, and additional features for the Microsoft Teams integration. Its other strengths include its global cloud presence and its growing customer service platform, which benefits from the recently launched Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Oracle is the next Leader identified in Gartner’s report. The product assessed by Gartner was the Oracle Fusion Service suite, which includes its Oracle Service Center, Digital Customer Service, Knowledge Management, Intelligent Advisor, Field Service, Digital Assistant, and Customer Data Management products. According to Gartner, the platform’s differentiating characteristics are its scalable knowledge management solution (KMS), knowledge and decision automation capabilities, and its inclusion in Oracle’s broader suite of Fusion applications, which makes it an appealing solution for businesses with high-volume, high-complexity service orchestration needs.

ServiceNow lands in the Leader category with its ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) product, built to automate and optimize front, middle, and back-office processes. The company recently accelerated the release cadence for its CSM product and has added a collection of new features developed natively and via partnerships. These include unified routing with partner CCaaS and productivity enhancements via its GenAI agent assistant. Its other strengths as a CRM CEC vendor include its growing market momentum and industry-specific solutions, templates, and workflows.

Pegasystems rounds out the category with its Pega Customer Service offering, which provides clients with in-depth process automation capabilities that allow users to create workflows they can embed in other applications. Its highest-ranking features include GenAI-enabled workflow enhancements and its native and third-party process automation solutions, a low-code development platform, CTI, APIs, prebuilt connectors, and industry-specific workflow types known as “microjourneys.” The company’s capabilities suit larger enterprises with complex service process orchestration needs.

Niche Players

SAP is the first Niche Player in the Magic Quadrant. Its SAP Service Cloud product offers solid process automation capabilities that can be integrated with the company’s broader ERP offerings. The company sets itself apart from the competition with its modular architecture, which uses an API-first approach where all of the platform’s core capabilities are built into the application. That architecture also allows clients to extend its functionality further with the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Other standout features include its industry-vertical strategy and AI-based service agent productivity features, including tools for account synopsis, case summarization, an email draft recommender, and more.

Freshworks’ CRM CEC solution is Freshworks for CX, a suite built for case management workflows and interdepartmental collaboration use cases. The Freshworks for CX suite also includes ticketing, conversational, and voice service solutions. One of Freshworks’ most compelling strengths is its ease of entry for customers since it offers free trials for limited periods, free onboarding assistance, and free limited use of product features through its licensing model. Other strengths include its focus on SMB and midmarket clients and its ability to deploy the solution or extend its functionality using apps available on the Freshworks marketplace.

Creatio is one of the new additions to Gartner’s report. Its solution, Service Creatio, is a CRM customer engagement center (CEC) built on a no-code platform well-suited to the needs of midsize to large enterprises. Its differentiating qualities include its workflow automation capabilities based on Creatio’s roots in the business process management (BPM) market, its collection of industry-specific solutions delivered via regional partner specialists, and its modular architecture, courtesy of the platform’s no-code functional blocks.

Zoho lands in the Niche Player category with Zoho Desk, a CRM CEC solution that provides service and support teams with basic customer service process orchestration capabilities. According to Gartner, Zoho Desk is ideal for smaller service and support deployments, specifically for organizations already using Zoho’s CRM. Its strengths as a vendor in the CRM CEC market include its ease of implementation, field service capabilities, pricing structure, and the ability to extend the solution using Zoho marketplace extensions or Zoho’s low-code development tools.

HubSpot is the second and final newcomer to this Magic Quadrant. Its CEC portfolio includes two solutions: HubSpot Service Hub, a help desk offering built for customer service management use cases, and the HubSpot customer platform, which provides unified customer data insights from marketing and sales into customer service interactions. Gartner identifies the company’s strengths as its pricing and license models, data aggregation features, and ability to meet the needs of brands in the SMB and midmarket segments.

Visionaries

Zendesk is one of the two companies listed under Gartner’s Visionaries category. Its CEC services and functions support customer interactions across voice and digital channels in self- and assisted-service deployments. According to Gartner’s research, the platform’s user interface and administration controls are easy to use and navigate, which helps improve user adoption and deployment speeds. Other strengths include its AI-centric innovations and core CRM CEC functionalities, including its omnichannel digital engagement tools and robust case management capabilities.

eGain rounds out the latest iteration of the Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Centers with the eGain Customer Engagement Suite, a customizable application coupled with a knowledge management and digital customer communication platform. The company is making a name for itself in the market with the pace of its AI-centric innovations, including the addition of an AI assistant, GenAI analytics for managers, an AI tool library for knowledge automation, GenAI reasoning functionality for customers, and more. The company is also well-regarded for its composability and knowledge management tools.

The post What’s Changed: Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Centers appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

Solutions Review’s listing of the best CRM software companies is an annual look into the solution providers in our Buyer’s Guide and Solutions Directory. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

A company’s interactions with its customers are a driving force behind its ever-evolving marketing and sales strategies. Many companies have turned to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to help them turn those interactions into ongoing relationships. With these solutions, marketers can automate tasks, analyze large quantities of data, and improve customer and employee experiences. Since CRM solutions cover a range of capabilities for businesses of all shapes and sizes—just like Act!’s CRM does—the marketplace continues to grow in new and unique ways.

However, finding the best CRM solution for your company isn’t always easy. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, as different products will have different pros and cons. With that in mind, Solutions Review editors updated this list of the best CRM software companies in the marketplace to consider if you’re looking for a new solution in 2025 (and beyond).

Our editors gathered this information via online materials, reports, product demonstrations, conversations with vendor representatives, and free trial examinations. Companies are listed in alphabetical order.

The Best CRM Software Companies for 2025

Act!

Description: The Act! platform provides CRM and marketing automation capabilities that include pipeline visuals and management, customer database management, pipeline management, business insights, reports, and more. The provider also has an extensive library of support resources such as software tutorials, video training, and a ticket system for in-depth issues. Act! can connect with hundreds of popular apps and software your business may already use. This product is best for small and medium-sized organizations. 

ActiveCampaign

Description: ActiveCampaign provides email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and Sales Automation solutions to clients across industries. Its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform has email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and sales automation solutions for businesses across industries. Its CRM suite has lead scoring, contact management, sales pipelines, one-to-one email automation, customer attribution, and other capabilities to help teams improve their customer experiences. Enterprise customers can also access an “expert level” team member to consult or help with the platform. 

Agile CRM

Description: Agile CRM offers an “all-in-one” CRM product suite that includes functionalities for sales, marketing, and customer service teams across the real estate, e-commerce, SaaS, and other small-to-midsize business markets. Other features cover social media, marketing automation, contact management, web engagement, sales enablement, telephony, email marketing, and more. The platform also has a Free version that allows up to 10 users. Agile CRM integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, allowing contacts and social pages to be easily transferred to benefit your marketing and sales strategies.

Apptivo

Description: Apptivo’s Customer Relationship Management solution enables its users to attract, engage, and retain more customers. It offers a highly customizable experience, allowing users to manage each aspect of CRM through a network of connected applications. Industries such as retail, real estate, manufacturing, travel, and hospitality will find value in this software, but it’s important to note that it offers modular and limited 3rd party integrations. With a comprehensive and intuitive lead conversion process and an affordable price point, Apptivo can help users focus on customer needs with traditional and effective CRM capabilities.

Bitrix24

Description: Bitrix24 is a low-cost CRM software with marketing automation, customer support, and client management features. In addition to being available in the cloud and on-premise, Bitrix24 is accessible on desktop and mobile devices. Whether your organization is looking for a multichannel, marketing-oriented solution or a heavily sales-oriented CRM, Bitrix24 provides one of the best CRM tools for smaller businesses. The vendor even offers various pricing models that depend on the number of intended users, making it viable for emerging companies.

Brevo

Description: Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is a CRM solution suite that helps businesses develop, maintain, and retain customer relationships across email, SMS, chat, and other channels. As part of its solution suite, Brevo equips its users with marketing tools for growing email lists, designing messages, optimizing campaigns, and analyzing results. These include email marketing, SMS marketing, WhatsApp campaigns, live chat, chatbot, landing pages, marketing automation, payment management, deal pipeline, and other capabilities that empower teams to grow company revenue.

Copper

Description: Copper is a marketing and CRM solution for Google Workspaces designed to help entrepreneurs, startups, and small teams grow their businesses from a single, centralized system. The company’s CRM platform has lead management, contact management, actionable reports, visual pipelines, deal tracking, custom reports, and more. Copper can also integrate with popular tools like Google, HubSpot, MailChimp, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Slack, and others. 

Creatio

Description: Creatio is a global software company providing low-code process management and CRM platforms for companies operating in the public sector, financial services, telecommunications, advertising, manufacturing, pharma, transportation, and other industries. Its CRM solution is divided into three products: Marketing, Sales, and Service. The company also offers a suite of services for software implementation alongside support and training for its sales, marketing, and customer service users.

Freshworks

Description: Freshworks provides business software solutions designed to be ready to go right “out of the box.” For example, the company’s CRM platform, Freshsales, comes equipped with the tools businesses need to identify loyal customers, improve engagement, personalize the shopping experience, and unify customer data. The sales and marketing CRM offering can also integrate with Freshdesk, a customer support platform that will help businesses offer a holistic shopping experience. 

HubSpot

Description: HubSpot is frequently brought up in discussions on CRM integration, as most of the providers in the marketing world offer integrations with the company’s software. HubSpot is perhaps the most popular small business CRM since its core capabilities are free. Additional features, like enterprise licensing, can be purchased as an add-on to the commercially free options. HubSpot also has platforms and solutions for sales, service, content management, and operations. HubSpot’s CRM is affordable for small businesses and organizations, especially with its negligible contact and data space limits.

Insightly

Description: Insightly is a unified CRM platform designed to align sales, marketing, and project teams around a single view of their customer base. The CRM includes workflow automation, lead routing, segmentation, campaigns, reporting, and email integration services to help marketers build meaningful relationships with present and future customers. The Insightly AppConnect platform allows users to access hundreds of pre-built app connectors. Insightly works with companies across the manufacturing, financial, healthcare, consulting, sales, insurance, e-commerce, and professional services industries.

Keap

Description: Keap is a CRM and marketing automation solutions provider for growth-oriented companies. While the company focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, it does offer a solution for established, larger firms. Keap’s CRM platform can be configured to meet the needs of multiple industries, equipping them with the sales and marketing automation tools they need to grow their business. Those tools include landing pages, automated follow-ups, multichannel marketing campaigns, customizable forms, sales pipeline management, reporting, appointment scheduling, one-on-one email messaging, SMS, payment management, and more.

Maximizer

Description: Maximizer is a feature-rich CRM product highlighted by sales function capabilities alongside marketing automation, contact management, business intelligence, cloud-based data storage, deployment tools, customer service features, and a companion mobile application. Maximizer also includes features like unlimited storage and investment account management, available via a collection of different sales package add-ons. It even offers a variety of CRM solutions at other price points, making this a solid choice for various businesses. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Description: Microsoft Dynamics 365 spans multiple technology categories and offers more than traditional customer relationship management capabilities. The solution is more focused on customer support than its competitors. Dynamics 365 provides users with a complete customer view, agile support models, predictive analysis, and integrated AI functionality, and it easily integrates with other Microsoft products. With deployment options for small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses, this product is viable for almost any business, regardless of size or need. 

monday.com

Description: Monday is a cloud-based, scalable, and flexible project management software for companies of all sizes. With Monday’s CRM solution, companies can create a custom platform using ready-made templates and tailor sales pipelines, workflows, and processes to meet business needs and drive growth. The integrated sales and marketing CRM includes sales pipeline visualizations, centralized data management, mobile access, workflow automation, customer tracking, custom automations, pipeline management, custom dashboards, and a collection of integrations.

NetSuite

Description: NetSuite, a property of Oracle, specializes in cloud-based solutions, including CRM, ERP, and e-commerce. NetSuite’s cloud-based CRM updates in real-time. Its cloud-based CRM tool updates in real-time and provides standard features such as SFA, customer service management, marketing automation, and more advanced capabilities like order management, commissions, sales forecasting, and integrated e-commerce. The platform tackles the entire customer lifecycle, from lead through opportunity, sales order, fulfillment, and more. 

Nextiva

Description: Nextiva offers multiple CRM products to align with the needs of organizations in varying industries. The vendor’s sales and marketing solution portfolio features tools to tackle traditional sales and customer service challenges. Nextiva brings a service-focused solution to a market populated by sales-oriented software. The key features bolster users’ capabilities in providing quality service and support experiences to their customers. With more AI-based technology arriving in the future, Nextiva is a worthwhile contender for organizations with a customer focus.

Nimble

Description: Nimble offers various products and functionalities that integrate with Microsoft Office and Google. They provide middle-market and enterprise companies with CRM software that includes social insights into potential prospects. In addition to CRM software, Nimble is also known in the sales automation space. Social integration capabilities set Nimble apart in the market, as it collects critical information from online profiles to supplement data already within the system.

Nutshell

Description: The Nutshell CRM platform is equipped with sales automation, pipeline management, reporting, contact management, email, team collaboration, marketing features, and a collection of integrations with software like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Gmail, Office 365, Outlook, Zendesk, and more. The company’s user-friendly platform best suits small and medium-sized businesses across industries and offers an accessible monthly pricing option.

The post 27 of the Best CRM Software Companies to Know About for 2025 appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

As part of this year’s Insight Jam LIVE event, the Solutions Review editors have compiled a list of predictions for 2025 from some of the most experienced professionals across the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and broader WorkTech marketplaces.

As part of Solutions Review’s annual Insight Jam LIVE event, we called for the industry’s best and brightest to share their ERP, BPM, CRM, and Marketing Automation predictions for 2025 and beyond. The experts featured represent some of the top WorkTech solution providers with experience in these marketplaces, and each projection has been vetted for relevance and ability to add business value.

WorkTech Predictions for 2025 and Beyond

Thomas Butta, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship

Data willingly and simply provided will be key to unifying customer experiences.

“While walled gardens are nothing new, the walls keep getting higher—fortified by data deprecation and growing privacy regulations. In 2025, industry giants like Meta and Google will continue to tighten their grip on audiences, keeping more traffic on their pages while scraping content for large language models without an equitable value exchange. The result: plummeting referral traffic and soaring acquisition costs.

“Now more than ever, brands must prioritize direct customer relationships or risk being disintermediated. Data willingly and simply provided and purposefully solicited will be key to unifying experiences everywhere customers choose to interact–on the web, in apps, and everywhere in between.”

Murray Campbell, Global Product Manager (Regulatory) at AutoRek

Compliance demands drive the rise of automation  

“Regulatory pressures aren’t just tightening the screws—they’re turbocharging the case for compliance automation. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expanding its budget and workforce to unprecedented levels. As global authorities enforce increasingly complex mandates, businesses are drowning in a sea of audits, filings, and reporting requirements. The old-school, manual approach to compliance is officially obsolete.

“Regulators are increasingly favoring firms that adopt advanced technology, recognizing that automated processes provide a level of traceability and precision unattainable with manual methods. As the digital economy grows, transaction volumes surge, and regulatory demands evolve, sticking to outdated methods for critical processes becomes an inefficient and costly approach.

“In this high-stakes landscape, automation isn’t a luxury—it’s an essential component of doing business today. By automating tasks like validations and cash transfers, firms can achieve greater speed and precision in handling data-related processes. This also frees resources to focus on activities that benefit from human expertise and creative problem-solving.”

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint

DevOps Supercharges AI-First Infrastructure in 2025

“DevOps will evolve to meet the unique demands of AI-driven infrastructure, where complex ecosystems of data, machine learning models, and interconnected systems power nearly every industry. This AI ecosystem involves managing vast amounts of data, training and deploying machine learning models, and supporting scalable compute resources—all requiring specialized infrastructure. DevOps teams will expand their role, going beyond workflow automation to fully owning and optimizing these AI-first infrastructures. They’ll set best practices for managing the speed, scale, and reliability of AI applications, helping organizations harness AI efficiently and securely as it becomes central to operations.”

Edge Compute: The New Frontier in 2025

“Edge computing will emerge as the new frontier, enabling real-time data processing closer to where it’s generated—whether in autonomous vehicles, IoT devices, or remote facilities. By minimizing latency and reducing the load on centralized cloud resources, edge computing will transform industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail with faster, more reliable data-driven insights. This shift empowers applications that demand ultra-low latency, increased security, and local processing capabilities, pushing businesses toward a future where edge intelligence enhances user experiences, operational efficiency, and scalability like never before.”

Bill Buckley, the SVP of Engineering at CloudZero

Damantha Boteju, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Configit

Manufacturers Will Lean into Generative AI for Augmentation and Employee Enablement

“One of the significant business benefits of Generative AI is reducing time to market while giving employees time back to work on bigger, more creative projects. Generative AI helps accelerate business processes and reduce mundane work, enabling employees to focus on being creative and putting more effort into better human interactions and collaboration. The most competitive companies in 2025 will be those who understand the power of artificial intelligence and copilots to build on the strength of their employees.”

Daniel Joseph Barry, Vice President of Product Marketing at Configit

The Concept of the Digital Configuration Thread Gains Prominence   

“The digital thread approach is rapidly becoming the data foundation for managing both standard and configurable products. As we move into 2025, we see this concept playing an even more prominent role. That’s because a digital thread can help manufacturers by providing end-to-end insight and traceability, enabling analysis and optimization of product portfolios, and supporting digital twins. However, achieving this approach often requires manufacturers to cobble together information from multiple bills of material (BOMs) in varying formats that reside in disparate systems–typically under the purview of multiple departments. That can lead to misunderstandings, inconsistencies, control issues, and maintenance concerns, but Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) produces a ‘digital configuration thread’ that can help manufacturers manage product configurations better.”

Manufacturers Will Look to Configuration to Help with Workforce Challenges

“Demands on manufacturers have never been higher, but U.S. manufacturers are struggling with a workforce gap. As seasoned workers hit retirement age, manufacturers will need to ensure they can capture the institutional knowledge of these employees in a more efficient way. That means moving away from a document- and experience-driven process to capture information from individual contributors. A configuration lifecycle management approach is one approach to doing this, laying the foundation for better collaboration and innovation by centralizing product configuration information so it can be shared among multiple departments. This capability lessens the sting of retiring pros and the fear of losing a company’s ‘brain trust.'”

Henrik Hulgaard, Vice President of Product Management at Configit

Configurability Will Become a Bigger Priority 

“As we saw in a recent survey of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) professionals conducted by CIMdata, configurability has become a bigger priority, and we anticipate that trend will continue in 2025. This will drive the need for new ways to support customization, as traditional processes and tools won’t suffice. Many manufacturers still try to manage configurable products and product variants as if they were standard products, but managing configurable products requires a different approach. This leads to the next prediction.”

The Adoption of Modularity Will Rise 

“We’ll see an increase in modularity due to the expanded demand for customization and increased regulations and compliance mandates. For instance, sustainability regulations that require reuse and recyclability, such as those we see in the U.S. and EU, are easier to meet with a modular approach. Many early adopters have already implemented a modular approach to their products, and we’ll see more adoption in the new year, as modularity benefits manufacturers by reducing time, effort, and costs. It enables them to meet customization demands more cost-effectively by reusing modules (collections of features or pre-assembled parts) rather than custom engineering.

“Adopting modularization can be demanding, as it requires process changes, but with the combined compelling events of regulations and competition, manufacturers can justify the investment and reap the benefits. Forward-thinking manufacturers have already recognized this and are adopting new approaches centered on modularity and transitioning from engineer-to-order (ETO) to more customize-to-order (CTO) approaches that better meet their customers’ needs and enable faster response and delivery of solutions with minimal impact on engineering resources.”

Rahul Pradhan, Vice President of Product and Strategy at Couchbase

Agentic AI Poised to Power Next Wave of AI Innovation in 2025

“In 2025, the trajectory of AI will be shaped by the rise of agentic AI—proactive, intelligent agents that go beyond basic chatbots in an evolution promising a profound transformation for both consumer and enterprise landscapes, accelerating the world into a new era of AI capabilities. With capabilities such as understanding context, setting goals, and adapting actions, agentic AI can complete tasks previously thought impossible by AI.

“For this to be made possible, agentic systems require a compound AI system using multiple models that are moved closer to data sources within security parameters. The systems also need to handle both structured and unstructured data at low latency—all in real-time — to make meaningful, context-aware decisions on the fly. This requires seamless integrations across unstructured data processing, vector databases, and transactional systems for efficient storage and retrieval of diverse data types.

“The companies that will excel in providing these robust integrations and infrastructures will be uniquely positioned to drive the next wave of innovation and value in the AI sector.”

Edge AI Agents: Autonomous Decision-Makers

“As the maturity of Agentic AI advances, edge devices will start to adopt agents that can act autonomously based on real-time data. Edge AI agents, powered by integrated databases, will be able to make decisions in milliseconds, bypassing the need for centralized processing. These autonomous agents will perform tasks like controlling robotic arms in manufacturing, adjusting energy consumption in smart grids, and ensuring patient safety in healthcare facilities. The combination of AI models, local data processing, and autonomous agents will make edge devices intelligent participants in broader ecosystems.”

Steve Rotter, Chief Marketing Officer at DeepL

AI will accelerate hyper-personalized, more consistent marketing.

“We live in a hyper-personalized world—custom coffee, made-to-order clothing, and on-demand news feeds. Brands are even now tailoring their marketing messages and language to every customer in their preferred language, style, and tone. Along with personalization, consistency of language across all streams is central to successful marketing. Research shows that it boosts revenue by 20 percent or more.

“However, achieving this consistency across borders and languages is tough, requiring not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation to ensure that messages resonate the right way in different markets. If advertisers and marketers don’t get this right, they’ll open themselves up to misunderstandings, wasted resources, and missed growth opportunities. 2025 will be an exciting year for the marketing world as we start seeing a better understanding of how AI can strengthen customer relationships and help businesses’ bottom lines.”

Jim Palmer, the Chief AI Officer at Dialpad

The AI trust divide will reshape market dynamics in 2025. 

“Organizations that address customer concerns and ensure human oversight to prioritize transparency and ethical governance will gain a competitive edge. Companies that proactively address customer concerns and maintain human oversight will excel in customer retention and navigate regulated markets more effectively than those rushing to market without proper ethics. As consumer awareness grows and regulatory frameworks evolve, the market will increasingly reward businesses that demonstrate responsible AI practices while fostering innovation, leading to a more mature competitive landscape.”

Businesses will grow increasingly skeptical of AI offerings. 

“We’ll see a shift towards industry-specific AI tools as businesses grow weary of generic solutions that fail to deliver on their promises. This skepticism will be fueled by the proliferation of rushed AI products that create more challenges than they solve, leading to stalled adoption and investment among wary buyers.”

The human element of customer service will be redefined.

“As AI handles routine inquiries and administrative tasks, customer service roles will evolve to focus on complex problem-solving and relationship building. This shift will attract and retain more skilled professionals who can dedicate time to nuanced customer needs, leading to improved job satisfaction and career advancement opportunities. Organizations that successfully blend AI efficiency with meaningful human interactions will see higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, while those maintaining traditional high-volume, low-value service models will lag behind.”

Alan Samuels, the Vice President of Data and Product at Encompass Corporation

In 2025, AI Will Move Beyond The Hype and into Practical Application

“As artificial intelligence (AI) matures, 2025 marks a pivotal shift in how the financial industry leverages its potential. Gone are the days of embracing AI for its novelty. In the coming year, financial organizations will focus on pragmatism, problem-solving, and creating measurable value.”

• Solutions-focused AI: Financial firms will focus on scalable solutions that deliver clear, measurable outcomes. AI applications are now subject to rigorous scrutiny regarding their origins, training data, and compliance with security standards.
• Accelerating Digital Transformation: Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision are enabling AI to process non-digital information, bridging the gap for businesses reliant on legacy systems.
• The Arms Race in Financial Crime: AI is transforming how institutions detect and prevent fraud, leveraging its ability to uncover patterns and connections hidden in vast datasets while staying ahead in an arms race against increasingly sophisticated bad actors.
• Rethinking Product Development: AI serves as a “co-pilot” for developers, assisting in coding and accelerating the translation of vision into actionable requirements. AI-powered tools are reshaping how financial firms deliver customer experiences, blending efficiency with personalization to meet evolving demands.
• Enhancing CX: AI-powered tools are reshaping how financial firms deliver customer experiences, blending efficiency with personalization to meet evolving demands.
• Corporate Digital Identity (CDI): CDI leverages multiple advanced technologies, including AI, security frameworks, and robotic process automation (RPA), by pulling information from both public and private domains, ensuring it adheres to regulatory requirements, such as documenting sources and demonstrating the provenance of data.

Alexandros Siskos, the SVP of Customer Success and Marketplace Strategy at Everseen

More than Half of Retailers Will Invest in AI Platform Technology.

“As retailers recognize the value of unified AI solutions over piecemeal approaches, we predict that over half of them will adopt AI platform technology to support a growing range of business applications. This platform approach will enable retailers to apply AI-driven insights across business functions such as loss prevention, inventory management, and customer experience. With the tech industry increasingly focused on this market, retailers are well-positioned to integrate foundational AI with tailored applications.”

Casey Ciniello, Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

Implementing AI Will be a Top Priority in 2025

“By 2025, generative AI will become more integrated into technology, including content creation, software development, and automated decision-making. The shift towards AI will be a top priority and present transformative challenges in 2025, including workforce concerns about job security and resistance among employees hesitant to embrace AI-driven interactions. Traditional mentoring and learning pathways could be disrupted, resulting in limited development opportunities for junior staff and leaving a critical gap in skill-building and career growth.

“To address these challenges, we must adopt a proactive approach to collaboration between human employees and AI tools, emphasizing the unique skills that humans bring to the table, such as creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. By fostering an environment where employees view AI as a partner rather than a replacement, organizations can alleviate fears and enhance morale.”

JJ McGuigan, App Builder Product Manager at Infragistics

“Industries like healthcare and finance, where compliance with strict regulatory standards is critical, often face extended development timelines due to the rigorous testing required. However, the growing adoption of low-code tools is poised to revolutionize the time needed to adhere to these standards. Low-code platforms not only accelerate app development but also ensure that applications are built in alignment with legal and regulatory requirements. By integrating industry best practices into the development process, low-code solutions will streamline compliance, enabling faster delivery of secure, compliant apps without sacrificing quality or oversight.”

Security-related attacks on AI agents will soon emerge as a critical threat.

“Technology leaders will need “Guardian Agents” to autonomously monitor, manage, and contain AI actions as they work to establish standards for AI oversight. With enterprise interest in AI agents intensifying, next-generation GenAI agents are rapidly reshaping strategic planning for product leaders. Guardian Agents will bring a holistic approach to AI security, integrating compliance assurance, ethics, data filtering, log analysis, and advanced observability. As we move through 2025, the number of product releases deploying multiple agents will rise, supporting increasingly sophisticated use cases. Guardrails, security filters, and human oversight alone won’t be enough to guarantee the safe and appropriate use of autonomous agents.”

Daniel Lereya, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com

Productization Fuels AI Business Transformation in 2025

“AI has moved beyond the hype and is now a fundamental force transforming business operations. As we move into 2025, the primary challenge won’t be the technology but adopting and integrating AI into existing workflows. Companies must focus on how AI can be embedded directly into platforms, including new and existing processes while extracting real and material business value to enhance and scale operations.

“For AI to truly drive value, it must be accessible, predictable, and trustworthy—solutions that provide clear ROI while seamlessly aligning with how companies already work. Businesses will prioritize AI tools that grow with them and can tackle a wide range of issues, from automating routine processes to solving complex problems across areas like customer service, supply chain optimization, and data analysis—all with minimal disruption and cost.

“Ultimately, success in 2025 will hinge on adopting AI and ensuring its implementation is smooth, scalable, and impactful within existing infrastructures. This will unlock new business opportunities, accelerate growth, and encourage companies to build a unique competitive edge in an increasingly AI-driven world.”

Enterprise Work Management: The Key to Scaling Success

“In 2025 and beyond, enterprise work management will be a cornerstone of business success as companies realize that seamless execution at scale is essential for growth. With hybrid teams spread across offices and remote locations, orchestrating workflows across departments, time zones, and geographies is no longer optional—it’s vital. Businesses that master this alignment will drive innovation and agility and stay ahead in an increasingly digital-first world.”

Unified Platforms Are the Future of Enterprise Tech

“Platforms will reign supreme as businesses consolidate their tech stacks into unified systems for greater efficiency and strategic advantage. With all company data in one place, decision-making becomes faster and smarter, unlocking insights that fuel growth. Companies looking to achieve a complete AI transformation will find it more effective to implement an AI platform as an integrated platform essential for unlocking its full potential across all aspects of the business. In a data-driven world, a holistic platform isn’t just nice; it will be a must-have for organizations looking to establish a unique competitive edge.”

Amol Dalvi, the VP of Product of Nerdio

Demand for Cost Efficiency and Resiliency in VDI and DaaS 

“Looking into 2025, we’ll see an increase in demand for cost efficiency coupled with robust business continuity and resiliency in virtual desktop solutions. These themes are echoed consistently by our customers who are asking questions like, ‘How do I ensure my AVD desktops remain accessible at all times?’ and ‘How can I meet stringent continuity requirements?’ The shift to cloud VDI solutions has brought many benefits, yet with the growing focus on uninterrupted access, we expect to see an evolving approach to meet both budget and reliability needs.”

Resurgence of On-Premises VDI Solutions 

“I anticipate a resurgence of on-premises VDI solutions in 2025. Azure Stack HCI could offer a VDI option for organizations that require specific data residency or regulatory control, face bandwidth challenges, or may not be fully comfortable relying solely on the public cloud. This trend would be especially significant for highly regulated sectors like healthcare, financial services, and federal government agencies, where tight control over data location and access can be critical. We’re even seeing an uptick in interest for environments where a completely disconnected setup—think submarine-level isolation from the internet—is a real business requirement.”

Stabilization of AVD as a Cloud VDI Leader 

“In the cloud arena, AVD continues to stabilize as a technology, which may encourage broader adoption by businesses that have been slower to make the shift. The improved reliability and usability of AVD, along with the integration of Microsoft 365 into the DaaS landscape, adds interesting new layers of choice. Organizations will need to weigh the flexibility and maturity of AVD against the growing adoption of Windows 365 to determine the best fit for their needs.”

Balancing AVD’s Versatility with Windows 365 Integration 

“As we look ahead, it will be fascinating to see how the market balances these options—whether enterprises lean more into the maturity and flexibility of AVD or focus on the pre-packaged option of Windows 365 for their evolving workforce needs. The decision will hinge on each organization’s unique needs for both flexibility and operational continuity.”

Jonathan Rhyne, CEO and co-founder of Nutrient

“As we embark on the journey of understanding AI’s impact on productivity, particularly in how we create, interact with, and experience documents, we find ourselves at an exciting crossroads. Currently, generative AI is revolutionizing content creation, enabling us to produce new material with unprecedented ease. Additionally, AI’s capability to access and summarize text from images has transformed our interactions with documents, making them more intuitive than ever.

“Looking ahead, I anticipate a significant evolution in how we experience these documents. One of AI’s groundbreaking advancements is its ability to establish a direct interface between humans and computers. While the popularity of natural language chatbots is currently capturing attention, they serve as a preliminary step in demonstrating the potential of transformer models.

“In the coming year, we can expect this new human-computer interface to facilitate real-time personalization of document content. This means that interactions will become dynamic, tailored to individual preferences and past experiences, all while leveraging the most current information available. Over time, the conveniences brought by AI will become so integrated into our daily lives that they will be taken for granted, much like our constant connectivity to the internet today.”

Steve Fenton, Principle DevEx Researcher at Octopus Deploy

Platform Engineering will be thinner.

“Platform engineering has become a path towards DevOps efficiency and developer productivity. In 2025, organizations will realize they can achieve the goals of platform engineering with fewer lines of bespoke code. Instead of trying to build a grand unifying platform, existing tools will provide solutions that reduce fragmentation, apply standards, and integrate security into software delivery.”

Continuous delivery is dead… Long live continuous delivery!

“As organizations shift to platform-as-a-service, Kubernetes, and serverless offerings, they often lose good practices along the way. The solid continuous delivery pipelines they created for traditional self-hosted and IaaS environments had solid practices that should be transferred to new environments.”

Paul Laudanski, Director of Security Research at Onapsis

Cloud migration delays will trigger security emergencies

“As organizations face pressure to migrate their business-critical data to the cloud, many are still dragging their feet. Once migration becomes urgent, especially as we approach deadlines such as SAP’s 2027 cutoff to move to S/4HANA, the rush to transition will lead to mistakes such as leaving remaining vulnerabilities in the code or data you are bringing over. These mistakes could lead to costly delays or re-dos. Organizations still on legacy systems need to modernize their applications immediately to survive in the digital world that is already surpassing them. In 2025, we must prioritize addressing this migration before the risk compounds by way of proper cross-functional planning and execution.”

Lalitha Rajagopalan, co-founder of ORO Labs

Integrating GenAI and no-code solutions into procurement processes will be integral to remaining agile in the face of global changes.

“With natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and economic shifts on the rise, traditional, pre-built procurement solutions can no longer adapt fast enough to avoid disruptions. GenAI-powered procurement orchestration breaks free from ‘hard-coded’ limitations, allowing companies to dynamically respond as situations evolve. This will be key to eliminating complex systems, improving visibility, and unlocking hyper agility, inherently enabling teams to react faster to potential disruptions, keeping operations not only on track but ahead in an unpredictable world.”

GenAI investments will shift from generic, broad use cases to more specialized, strategic applications.

“As GenAI technologies mature, companies will prioritize tools with clear ROI and targeted use cases. Procurement is especially ripe for transformation, given its exposure to frequent disruptions from global instability and complex third-party networks. By implementing GenAI in this space, companies can replace cumbersome systems with streamlined solutions that enhance visibility, adaptability, and resilience, making it a clear area where specialized GenAI investment can drive tangible results.”

Itamar Golan, Co-Founder and CEO at Prompt Security

The Future of Work with AI

“Contrary to widespread concerns, I don’t expect AI to eliminate jobs in 2025. Instead, it will serve as a powerful tool to enhance human capabilities. Agentic AI systems will work alongside humans, such as in customer service, sales outreach, marketing content creation, software development, and healthcare applications, among others. This means that very soon, 30 percent of our tedious and repetitive tasks will be automated, giving us more time to focus on creative, innovative, and interesting pursuits.

“I believe we will also see a significant shift as the multimodality of AI becomes more mainstream (video, audio, etc.), as opposed to the majority of its use, which has been text-based. This creates new opportunities for human-AI collaboration.”

Organizational AI Adoption

“The democratization of LLM access, driven by ever-decreasing prices, is enabling broader adoption across organizations. Additionally, specialized AI solutions will increasingly be moving away from OpenAI’s dominance, with alternatives like Claude gaining traction in specific domains such as coding, which is something we’re already starting to see.”

Agentic AI

“AI chatbots use generative AI to provide responses based on a single interaction. A person makes a query, and the chatbot uses natural language processing to reply. In my opinion, the next frontier of artificial intelligence will be agentic AI, which employs sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. It is poised to enhance productivity and operations across various industries.

“Agentic AI systems process vast amounts of data from multiple sources to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies, and execute tasks such as supply chain optimization, cybersecurity vulnerability analysis, and assisting doctors with time-consuming tasks. I believe that by 2025, we will see a significant increase in resources shifting from single-interaction procedures with LLMs to this multi-step approach of agentic AI, which will gradually solve complex problems for us autonomously.”

Nitesh Bansal, CEO and Managing Director of R Systems

Organizations Must Take A Practical Approach to Generative AI Usage

“It’s no secret that generative AI has already had a significant impact on digital product engineering. It has fundamentally changed the way companies optimize the design and functionality of their products–everything from accelerating ideation and prototyping to user experience and product performance.

“In 2025, we will see more of this, but we will also see organizations take a more practical approach to how they leverage AI. AI has had a lot of hype–and that will continue–but more and more tech leaders will place a higher emphasis on ensuring measurable ROI–especially what can be achieved in the same fiscal year or under 12 months. For example, if an organization requires complex coding to enhance a new product, using AI to automate routine development tasks can free up needed time and gain an immediate benefit.”

There Will Be Continued Innovation Challenges In Digital Product Engineering if Organizations Don’t Embrace Upskilling and Outsourcing

“Innovation in digital product engineering will continue to flourish, but it will not come without challenges. On the technical side, a growing reliance on data, AI, and the cloud will require robust security measures and compliance with industry, state, and federal regulations. Additionally, ensuring AI-driven products are fair, transparent, and free from harmful biases will require ongoing vigilance and mitigation strategies.

“In the face of these challenges, it will be more important than ever to engage with those with deep technology expertise and know-how. However, finding and retaining professionals with the right mix of AI, data science, and product engineering skills will continue to be a challenge in itself.

“In 2025, we will see an increased focus on upskilling and outsourcing in an attempt to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology landscape. Internal teams will become keepers of industry and company expertise, engaging with external resources that can help them choose and leverage the right emerging technologies while also bringing outside thinking and experience to problem-solving.”

Pieter Danhieux, co-founder and CEO of Secure Code Warrior

Rewriting the AI Equation: Not AI Instead of Developer, but AI + Developer

“As companies are prompted to take drastic cost-cutting measures in 2025, it would be to no one’s surprise that developers are replaced with AI tooling. But as was the situation when Generative AI first made its debut, and now, with years of updates and more to come, it is still not a safe, autonomous productivity driver, especially when creating code. AI is a highly disruptive technology with many amazing applications and use cases, but it is not a sufficient replacement for skilled human developers. I agree with Forrester’s prediction that this shift towards AI/human replacement in 2025 is likely to fail, especially in the long term. I think the combination of AI + developer is more likely to achieve this than AI alone.”

Bulent Cinarkaya, GM of Field Service Management at ServiceNow

“Over the past year and a half, field service organizations have been running a lot of GenAI pilot programs. Now, they’re working out whether to build solutions in-house, buy off-the-shelf options, or go with a mix of both. Next year, we’ll likely see a big increase in GenAI rollouts, with the technology expanding beyond just text-based tools. We’re talking about smarter, multi-turn conversations and new image and video intelligence features that can handle more advanced tasks. These developments will help companies operate more efficiently and open up fresh ways to improve service and engage customers.”

Dorit Levy-Zilbershot, VP of AI and Innovation at ServiceNow

“Over the next year, we will witness the evolution of enterprise AI agents as they become increasingly sophisticated in their reasoning and comprehension capabilities. Emerging use cases will transform the way businesses leverage these agents, and the nature of human interaction with them will evolve as they take on more complex tasks and decision-making roles. Watch for the rise of AI-powered ‘supervisors’ that will have the ability to move past simply automating tasks to truly orchestrating the interaction of all AI agents throughout an entire organization. This will make it exponentially easier for humans to administrate teams of AI agents across their entire business.

“By the end of 2025, AI agents will cross the chasm from tools that require more hands-on supervision to fully autonomous systems. Expect to see AI agents independently automating complex, multi-step processes without a human in the loop. This will undoubtedly transform how executives view AI adoption, positioning it as a powerful engine for unprecedented growth and innovation.”

Heather Jerrehian, VP of Product Management – Employee Workflows at ServiceNow

“To build an AI-capable workforce, organizations need visibility into the day-to-day tasks people perform and a plan for how to free up that time for more impactful work. Task intelligence will be the new frontier in 2025, enabling AI-driven automation and workforce agility so leaders can make informed decisions about upskilling, reskilling, and redeploying talent.

“In 2025, organizations will embrace autonomous agents, pairing humans and AI agents to streamline operations while cultivating new skill pathways for the workforce. This enables humans and machines to co-create the future of work—harnessing what each does best in a seamless partnership.”

Terence Chesire, VP of Product Management – Customer and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow

“In customer service, the ongoing transition from on-premise to the cloud for contact center will continue to accelerate–driven by the need to adopt AI quickly. This may come as a surprise to many. While most other software stacks have already moved to the cloud, the contact center has remained on-prem. The implication of this shift is a greater need to integrate cloud contact center systems with cloud-based CRM to both orchestrate interactions and the work that needs to happen during and after the call.”

Mark Mader, President and CEO at Smartsheet

Generative AI (GenAI) is ushering in a renaissance age for the generalist.

“Organizations have spent a disproportionate amount of capital hiring hyper-specialized talent with deep technical knowledge for years. Now, with the democratization of GenAI, the value offered by hiring ‘capable generalists’ is on the rise. People who articulately frame their thoughts, pose well-formed questions (prompts), and exercise AI tools to their advantage stand to benefit greatly.

“The demand for specialized AI talent—model developers, AI ops talent, and engineers to build and maintain infrastructure—will persist in 2025. However, we will also see the demand for non-technical talent shift to a more balanced state. Organizations will place as much worth on employees with the skills to extract value from platforms as those who build them.”

Future of Work 

“Over the past year, many of us have started experimenting with GenAI to work smarter and faster, raising questions about how this new technology will impact knowledge workers’ roles. In the coming year, organizations will apply GenAI to reduce and even replace repetitive tasks. This will allow knowledge workers to shift their focus, freeing their time to work on the aspects of their roles that are more strategic and creative. As a result, we’ll start to see more innovation. Businesses will also be expected to move faster and deliver more for their customers. Those who adopt GenAI now will have a competitive edge as these expectations shift.”

In 2025, AI will start to become part of the everyday fabric of our work.

“This year, an unbelievable amount of software came online that enables people to take advantage of AI in the context of their daily work. In 2025, AI will become part of the everyday fabric of work. Adoption will increase dramatically. More people will experience AI within the software they currently use. This removes the friction of switching to another app and staring at a blank prompt window. People will know where to start, and when they see results generated, they’ll usually have a better sense of whether the result is accurate.”

Greg Benson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco and Chief Scientist at SnapLogic

Agents will Flourish with Human Oversight

“Agents have the potential to automate the grunt work of many human activities in the enterprise. However, the near-term success of Agents will depend on the harmonious interaction between autonomous processing and human approval of critical, consequential decisions. In this way, Agents are an accelerator to human workflows, but the human still has the final say. Future Agent systems will seamlessly incorporate a human in the loop.”

Increased Focus on Copyright and Data Provenance

“As AI-generated content proliferates, questions about copyright infringement and data lineage will intensify. The industry will see a push toward ‘provenance-aware’ AI models that provide transparency about the sources of their training data. Legal and regulatory developments in this area will be closely monitored and could redefine how AI models are trained and deployed.”

Nitin Singhal, VP of Engineering (Data, AI, and Integrations) at SnapLogic

AI Agents Will Empower Data Engineers To Deliver More Value

“In 2025, enterprise AI agents will fundamentally transform workplace operations, not just by automating repetitive tasks but by reimagining the way teams collaborate, innovate, and deliver value. Far beyond assisting humans, AI agents will optimize decision-making, reduce operational overhead, and empower employees to focus on creativity and strategic initiatives. This evolution will redefine roles like data engineers and software developers, transitioning their work from repetitive processes to managing AI systems, shaping data ecosystems, and unlocking new avenues of value.”

The Real Work Behind Building Responsible AI Systems Will Come to Light in 2025

“The adoption of generative AI will necessitate robust data integration and validation technologies. Organizations will prioritize data lineage, cataloging, and context-sensitive processing to reduce risks like hallucinations in AI outputs. Regulatory compliance frameworks around data privacy, security, and transparency will evolve, and we will see brand new AI regulations driven by global attention to responsible AI usage.”

Charles Ruffino, Fellow, Cloud Architecture at SoftIron

IT talent shortage will force radical workforce reimagination.

“The IT talent landscape is about to experience a tectonic shift that makes previous skill shortages look like a gentle tremor. The quantum of offshore talent is contracting faster than a startup’s runway during a funding drought, forcing organizations into a high-stakes game of technological musical chairs. Onshore talent acquisition will become a bloodsport, with compensation packages climbing like hyperscaler stock prices and the true cost of technical expertise revealing itself in brutal economic clarity.

“This talent crunch isn’t just a staffing problem—it’s an existential forcing function for IT infrastructure reimagination. While AI won’t magically replace human expertise overnight, it will accelerate a Darwinian evolution in how technical teams are structured, skills are developed, and complex systems are conceived. Organizations will be compelled to architect more resilient, self-documenting, and intrinsically manageable infrastructure, transforming a potential crisis into a strategic inflection point for technological innovation. The silver lining? Those who adapt fastest will emerge not just surviving but fundamentally redesigning the future of enterprise technology.”

J-M Erlendson, Global Evangelist at Software AG

Shadow AI is here to stay

“Even as companies push towards developing proprietary AI models, shadow AI will remain pervasive. People tend to favor their own way of doing things, so it’s incumbent on business leaders to evolve in how they address unsanctioned AI use. Blanket bans may have the unintended effect of discouraging innovation, while a failure to lay out policies will bring security and compliance risks. The focus from a governance standpoint should be to make sure company tools are the best available options, as well as educate workers about the inherent risks of shadow AI.”

AI-powered predictive analytics will evolve, driving timely decision-making for businesses.

“Right now, AI’s capabilities in predictive analytics are still mediocre, with machine learning falling short of delivering the deep insights businesses need. While AI today mainly identifies trends, significant advancements will begin to emerge in 2025 and beyond. Over the coming years, AI will continue to evolve to provide more accurate, preemptive decision-making support, empowering organizations to act on business practices proactively and in real-time rather than giving counsel based on older context.”

Aurélien Caye, Solution Specialist at Sprinklr

The Rise of AI-Powered Customer Support

“In 2025, traditional chatbot experiences will fall short as customer expectations evolve. Businesses will increasingly adopt autonomous, AI-powered agents capable of delivering more adaptable, responsive, and personalized support. Generative AI, especially through conversational AI copilots, will enhance both customer and agent interactions by enabling faster, more insightful responses that feel human. While this shift opens vast opportunities, it also brings challenges in responsible AI implementation. As organizations scale up AI adoption, they’ll need to establish guardrails, ensure transparency, and focus on regulatory compliance. Ethical considerations and transparency in AI decision-making will be essential to building customer trust.”

Optimizing AI Efficiency and ROI in 2025

“As organizations move beyond the initial generative AI hype, 2025 will see a focus on optimizing AI model efficiency. Companies will prioritize ‘smaller LLMs’ or open-source, in-house models to improve ROI and manage costs effectively. Multi-modal capabilities in AI will gain traction, allowing systems to interpret diverse content formats and provide more comprehensive support. Success will come from blending AI’s capabilities with human input to create meaningful customer experiences, ensuring that AI-driven transformations remain both sustainable and valuable.”

Ryan Tierney, SVP of Product Management at TrueCommerce

“As we move into 2025, many of the challenges supply chain leaders face today are likely to persist. While the obstacles themselves might not change dramatically, we can expect businesses to sharpen their focus in key areas, particularly around automation. Streamlining supply chain processes will continue to be a priority as companies look for ways to operate faster, more efficiently, and with fewer resources. Another area that will remain critical is data analytics. Supply chains are made up of complex, disparate systems, and getting smarter with data will be key to making informed decisions. Leaders will increasingly rely on internal intelligence to drive operational improvements.”

Claus Jepsen, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Unit4

Out With Generative AI, In With Automation

“In 2025, IT leaders will pull back from applying generative AI to enterprise use cases amid growing data privacy and intellectual property concerns. While generative AI will fail to gain immediate traction, I expect its human-like quality and prevalence in public discourse will warm more enterprises up to the use of automation. Greater understanding and adoption of automation will transform the user experience for enterprise software. We’ll see the era of ‘self-driving ERP, where more intuitive and conversational software enables users to have less and less direct interaction with the user interface.”

Chris Wysopal, the Chief Security Evangelist and Founder of Veracode

Development and Security Teams Will Redirect Their Secure Coding Training Budget Toward Auto-Remediation

“Developers will learn less about secure coding because they’ll rely more on generative AI to remediate flaws automatically. This progression is analogous to the task of calling someone on the phone. While a few decades ago, we all needed to remember someone’s number to reach them, today, all we need to do is tap a contact on our phone. For developers, the equivalent will be to produce secure code without learning how to code securely from scratch. Instead, they will adopt processes to find, test, and fix vulnerabilities automatically, meaning it won’t be as important to know about secure coding—or even to know if generative AI has learned how to write secure code.”

For consideration in future news round-ups, send your announcements to wjepma@solutionsreview.com.

The post 61 WorkTech Predictions from Industry Experts for 2025 appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled a list spotlighting some of the best sales CRM software platforms that small and midsize businesses should consider working with. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

With the right sales CRM software, businesses can improve their sales processes by managing and optimizing every touchpoint with prospects and customers. These solutions simplify the lead nurturing process by helping sales teams spend less time on data entry and more time developing relationships with prospects in the pipeline. However, selecting the right sales CRM software solution is easier said than done, especially for small and medium-sized businesses, where budget and functionalities are significant factors.

To help make your search easier, our editors have profiled some of the best sales CRM software platforms that SMBs should consider. The list has been organized in alphabetical order.

Best Sales CRM Software Platforms for Small and Midsize Businesses

ActiveCampaign

Description: ActiveCampaign provides companies of all sizes with a customer experience automation platform (CXA) designed to help automate and customize marketing efforts. Its product suite includes a sales CRM solution outfitted with automated contact management, lead prioritization, lead scoring, segmentation, deal monitoring, sales reporting, pipeline management, deal updates, and task assignments. These features help sales teams spend more time and energy developing lasting relationships with active and prospective customers.

Agile CRM

Description: Agile CRM offers an “all-in-one” CRM product suite that includes functionalities for sales, marketing, and customer service teams across the real estate, e-commerce, SaaS, and other small-to-midsize business markets. For example, its Sales CRM Automation software can help users automate their sales follow-ups, track deals with real-time alerts, score leads, and create in-depth timelines with up-to-date analytics. Other sales-centric features include appointment scheduling, project management, sales reporting, telephony, sales enablement, lead prospecting, and 360-degree customer views.

Bigin, by Zoho

Description: Zoho is a multinational company specializing in software development, cloud computing, and web-based business tools. It launched Bigin in 2020 as a pipeline-centric CRM solution built to help small and micro-businesses engage with prospects, manage their pipeline, boost growth rates, and close more deals. The solution has email marketing, built-in telephony, customizable workflows, pipeline management, automated tasks, pre-built dashboards, real-time alerts, data management, GDPR, data security, and other functionalities to help small businesses streamline and optimize their sales processes.

Capsule

Description: Capsule is a CRM solution for companies looking for a reliable, easy-to-use tool for staying organized, building customer relationships, minimizing user input, and maximizing sales opportunities. Alongside its ability to integrate with popular software like Mailchimp, Zendesk, Microsoft, and G-Suite, Capsule also has capabilities for contact management, sales analytics, data security, task management, customizable record-keeping, and sales pipeline management. The scalable platform is best suited for startups and SMBs but is also used for large-scale growth businesses.

Freshsales

Description: Freshworks provides business software solutions designed to be ready to go right “out of the box.” For example, the company’s AI-powered sales CRM platform, Freshsales, can help businesses identify loyal customers, improve engagement, personalize the shopping experience, and unify customer data. Specific features include sales sequences, custom pipelines, Configure Price Quote (CPQ), contact scoring, sales forecasting, visual data dashboards, role-based access, and more. Freshsales can also integrate with Freshdesk, a customer support platform that will help businesses offer a holistic experience to customers.

HubSpot

Description: HubSpot Sales Hub is an easy-to-use sales CRM platform designed to help sales teams close deals, manage sales pipelines, and improve customer relationships. HubSpot Sales Hub is equipped with sales engagement tools, reporting features, sales automation, quote functionalities, live chat, appointment scheduling, sales analytics, account-based marketing (ABM), and access to the hundreds of integrations available in the HubSpot App Marketplace. The software comes in four models (Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise), so companies of all sizes can work with a solution tailored to their needs.

Nutshell

Description: Nutshell is a user-friendly CRM platform best suited for small and medium-sized businesses across industries. The sales CRM solution provides users with automated administrative tasks, sales tracking tools, easy-to-read reports, mobile access, one-on-one customer support, email automation, and other features to help sales reps create stronger customer relationships. It offers several annual packages alongside an accessible monthly pricing option, so companies don’t have to pay for functionalities they don’t need.

Pipedrive

Description: Pipedrive is a clean, intuitive, and interactive CRM platform built around activity-based selling. This means it’s uniquely equipped with the tools sales professionals need to manage leads, track communications, automate tasks, measure performance with detailed metrics, and improve sales processes. Other features include visual sales pipelines, mobile apps, lead segmentation, revenue forecasting, web forms, pipeline management, reporting dashboards, email marketing campaigns, and integrations with other software platforms, including Slack, HubSpot, Zoom, Quickbooks, and more.

Pipeliner CRM

Description: Pipeliner is a CRM software for salespeople and sales management teams. With its unique visual interface, no-code workflow automation engine, and reporting tools, sales reps from companies of all sizes can improve how they extract actionable insights from their sales data. Other features include account management, sales insights, email tracking, guided selling, lead management, social selling, custom forms, sales reports, an AI-powered mobile app, pipeline management, revenue tracking, sales force automation, custom templates, and more.

Salesflare

Description: Salesflare is a cloud-based CRM solution tailored to the needs of startups and smaller businesses. It provides users with visual sales pipelines, email tracking, customizable reporting, relationship intelligence, document management, email sequences, sales funnel insights, an easy-to-use interface, and integrations with hundreds of productivity tools like Google Apps, MailChimp, and Slack. Sales teams can also use Salesflare’s automated data collection tools to automatically scan customer emails and social profiles to expedite the process of collecting customer information.

Salesforce

Description: Salesforce Sales Cloud is a sales performance management and CRM software for companies looking to improve sales processes and increase conversion rates. With Sales Cloud, companies of all sizes can grow their business with tools and features for contact management, dashboards, process automation, opportunity management, lead management, mobile CRM, pipeline management, forecasting, activity management, and more. Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack can also help Sales Cloud users improve customer interactions and sales rep productivity.

Salesmate

Description: Salesmate is an “all-in-one” cloud-based CRM platform to help startups and small and medium-sized enterprises simplify their sales processes, improve customer engagement, and boost the productivity of their sales teams. The platform provides users with lead engagement, visual sales pipelines, prospect management, activity tracking, sales automation, email campaigns, account management, sales sequences, activity automation, custom dashboards, and sales forecasting. Salesmate can also integrate with over 700 business apps, including Google Apps, Microsoft, and Zapier.

Spotler CRM

Description: Spotler CRM, formerly Really Simple Systems, is a CRM solution for small businesses and startups. Alongside its B2B marketing and customer service capabilities, Spotler CRM offers sales CRM tools to help teams identify, track, and nurture prospects as they move through the sales pipeline. Features include contact management, sales quotations, email integrations, sales pipeline management, drag-and-drop reports, sales forecasts, workflow automation, Google Calendar synchronization, task management, and integrations with other technology platforms.

VanillaSoft

Description: VanillaSoft is a sales engagement platform equipped with a suite of products to optimize business workflows, engage leads, and maximize revenue. Features include lead tracking, SMS marketing, logical-branch scripting, VoIP, auto-dialing, sales tracking, call recording, email marketing, content management, telemarketing, automated lead routing, appointment setting, sales cadence management, and integrations with other sales platforms like Salesforce and Zapier.

Zendesk

Description: Zendesk is a global provider of customer service and sales CRM software solutions. With Zendesk Sell, its cloud CRM platform, sales-centric organizations can maximize productivity, unlock complete pipeline visibility, set up triggers to automate tasks, grow revenue, deliver personalized conversational experiences, analyze processes, and more. Its capabilities include sales automation, pipeline visualization, deal management, sales engagement, email sequences, forecasting, mobile access, lead management, reporting capabilities, custom dashboards, employee management, live chat, and lead generation.

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The editors at Solutions Review highlight and summarize the key takeaways and updates in Gartner’s 2024 update of the Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2024 version of its Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms. Gartner defines Content Marketing Platforms (CMP) as software solutions that help businesses create and curate text, video, graphics, images, audio, e-books, white papers, and other interactive content assets across paid, owned, and earned media channels. These platforms aim to help brands engage with customers, nurture prospects down the sales funnel, and drive loyalty with personalized materials.

According to Gartner’s report, a content marketing platform’s standard capabilities include tools for content strategy, editorial planning, calendarization, content creation, collaborative workflows, approvals, content performance measurement, and integrations with other marketing technologies (e.g., marketing automation, sales enablement, and web content management) via standalone or suite-based solutions.

What’s Changed: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms

In this updated Magic Quadrant, Gartner identifies ten of the most significant Content Marketing Platform providers in the marketplace. The researchers behind the report—Nicole Greene, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Rene Cizio, and Carlos Guerrero—evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each provider listed and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph, which illustrates each vendor’s ability to execute its vision. The diagram includes four quadrants: leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries.

To qualify for the report, each vendor must meet specific criteria by December 1st, 2023. Those criteria include generating a minimum of $5 million in annual revenue or a minimum of $2 million in annual revenue and 30 percent year-over-year growth compared to 2022, and integrated support for five of the six following capabilities—content strategy, editorial planning and calendarization, creative workflow, distribution, content performance measurement, and out-of-the-box integrations. 

Below is a breakdown of each category and the companies associated with it. Solutions Review’s summary of last year’s report is available here.

Leaders

Optimizely is the first Leader in the category, offering a suite-based solution with robust structured content and distribution capabilities. It primarily works with enterprise B2B organizations in manufacturing, insurance, travel and hospitality, and technology markets across North America and Western Europe. Gartner highlights its strengths: its adaptable product roadmap, expanded AI functionalities, ability to enable distributed teams, and overall viability in the CMP marketplace.

Storyteq provides a content marketing platform with ideation insight, workflow, planning, metadata, content storage, distribution, and content performance analytics capabilities. It works with enterprise and mid-market organizations across B2C and B2B verticals and industries. Strengths as a CMP vendor include its integrations with AI, content connectivity, and ongoing investments in AI tools, which Gartner says are “advanced” compared to other providers in the market.

Sitecore moved into the Leaders category in this year’s Magic Quadrant, a change from its placement in Visionaries last year. The company’s CMP solution uses modular content to support mid-market and enterprise clients seeking personalized experiences. Sitecore differentiates itself in content marketing with its innovative AI Copilot tool, AI-assisted Content Hub Suite, and its broader suite-based strategy, which can help customers leverage GenAI for their content marketing efforts.

Skyword and its Skyword360 solution return to the Leader category in this year’s Magic Quadrant. It primarily works with B2B and B2C companies based in North America, emphasizing large-enterprise organizations in the banking, communications, healthcare, insurance, and retail industries. Gartner says Skyword “distinguishes” itself in the marketplace with its in-depth strategic support, robust talent marketplace, streamlined customer experience, and evolving product roadmap, which balances AI technologies with human-centric strategic involvement. 

Challengers

Adobe is one of the new companies added to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Its products include Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM Assets and AEM Sites), Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe Express with Adobe Firefly, which collectively supports workflow, planning, production, creation, delivery, activations, asset management, reporting, and insights capabilities. Its strengths include its track record of innovation and overall viability in the market, courtesy of its global reach and year-over-year growth.

Acquia is the other newcomer to this Magic Quadrant. While it doesn’t market itself as a content marketing platform (CMP) provider, it offers content management, analytics, personalization, and customer journey management features alongside a customer data platform. The company earns its spot in the report with a suite-based solution that includes an open-source Drupal CMS, CDP, DAM, and DXP, providing B2C and B2B companies with the tools they need to support their content marketing efforts. Other strengths include its strategy for innovation and its process of incorporating real-time user feedback into platform updates.

Niche Players

Contently is back as a Niche Player. Its CMP is a legacy solution that provides North American companies in B2B markets with the features required for content creation through distribution. According to Gartner, Contently’s strengths stem from its focus on helping clients make productivity improvements, its responsive account team that helps provide better customer experiences, and a talent marketplace to enable operations with customer workflows capable of scaling content across teams.

CoSchedule supports content marketing and social publishing use cases with its Marketing Suite, calendars, and add-on offerings. This is a different approach than other vendors in the CMP marketplace, as it provides clients with an out-of-the-box solution that can be easily configured to the needs of vertical industries. Other differentiating qualities include its streamlined implementation programs, customer support services available to Enterprise customers, and its release cadence, which keeps customers happy without overwhelming them with new features.

Upland is the final vendor in this year’s report since Gartner didn’t place any companies in the Visionaries category. Its content marketing operations solution is Upland Kapost, which can help B2B organizations create and distribute content that supports complex buying journeys. The company benefits from a marketing strategy that prioritizes B2B enterprise customers, a simple pricing tier structure, and the customer support it offers via its community forum, dedicated customer success managers, and other support services.

The post What’s Changed: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled the following list to spotlight some of the best sales enablement software solutions for companies across industries to consider. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs and may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

Marketing and sales are the driving forces behind almost every company’s success. However, not every company’s sales and marketing departments collaborate as often or as effectively as they should, which is where sales enablement can help. Gartner defines sales enablement as “the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.” In many cases, this process requires marketing and sales teams to be aligned and collaborative.

Sales enablement software solutions are designed to make that alignment as seamless as possible. These solutions provide sales representatives with a single location for marketing collateral and sales playbooks. With easy access to those resources, sales teams can provide prospects with targeted, personalized content and experiences that will move them further down the sales funnel.

With that in mind, the editors at Solutions Review compiled the following list to spotlight some of the marketplace’s top-rated sales enablement software solutions. Our editors selected these software solutions based on each provider’s Authority Score, a meta-analysis of user sentiment through the web’s most trusted business software review sites, and our proprietary five-point inclusion criteria.

The Best Sales Enablement Software Solutions

Zoho CRM

Description: Zoho is a multinational company specializing in software development, cloud computing, and web-based business tools. It offers a collection of products and applications across major business categories. With Zoho CRM, companies can access a suite of sales enablement tools designed to help sales teams improve productivity and sales rates. Those sales enablement tools include a documents library, integration with Zoho’s financial solution suite, content management capabilities, customer portals, vendor portals, sequential forms, calendars, mobile functionalities, and more.

HubSpot Sales Hub

Description: HubSpot is frequently brought up in discussions on CRM integration, as most of the providers in the marketing world offer integrations with the company’s software. HubSpot is one of the most popular small business CRM since its core capabilities are free. HubSpot Sales Hub solution provides sales and marketing tools for reporting, automation, live chatting, sales engagement, quoting, appointment scheduling, analytics, account-based marketing, and more. The software comes in four models (Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise), so companies of all sizes can work with a solution tailored to their needs.

Seismic

Description: Seismic is an enablement platform provider that equips companies worldwide with the tools they need to engage customers, improve team alignment, and generate revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement Cloud solution is an open, scalable, extensible platform equipped with sales content management, coaching, strategy planning, buyer engagement, enablement intelligence, and content automation capabilities. Seismic offers over 150 integrations to help businesses create a unified enablement tech stack for all their CRM, email, sales, content, and collaboration tools.

monday.com

Description: monday.com is a cloud-based, scalable, and flexible project management software for companies. The company’s sales CRM solution allows users to create a custom platform with ready-made templates and tailored sales pipelines, workflows, and processes to meet business needs and drive growth. Capabilities include lead capturing, sales pipelines, contact management, customizable deal stages, centralized client communication, sales process automation, lead management, and more.

Showpad

Description: Showpad is a global provider of revenue enablement technology and modern selling solutions for hybrid sales. The company’s open, end-to-end revenue enablement platform provides customer-facing teams with the tools, knowledge, and content they need to streamline their B2B buying and selling processes. Specific capabilities include sales content management, buyer engagement, sales readiness tools, sales coaching programs, conversation intelligence, analytics, and integrations to help users enhance the platform with additional functionalities.

Allego

Description: Allego provides companies across industries with a sales enablement platform to help salespeople engage buyers in a hybrid world. The Allego Sales Enablement Platform is geared toward distributed sales teams and includes products for conversation intelligence, sales content management, learning tools, and channel sales enablement. Allego’s product suite comprises functionalities for virtual selling, channel training, collaborating learning programs for sales reps, deal insights, mobile access, digital sales rooms, and more.

Highspot

Description: Highspot’s unified sales enablement platform equips revenue teams with a single solution designed to help them drive repeatable revenue, elevate customer conversations, and bring together native content, training, engagement intelligence, and actionable analytics. The platform can be tailored for multiple departments, including marketing, sales, channel enablement, sales training, and sales enablement. With Highspot’s analytics, security, AI, and integration capabilities, businesses can improve sales rep performance, unlock strategic insights into selling strategies, and promote departmental alignment.

Mindtickle

Description: Mindtickle is a sales readiness platform built with sales coaching, conversational intelligence, sales enablement training, sales content management, and analytics capabilities companies need to understand sales behaviors, adapt to change, and grow revenue. Its sales enablement capabilities can help teams develop personalized programs to attract buyers, reduce time to revenue, train sales reps with AI-guided role-play activities, and more. Alongside its sales enablement offering, Mindtickle provides solutions for sales leadership, sales operations, and frontline management.

Guru

Description: Guru is a collaborative knowledge management solution for support, marketing, engineering, people ops, and sales teams. With Guru’s real-time knowledge management capabilities, teams can shorten their sales cycles, improve customer conversations, answer questions, close deals, and maintain sales reps’ skills and knowledge. Users can also utilize Guru’s sales enablement frameworks to organize their sales assets, deal processes, email templates, and competitive positioning to improve client relationships.

Agile CRM

Description: Agile CRM offers an “all-in-one” CRM product suite that includes functionalities for sales, marketing, and customer service teams across the real estate, e-commerce, SaaS, and other small-to-midsize business markets. The company also provides its small business clients with sales enablement functionalities to help them optimize sales activities and improve customer communications. These functionalities include collateral management, 360-degree customer views, employee onboarding, sales training, performance management, deal tracking, sales metrics, and more.

Klue

Description: Klue is an AI-powered competitive enablement platform that equips enterprise sales teams and product marketers with actionable competitor insights to help them close more deals. Companies can use the Klue platform to support decision-making with connected intelligence tools, compile relevant data in a single location, provide sales reps with the real-time intel they need, measure performance, and support teams with battlecards, self-service tools, and integrations.

Dooly

Description: Dooly is a “connected workspace” designed to help Salesforce users, revenue teams, account executives, sales leaders, customer success reps, and sales enablement teams improve alignment, boost collaboration, and close more deals. Sales enablement teams can utilize Dooly to centralize their workflows, equip sales with real-time insights, and more.

SalesHood

Description: SalesHood is an “all-in-one” sales enablement platform built to help hyper-growth companies improve their sales performance, lift quota attainments, and reduce time to ramp. It offers users a collection of personalized learning paths for sales representatives, collaborative learning tools, automated sales enablement workflows, real-time feedback, guided selling functionalities, content management, departmental alignment, content-sharing tools, and out-of-the-box integrations.

Upland Altify

Description: Upland Altify is a sales enablement software provider for account-based selling teams. The platform is built natively on the Salesforce platform and combines opportunity management, account planning, relationship mapping, and guided selling to help businesses grow revenue in critical accounts. The Altify product suite includes tools for relationship mapping, sales process management, out-of-the-box reporting tools, account management, sales reference management, sales training, and sales cycle optimization. Companies can also pair Altify with other Upland products to further optimize and streamline their sales processes.

Salesforce

Description: Salesforce offers one of the most expansive and complete CRM products. The platform includes the company’s sales and marketing applications, most notably the Sales and Marketing Clouds, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT service. Salesforce offers sales enablement functionalities via its Sales Cloud solution. These features can help businesses streamline the onboarding process for new sales reps, increase the adoption of new systems with in-app guidance, produce actionable insights that identify skill gaps, and customize learning content to fit the needs of particular roles.

RELAYTO

Description: RELAYTO’s sales enablement software offering can help sales teams streamline how they create unique and interactive sales content. Sales teams can use RELAYTO to create sales material, personalize content, provide reps with relevant analytics, develop cohesive content experiences, start conversations with in-app communication tools, aggregate external assets into a single experience, and offer prospects on-demand access to sales collateral. Companies can also expand RELAYTO’s functionalities via integration with leading platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, Google Analytics, Marketo, and Eloqua.

The post 16 of the Best Sales Enablement Software Solutions to Consider appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

Solutions Reviews has compiled a list to spotlight some of the best enterprise CRM software solutions for larger companies to consider working with. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

A company’s interactions with its customers are a driving force behind its ever-evolving marketing and sales strategies, which is why so many companies have turned to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to help them turn those interactions into ongoing relationships. Large, enterprise-level companies need a reliable CRM solution to facilitate collaboration, share information across departments, automate tasks at scale, analyze large amounts of data, streamline experiences, and more.

Finding the best enterprise CRM software solution is easier said than done, though. Not every CRM solution has the features an enterprise organization needs to manage complex, multi-faceted customer data. With that in mind, Solutions Review has developed this list of top-rated enterprise CRM software platforms to help connect buyers with some of the leading software providers in the marketplace.

The Solutions Review editors selected these solutions based on each provider’s Authority Score, a meta-analysis of user sentiment through the web’s most trusted business software review sites, and our proprietary five-point inclusion criteria.

The Best Enterprise CRM Software Solutions

ActiveCampaign

Description: ActiveCampaign provides companies with a customer experience automation platform (CXA) designed to help automate and customize marketing efforts. Alongside its industry-specific capabilities, ActiveCampaign provides users with a suite of features designed to help them develop, manage, and automate meaningful customer experiences. ActiveCampaign’s enterprise solution expands on the platform’s usual collection of marketing services with unlimited users, custom permissions, expanded customization tools, social data for individual contacts, and apps and integrations.

Zendesk

Description: Zendesk provides customers with a CRM experience focused on customer service and sales needs. With Zendesk Sell, a sales CRM platform, users can access sales automation software, pipeline visualization and management tools, mobile access, lead management, reporting capabilities, and more. The Zendesk for Enterprise solution is designed to help extensive organizations segment, personalize, and respond to customers on their preferred marketing channels. Features include advanced workflow capabilities, AI-powered automations, a comprehensive suite of integrations, and more.

monday.com

Description: monday.com is a cloud-based, scalable, and flexible project management software for companies of all sizes. With the company’s CRM solution, users can create a custom platform with ready-made templates and tailored sales pipelines, workflows, and processes to meet business needs and drive growth. Its integrated enterprise CRM and work management platform includes enterprise-level analytics, data control tools, built-in security and compliance functionalities, enterprise integrations, and more.

ClickUp

Description: ClickUp is a task and project management application designed to help teams of all sizes plan, organize, and collaborate from a single, customizable app. The software comes with hundreds of features that businesses can customize for whatever use case they need. Alongside its sales, development, marketing, design, and other functionalities, it offers an enterprise package built to simplify cross-functional teamwork, create company-wide visibility, and visualize progress toward shared goals. It has real-time dashboards, virtual whiteboards, task automation, Single Sign-On (SSO), custom permissions, one-on-one support from ClickUp’s Customer Success Team, and more.

Keap

Description: Keap is a CRM and marketing automation solutions provider for growth-oriented companies. While the company focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, it does offer a solution for established, larger firms. With Keap Max, enterprises can access CRM functionalities, advanced sales tools, marketing automation technology, and e-commerce features to help foster sales growth. The additional features available on Keap Max cover automatic lead capture, advanced lead capture, segmentation, built-in landing pages, custom campaigns, and more.

Pipedrive

Description: Pipedrive provides a clean, intuitive, and interactive CRM tool to help sales professionals manage leads, track communications, automate tasks, measure performance with detailed metrics, and improve sales processes. Other features include visual sales pipelines, mobile apps, data integrations, pipeline management, and email functionalities. The Pipedrive Enterprise edition equips companies with an unlimited open-deal limit and lead management, customizable pipelines, organization management, custom email templates, workflow automation, deal management, and an extensive collection of other marketing and sales features.

Zoho CRM

Description: Zoho is a multinational company specializing in software development, cloud computing, and web-based business tools. It offers a collection of products and applications across major business categories. Zoho’s enterprise-grade CRM software gives users the customizability, feature offerings, and product stability they need to manage large-scale organizations across departments, markets, and locations. Features include lead management, sales force automation, multichannel marketing, business intelligence, sales performance management, customer experience tools, journey orchestration functionalities, AI, and customer service.

Freshsales

Description: Freshworks’ CRM platform, Freshsales, comes equipped with the tools businesses need to identify loyal customers, improve engagement, personalize the shopping experience, and unify customer data. With the Freshsales for Enterprise solution, larger companies will have access to an “all-in-one” sales software for managing and customizing their business as it scales. The features offered in the enterprise CRM software include a unified customer database, visual sales pipelines, AI-powered insights, task automation, performance reports, data security, and integrations.

HubSpot

Description: HubSpot is frequently brought up in discussions on CRM integration, as most of the providers in the marketing world offer integrations with the company’s software. Additional features, like enterprise licensing, can be purchased as an add-on to the commercially free options. HubSpot also has platforms and solutions for sales, service, content management, and operations. HubSpot is one of the most popular small business CRM since its core capabilities are free. Still, its scalable, intuitive capabilities make it an easy platform for enterprise-level organizations to adopt and find value in.

Salesforce

Description: Salesforce Customer 360 is a comprehensive CRM platform that includes the company’s sales and marketing applications, most notably the Sales and Marketing Clouds, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT service. Salesforce is fully mobile, and its Complete Customer Management Solution is best-in-class. In addition to its core CRM features, Salesforce also offers an AI-based analytics tool called Einstein. The company touts over 100,000 customers, ranging from small to sprawling enterprise-level corporations.

Bitrix24

Description: Bitrix24 is a CRM software available on desktop and mobile devices and a cloud-based and on-premise solution. With the company’s enterprise CRM software solution, users can manage employees, business units, and locations worldwide. These features include project management tools, social CRM applications, big data analytics, advanced reporting, marketing automation, Gantt charts, employee workload management, automated workflows, sales automation, human resource management, and more.

Oracle NetSuite

Description: NetSuite, a property of Oracle, specializes in cloud-based solutions, including CRM, ERP, and e-commerce. NetSuite’s cloud-based CRM updates in real-time. Its cloud-based CRM tool updates in real-time and provides standard features such as SFA, customer service management, marketing automation, and more advanced capabilities like order management, commissions, sales forecasting, and integrated e-commerce. The platform tackles the entire customer lifecycle, from lead through opportunity, sales order, fulfillment, and more. 

Copper

Description: Formerly known as ProsperWorks, Copper provides a tool for sales teams that rely on Google Workspaces. It can be configured for agencies, consulting firms, technology companies, real estate businesses, mid-market brands, SMBs, and enterprise-level organizations. Companies that use Copper’s enterprise CRM offering will have access to lead management, contact management, actionable reports, visual pipelines, deal tracking, custom reports, automated data entry, real-time analytics, workflow automation, sales deal alerts, embedded integrations, lead scoring, sales funnel management tools, and more.

SugarCRM

Description: SugarCRM is designed to provide users with a simple UI and many customization options. The platform’s key features include sales automation and forecasting, lead management, sales campaigns, quote configurations, 24/7 technical support services, 250GB of data storage, and marketing automation. The enterprise edition of SugarCRM provides large companies with an on-premises sales force automation tool to help users manage their technology stack and maintain security compliance, sales processes, and performance management. It also has various tools for improving conversions, customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue.

Insightly

Description: Insightly is a unified CRM platform designed to align sales, marketing, and project teams around a single view of their customer base. The CRM includes workflow automation, lead routing, segmentation, campaigns, reporting, and email integration services to help marketers build meaningful relationships with present and future customers. Insightly’s Enterprise model includes all of the platform’s features, including additions like process automation tools, custom app deployment, dynamic page layout rules, and more.

Nutshell

Description: Nutshell is an “all-in-one” CRM and email marketing platform provider that focuses on helping B2B organizations across industries improve collaboration and win more deals. Features include sales automation, email marketing, pre-built email templates, built-in reporting, pipeline management, lead attribution, intelligent forms, contact management, internal collaboration tools, A/B testing, and mobile alerts. Its enterprise-level offerings include advanced reporting, unlimited sales pipelines with automation, automated personal email sequences, API support, SQL access for deep reporting, and more.

The post The Best Enterprise CRM Software Solutions to Consider appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled some of the best inbound marketing books worth reading based on relevance, ratings, publish date, and ability to add value to a business. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

There is no shortage of marketing resources and online learning tools (including the buyer’s guides and best practice articles here on Solutions Review). But if your team is looking for a learning resource it can do together, a good, old-fashioned book is one of the best options available. To help you find the right one for your needs, our editors have spotlighted some of the best inbound marketing books worth reading.

Each book listed below has at least three or more stars on Amazon and comes from various leaders, educators, and professionals in the marketing and CRM fields. Readers can find everything in these books, from the basics of inbound marketing to higher-level, advanced methodologies. This list is organized alphabetically by title.

The Top Inbound Marketing Books Worth Reading

Grow! Inbound Marketing System: How to rapidly and profitably grow your service company online

OUR TAKE: Written with service business owners in mind, this book provides readers with a three-part path for understanding and implementing an online marketing strategy that streamlines company processes and generates growth.

Description: This title is geared toward beginners and experienced service business owners. It offers readers a straightforward, step-by-step plan for effectively and affordably converting a target audience into loyal customers. The book is written by Donnie Shelton, an owner-operator of two service companies that have grown into multi-million dollar enterprises. Shelton has used his years of experience as a business owner and a pilot for the United States Air Force to write a book introducing readers to his unique “Inbound Marketing System” and showing them how it can help them target and convert their ideal customers.

Inbound Content: A Step-by-Step Guide To Doing Content Marketing the Inbound Way

OUR TAKE: Learn how to develop, implement, and maintain an effective inbound marketing content strategy with this step-by-step manual from Justin Champion, the Content Professor for HubSpot Academy.

Description: It’s no secret that content is still a critical tool for success in today’s marketing landscape. When used strategically, a company’s content marketing efforts can attract and convert ideal customers, and this book will teach you how to do precisely that. Author Justin Champion has over a decade of marketing experience and created HubSpot Academy’s Marketing Certification course. With Inbound Content, he will teach readers how to use storytelling in their content marketing efforts, plan long-term content strategies, develop a content creation framework, and promote, measure, and analyze the performance of the marketing department’s content strategy.

Inbound Marketing For Dummies

OUR TAKE: The insights in this beginner-level book will show you how to use inbound marketing strategies to increase brand awareness, engage with target audiences, and maximize brand loyalty.

Description: This book is written as a “one-stop-shop” for marketers looking to learn about the fundamental principles of creating, launching, promoting, and measuring the success of inbound marketing tactics. Topics covered in the book’s almost 400-page length include the three-step inbound process, pay-per-click advertising, attracting customers with targeted content, understanding dynamic consumers, and a suite of tips for introducing inbound marketing to a business. Inbound Marketing For Dummies is written by Scott Anderson Miller, an inbound marketing speaker, consultant, and author with almost thirty years of industry experience.

The Inbound Marketing Playbook: How to kickstart your inbound strategy and get results

OUR TAKE: One of the more recent titles listed here, this compact book will help marketers learn how to kickstart an inbound approach to marketing, develop a customer-centric strategy, and move their company into the future.

Description: This book is a great place to start if you’re looking for a quick and easy-to-read introduction to inbound marketing. At a compact 120 pages, the book is written from a practitioner’s point of view and will provide readers with an overview of inbound marketing strategies. The text uses real-world examples and how-tos to equip marketers of various experience levels with the tips and tricks they need to grow their company’s marketing success. The Inbound Marketing Playbook is an accessible, modern gateway to the changing world of inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

OUR TAKE: Written by HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, this book is one of the most-read primers on the inbound marketing methodology and how it can improve your lead generation and nurturing efforts.

Description: This edition of Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah’s best-selling Inbound Marketing book takes all of the insights that helped launch the inbound marketing movement and update them so companies of all sizes can learn how to utilize SEO tactics, build a significant social media following, convert website visitors into paying customers, and improve their understanding of topics like viral marketing, startup marketing, customer delight, visual content, entrepreneurial marketing, and more. The book is one of the highest-rated introductory guides to inbound marketing and has over 200 reviews on Amazon.

Inbound Selling: How to Change the Way You Sell to Match How People Buy

OUR TAKE: Learn how the inbound marketing methodology can help your sales team boost profits and customer retention with this introduction to a new approach for improving the sales experience.

Description: Acting as a semi-companion piece to Justin Champion’s Inbound Content, this book takes ideas from inbound marketing and translates them to the world of B2B sales. Written by Brian Signorelli—the director of HubSpot’s Global Sales Partner program and founder of a sales consulting firm—Inbound Selling will teach sales professionals to implement the inbound sales playbook into their selling strategies. Readers can expect to learn how to identify receptive buyers, address their pain points, make sales a team sport that empowers every salesperson, and, ultimately, tailor the buying experience to the specific needs of each prospective customer.

Linked Inbound: 8 Social Selling Strategies to Generate Leads on LinkedIn

OUR TAKE: LinkedIn is one of the most important platforms for marketers but is often underutilized. This book will teach you to make LinkedIn part of your prospecting, pipeline building, lead generation, and social selling efforts.

Description: Sam Rathling’s book is written to help marketers, sales professionals, and team leaders develop a LinkedIn marketing strategy, build a reputation that attracts prospects to their brand, turn leads into paying customers, master social selling, and more. Rathling is the Chief Visionary Officer for a company that helps salespeople, and business owners improve their sales. She has years of experience providing training and consulting services to customers. Her book covers LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the value of LinkedIn Premium social selling best practices, designing a LinkedIn content marketing strategy, how to utilize LinkedIn Groups, and more.

The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

OUR TAKE: Mark Roberge’s highly-rated book is designed to provide active and aspiring entrepreneurs with the insights they need to develop a scalable, reliable approach to assembling a winning sales team that drives revenue.

Description: As a former SVP of HubSpot’s Worldwide Sales and Services department and a current Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, Mark Roberge is as experienced a sales professional as they come. With this book, he’s compiled his years of experience into a formula for using technology, data, and inbound selling techniques to drive meaningful revenue gains. He provides readers with insights and best practices for hiring, training, and managing successful sales professionals. The book will also offer salespeople a formula for delivering consistently high-quality leads by leveraging the right technology platforms.

They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer

OUR TAKE: Success in a modern marketing and sales landscape requires companies to answer their customers’ questions preemptively. With this book, you’ll learn how to use inbound selling strategies to predict customer pain points and provide solutions.

Description: This book provides companies with a straightforward guide to answering customer questions. Author Marcus Sheridan will introduce readers to the inbound marketing and selling tactics they need to align their sales and marketing departments and meet the increasing demands of modern buyers. Topics covered include content marketing strategies, using company websites to attract quality leads, achieving employee buy-in, transforming customers into brand advocates, and more. The popular title was recently updated to include new case studies and real-world examples to address emerging technologies, trends, and consumer habits.

Links to Read: The Best HubSpot CRM Training and Online Courses to Consider

The post 9 of the Top Inbound Marketing Books You Should Read appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

As part of this year’s Insight Jam Live event, the Solutions Review editors have compiled a list of predictions for 2024 from some of the most experienced professionals across the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and Marketing Technology marketplaces.

As part of Solutions Review’s annual WorkTech Insight Jam, we called for the industry’s best and brightest to share their ERP, BPM, CRM, and Marketing Automation predictions for 2024 and beyond. The experts featured represent some of the top WorkTech solution providers with experience in these marketplaces, and each projection has been vetted for relevance and ability to add business value.

WorkTech Predictions for 2024 and Beyond

Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia

“It’s becoming clear that the B2B marketing landscape will undergo a transformative shift around accessibility, video, and artificial intelligence (AI) in 2024. While these three trends will be fundamental to success, they will be the most powerful if working together. With the takeoff of generative AI, marketers have grappled with how to leverage it cohesively versus in silos, so we can expect to see a concentrated effort to integrate AI technology across entire organizations with strategic oversight. Within marketing, in particular, I also anticipate a significant surge in AI adoption for improving the understanding of customer interactions and predicting future engagements.

“With brand trust wary due to past data breaches, marketers will also look for new ways to engage and build that trusted connection back. One way will be through live videos, providing alternative formats for content consumption, such as bite-sized clips, to internalize information more quickly. Further, as businesses recognize the diverse needs of their audience, digital and communication accessibility will be paramount in 2024. When it comes to video, for example, we can expect an uptick in subtitles and voice-overs to better reach the 75 percent of Americans with disabilities who use the internet daily. Inclusive approaches to all marketing will help ensure that efforts—like video—reach and resonate with all audiences.”

Yeshwant Mummaneni, the Chief Engineer of Cloud at Altair

MLOps Moves to the Edge.

“MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) will significantly evolve to not only provide operational capabilities such as deployment, scaling, and monitoring, but will include model optimization. This will encompass everything from hyperparameter tuning to tweak model performance to model size/quantization and performance optimization for specific chipsets and use cases such as for edge computing on wearable devices or cloud computing.”

Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect at AWS

Generative AI will change customer behaviors at least as much as it changes contact center operations.

“Generative AI is showing the potential to transform the customer experience in profound ways. In 2024, the most thoughtful contact center leaders will move from reactive customer support to proactive relationship-building through frictionless and personalized experiences that are delivered 24/7. At the same, Customers will adopt their own GenAI tools to engage with companies, and their contact centers. Contact center leaders must be prepared for these new customer-driven automated interactions that will fundamentally change the way they provide customer service. Truly harnessing the power of AI will require driving change and adapting new customer behaviors, but the payoff in customer satisfaction and loyalty make it a necessary evolution.”

Technologies developed for the contact center will be used to solve challenges in other lines of business. 

“Agent assist functionality will quickly become sales assist and supervisor assist. Back-office task management will seamlessly meld with contact center work, giving much deeper insights into customer outcomes and costs, while customer profile data and identity resolution will drive marketing workloads and contact center experiences. Artificial intelligence and automation will also continue to transform the contact center, and we believe many of these same technologies will be leveraged to drive innovation across the entire organization, empowering sales, marketing, and back-office leaders.”

Jason Haworth, Chief Product Officer at Apica

Global catastrophes will continue to have an impact.

“We will see more financial crises, and logistics and supply chains will continue to take hits. There will be less money to spend, and it will be important to consolidate the tools and resources we use. This is especially critical as data volumes will continue to soar. When you have overwhelming amounts of data and don’t know how to process it, costs rise, and time is lost.”

AI will continue to boom, and we will see adaptations in almost every area of our lives.

“While AI will undoubtedly make our lives easier in many ways, we will see an uptick in error rates because this technology is only as smart as the language it’s been trained on. AI will inevitably replace more people and jobs, but the good news is that it will also create more jobs. In a few years, we will see many autonomous vehicles, essentially cell phones on wheels. The possibilities are virtually endless with AI, and we are only now starting to explore them.”

Paul Lechner, VP of Product Management at Appfire

“We will see the convergence of DevOps and Agile practices, aiming to break down silos and improve collaboration for faster, higher-quality software development. Tools facilitating continuous integration and delivery will be crucial in this integrated approach, streamlining the path from development to deployment, with the goal of delivering tangible value at every step of the way. Additionally, businesses will shift their focus from solely leveraging cloud migration for cost and time efficiencies to embracing its strategic advantages, especially within the growing AI sector. Many companies will lack the in-house resources to develop such technologies, so they will turn to AI-as-a-service on cloud platforms to leverage this powerful technology.”

Alan Masarek, Chief Executive Officer at Avaya

“With companies firmly in the ‘Experience Economy,’ where goods and services have been commoditized, and the customer experiences companies create will matter most, the focus in 2024 will be on innovating the customer experience to drive differentiation and growth. Brands are increasingly recognizing that their contact centers are at the ‘tip of the spear’ for driving differentiating experiences for their customers, and AI-powered innovations will be front and center to supercharge CX solutions.

“If 2023 was about the ‘potential of AI,’ the dynamic will shift in 2024 to demonstrating how AI investments must translate directly and tangibly to driving tangible business value by contributing to top and bottom-line improvements and competitive advantage. And, because CEOs and Boards of Directors are increasingly focused on managing risk, privacy, security, and business ethics concerns associated with AI technology, 2024 will increasingly be a year where these issues come to the forefront.”

Josh Mueller, CMO at Avaya

The CMO Will Have an Increased Role in Customer Experience

“In 2024, businesses will see the role of the CMO become more heavily entwined in the efforts to build stronger customer experience and interactions. In the contact center, specifically, expect to see CMOs closer to the content delivered in the contact center through campaign messaging, contact center agent training, or hands-on roles in applying AI to call routing. In the coming year, CMOs will play an increasingly crucial role in the experiential side of customer interactions.”

Omar Javaid, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Avaya

Improving CX in the contact center with AI and ML.

“Over the next year, there will be two areas of focus for AI-powered innovation in the contact center. The first will be using AI to delegate menial tasks away from contact center agents, boosting overall productivity while allowing agents to focus on creating higher-quality customer experiences and driving greater agent job satisfaction and retention. The second will be on how AI and/or ML investments can help customers navigate to their desired resolution much quicker than any previous solutions have allowed, driving customer engagement, satisfaction, and, potentially, share of wallet revenue gains.”

Raj De Datta, CEO and Co-Founder at Bloomreach

Ownership: The Key to AI Success in 2024 and Beyond

“2023 saw businesses jumping at generative AI, impressed by flashy demos and promises of instant productivity gains. But many initiatives flopped as companies realized they couldn’t just plug in AI and watch the magic happen.

“In 2024, successful AI initiatives will hinge on ownership. Business leaders will make a real impact once they take the reins to champion AI, pinpoint problems it can solve, and build dedicated staff to experiment, iterate, and operationalize. Leaders who get their hands dirty and steer their people through uncertain waters will successfully harness AI’s immense potential in 2024.”

Ali Siddiqui, Chief Product Officer at BMC Software

“Generative AI is impacting technology investments at a rate and scale that no one could have predicted, and I believe GPT / LLM tech will drive a 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction or a 25 percent reduction in IT service costs by 2025. In the coming year, I expect to see Generative AI make an impact on user interfaces across service management, knowledge search, monitoring, and other operational aspects of companies of all sizes.

“For example, Generative AI will help us identify new issue clusters, direct users to emerging solutions, and even predict issues before they manifest and impact experience. Generative AI will also help in reducing hallucination risks and solve challenges of challenges of secure data management, data pipeline orchestration, and the user experience. Overall, as businesses prioritize data-driven decision-making and automation, we will see the demand for generative AI grow. Organizations that can successfully harness the power of generative AI will shape the future of enterprise software.”

Ed Macosky, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Boomi

The democratization of technology will be driven by AI automation.

“Democratizing technology is becoming a top priority for many, thanks to the high demand and limited supply of IT talent. Being able to reskill non-technical staff quickly and effectively will be integral to overall resiliency within an organization. With too much overhead on both infrastructure maintenance and technical training, businesses can quickly find themselves unable to adapt quickly enough in tough macroeconomic climates. AI automation will enable the drastic reduction of resources needed for maintenance, as well as reduce the amount of expertise required to have a strong understanding of their tech stack.”

Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer of Braze

“The winds of change are subtly shifting for marketers as we move into 2024. While 2023 was predominantly about efficiency, marketers’ focus for the upcoming year will be moving toward building trust and enduring engagement with consumers with radical efficiency. It will be crucial for marketers to align with partners who can support their long-term growth goals, helping them on their journey from campaign management to comprehensive customer journey orchestration. This involves leveraging first-party data to build trustworthy, mutually beneficial direct relationships and the power of AI to scale customer journey orchestration and foster creativity, efficiency, and experimentation.

“However, marketers should view AI not as a standalone solution but as a sage and trusted advisor that enhances their marketing prowess and learns alongside them. This perspective acknowledges AI’s limitations and underscores the necessity for marketers to broaden their traditional skill set, particularly in data analysis, to fully leverage the opportunities AI presents.”

Myles Kleeger, President & Chief Commercial Officer of Braze

“In the marketing world, we’ve heard about a cookieless future for years. The reality is that it’s time for marketers to overhaul their customer data strategy or risk damaging trust with their consumers and hindering long-term customer value permanently. With the anticipated end of cookies and the rise of privacy-protecting laws, marketers need to balance capturing contextual data about consumers with gaining their trust. In fact, only 53 percent of consumers in the US and UK say they’re somewhat confident (or more) that brands will use their personal data responsibly.

“To ensure they deliver value over time, marketers must provide consistent, transparent messaging that fosters trust about what information they’re gathering (with consumer consent) and how that shared data will deliver a valuable experience. Compared to three years ago, most consumers (70 percent) in the US and UK are either more or as willing now to share personal data with brands. If consumers are willing to share personal data, brands should, in exchange, build them highly personalized experiences that provide value. In 2024, I predict more marketers will rethink their customer data strategy to prioritize collecting the most impactful data needed to create savvy campaigns that strengthen trust and provide value to increasingly privacy-centric consumers.”

Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze

“Real-time feedback from consumers will be of paramount importance in 2024. Often, being late with a message is sometimes worse than not sending a message at all. So brands that can effectively listen, understand, and act upon their consumers’ feedback are better positioned to build strong long-term loyalty by meeting their consumers at the most relevant and critical times in the customer journey. Creating contextually rich experiences is also important for retention, as recent Braze research shows that 80 percent of consumers react positively to personalized experiences, saying that they are at least somewhat important when making purchases. Further, with the rise of AI, customer experience experts will see more opportunities in 2024 for brands to ingest data and understand it more effectively—enhancing the ability to understand feedback from disparate sources and turn it into personalized action in real-time.”

Dave Hoekstra, Product Evangelist at Calabrio

AI will transform the contact center workforce in the next decade.

“AI’s impact on the contact center workforce will be transformative over the next 10 years. Contrary to concerns about job displacement, a resounding 70 percent of contact center managers believe that the number of agents will increase. This forecast indicates that AI will serve to augment human abilities, creating a heightened demand for well-trained agents proficient in working alongside AI technologies and efficiently engaging with customers.”

Stephen Hsu, the CPO of Calendly

AI won’t just be a productivity tool; it’ll be a co-worker.

“This year, a lot of AI’s success centered around efficiency and productivity returns. Moving forward in 2024, AI’s successful integration, especially for B2B companies, is going to focus more on the innovative ways workers and end-users can partner with AI systems to create greater autonomy and impact in their roles. For example, to fill in information gaps, ensure accuracy, and reduce bias.”

AI will create a new playbook for measuring success.

“Next year, we’ll start to see more of AI’s capabilities in setting and achieving higher KPIs and reshaping data strategies to focus on producing business outcomes. Whether it’s a sales department measuring deal velocity, a marketing department measuring conversion rates, or a recruiting department measuring hiring volume, the definition of what success looks like now that we have specific AI capabilities to accelerate progress toward any of these actions will drastically change.”

AI will systemize innovation.

“While innovation will continue to stem from human inspiration and discovery, AI will introduce structured parameters, optimizing efficiency, effectiveness, and outcomes. History shows us time and time again that some of the most pioneering and disruptive ideas are bred in the most unexpected human moments, not necessarily in a lab or by a worker hunkered down in research papers. We can think of AI as a muse during the initial ideation phases, introducing ways to spark creativity and facilitate a strategic path forward for delivering.”

Colin Kincaid, Chief Product Officer at Casa Systems

Enterprise-friendly private networks will come to the forefront in driving the monetization of 5G networks across IT and OT use cases.

“CIO-friendly Private Networks will come of age in 2024, equipping operators to go after Enterprise use cases as well as Operational Technology (OT) applications. IT- and OT-friendly private networks will enable CIOs to provide all end-users (employees, contractors, visitors, and others) with high bandwidth connectivity, fusing the advantages of mobile radio with the ease of deployment, efficiency, and convenience of wifi. This will allow IT teams to manage mobile private networks (MPNs) on their standard terms without having to learn or deal with the complexity of mobile networking. Enterprises will flock to CSPs that can offer wifi-like mobile radio.”

The emergence of the 5G innovation platform will enable CSPs to drive even greater 5G innovation.

“CSPs will embrace cloud-native 5G cores to make the switch from creating a unique code base for each enterprise or consumer use case to establishing market micro-segmentation and deployment of light-weight profitable services to address each commercial customer’s specific needs.”

Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO of Cleo

“The US will most likely experience a recession in 2024. Despite its short anticipated length, it will still have detrimental impacts on businesses. Ongoing supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions will trickle down to cause diminished consumer spending, fueling the economic slowdown. Despite the recession, now is the time for businesses to be aggressive in their investments in new technologies of automation and AI to quickly rebound and prepare for a period of expansion in 2025.”

John Thielens, CTO at Cleo

“The United States will experience a long-term labor shortage, which means that businesses will need to focus on productivity, signaling a potential increase in automation and digital transformation to improve efficiency and operations. At the same time, reports show that generative AI will not be as prolific in manufacturing as once thought. Though many have feared the potential of AI to push human labor out of the workforce, this shows that any increase in AI will be due to the shrinking labor market, filling a labor gap that would have had no human counterpart to complete.”

Kyle Campos, Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) at CloudBolt Software

AI/ML will disrupt the linear relationship in the FinOps solution ecosystem.

“Currently, there is a direct correlation between user complexity/friction and capabilities/cost granularity in the FinOps solution ecosystem: increases in the latter make the former that much more complex. However, advances in AI/ML will continue to disrupt the status quo, lowering the barrier and time to value for users. What used to take hours of custom configuration and trial and error will be a low-friction conversation. Additionally, AI/ML will facilitate Unit Cost solution inversion such that unit cost is provided to the user, not from the user.”

FinOps joins Security and Observability as the “golden paths” trifecta of Platform Engineering.

“FinOps silos that drive friction and unrealized optimization promises will find a breakthrough as the conversation and solutions shift from ‘motivation’ to ‘facilitation.’ With Platform Engineering fully adopted as a technology approach by the majority of forward-thinking IT organizations by the end of next year, FinOps practices will become a native part of its ‘golden paths,’ on par with security and observability, as the trifecta of defaults in the delivery process.”

John Engates, Field CTO Cloudflare

Executives, beware of the AI knowledge gap. Your productivity and profit depends on it.

“The AI divide is deepening, the result of C-suites that chose to invest–or ignore–AI investments. The result? A new class of ‘have-nots’ that operate at status quo while the AI-savvy gain surges in productivity thanks to teams that are equipped with efficiency-creating AI tools. Across industries, this divide will solidify the leaders and brands that can navigate the torrents of the economic landscape and come out on top, today and through the coming years.”

Henrik Reif Andersen, Chief Strategy Officer at Configit

As AI takes hold, the bar for customer expectations will only get higher.

“There’s a battle going on in terms of customer experience. Everyone is looking to ensure they can offer their customers a wonderful omnichannel experience. Some of the trends we’ve seen in this include visual configurations and the ability to offer 3D visualization, and that’s going to continue. We’ve crossed the Rubicon on that one. Once you start making these types of things available to customers, they come to expect them, and it becomes table stakes.

“The next frontier of this is going to be AI-based, and it’s going to be a situation of how much guidance can you get? Are you, as the consumer, actually making choices, or will you just tell an AI model some of the things you want, and then it will give you the available options? This might be the way we interact with things going forward, and that could be a game changer.

“Part of what manufacturers will continue to realize with this is that they can spend a lot of effort on making the front-end user interface look great, but if you don’t match that on the back-end, it won’t matter. You need to ensure your data is aligned in the background to support these efforts on the customer-facing side. And especially if you want to offer that same sort of consistent experience across different platforms and different applications, such as your partner portal, your sales service portal, and your direct sales portal.”

Henrik Hulgaard, VP of Product Management at Configit

As sustainability regulations increase, manufacturers will need to think carefully about their production processes.

“While sustainability is one of those things that’s long been in the background, in 2024, it’s really going to take a more front and center position, especially in the EU, as more regulations are introduced around emissions standards and carbon footprints. Once the digital product passport goes into effect, this will require companies to be able to show consumers information such as data on raw material extraction, production, and recycling.

“There will be more teeth to these regulations than ever before, incentivizing organizations to set goals, meet those goals, and disclose that information in their reports. ESG is becoming a bigger imperative around the world, and more organizations will need to be able to show in their financial statements their progress in meeting these benchmarks. To be able to have all of this information readily accessible to consumers, manufacturers will need to more closely inspect their own internal processes around transparency as well as looking at their carbon footprint/emissions.”

Patrick Martin, Chief Customer Officer at Coveo

In 2024, GenAI hype will crystallize into reality.

“In 2023, the world got hit by the ChatGPT storm, and the hype was huge around its capabilities and what it meant to the support world. We saw opportunities for operational efficiencies, automation of redundant tasks, and improvements in the overall experience. As we head into 2024, companies will continue exploring how this technology will be implemented in support organizations across multiple use cases. We will see more and more live use cases, largely for agent assistance, as concerns of removing the human-in-the-loop to validate generated content linger.”

Self-service will solidify as the norm and propel support teams to shift to more collaborative models in 2024.

“With GenAI’s impact on self-service, support organizations will need to review what is now coming into their support teams. Chances are, simple known issues will significantly decrease, meaning that Level 1 agents will receive more complex cases with no existing documentation. It should be expected that escalation rates to upper tiers will increase, thus forcing support organizations to rethink their support models to be more collaborative.”

Cross-functional collaboration efforts will be key to reigning in the right data for the right AI-driven business outcomes.

“The outcomes driven by GenAI can only be as good as the information/data used to feed the AI models. This means that companies must start expanding their operational strategies to leverage all valuable information and data points in their AI projects. This will require tight cross-functional collaboration between internal teams so that the right data is being collected by the right team at the right time.”

Brian Peterson, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Dialpad

“In 2024, we will see the initial hype around large foundational AI LLMs fade as companies realize that one size does not fit all. While the introduction of AI tools like ChatGPT was impressive, the enterprise will not benefit from solutions that pull from the entire internet. Instead, businesses are going to move away from leveraging large LLMs, leaning toward more specialized solutions and LLMs that are trained on a more bespoke and curated dataset. Not only will these produce more tailored results, but they are also more secure and cost-efficient. Businesses will embrace AI that is tailored to them and their customers to improve accuracy, avoid hallucination, and, ultimately, increase productivity and revenue.”

Jeff Moloughney, CMO at Digital.ai

CIOs Will Treat AppDev as a Critical Business Function.

“In 2024, businesses will recognize the significant impact of AppDev on revenue generation through changes brought about by the AI revolution. It will require a more strategic approach to the software development and delivery lifecycle for executives to predict risks, costs, and efficiency gains of every change in process, ultimately allowing businesses to release and deploy at scale while meeting competitive pressures and revenue expectations.”

Wing To, General Manager of Intelligent DevOps at Digital.ai

Frontrunners will crack the productivity code.

“We’ll see ‘first mover advantage’ disappear as best practices emerge mid-year and gain widespread adoption later in the year. By the end of 2024, those who have adopted AI-assisted code tools and cracked the code on how to use AI well will be outperforming companies that have not. For DevOps teams already on this bandwagon, information sharing and increased productivity will become standard, enabling them to monetize and scale their successes.”

2024 will produce significant challenges to AI-assisted code development.

“We will reach a threshold where we’ve tampered and experimented enough with AI across the SDLC that there will be an incident that will force enterprises to pay attention to end-to-end governance and the consequences of not having AI policies in place. DevOps teams need guidance on what they are/aren’t allowed to do with the tools they’re using, and team leaders need full visibility into how those tools are being used.”

Matt Heerey, President of Manufacturing at ECI Software Solutions

“During the peak of the pandemic, manufacturing supply chain capacity decreased due to workers being sick or staying home. Today, the challenge with labor has shifted away from an availability issue and towards backfilling attrition, which has been further exacerbated by macroeconomic conditions, including inflation and a threat of a recession. In the new year, manufacturers will want to avoid overspending on labor if the broader economy is going to produce lower demand for their products. As a result, tech and cloud adoption will continue to rise as the lack of labor has fueled the installation of more automation and artificial intelligence. This adoption is still not replacing humans, but rather, is supporting them and filling the gaps that are expected to continue in the years ahead.”

Manny Rivelo, CEO of Forcepoint

“In 2024, AI-related innovations will create new possibilities we’re not even considering at the moment. Moving forward, organizations of all sizes will need to create and expand corporate AI policies that govern how employees can interact safely with AI. AI security policies will need to extend beyond commercial AI tools to also cover internally developed GPTs and LLMs. At Forcepoint, we have web and data security solutions all designed to future-proof adoption of emerging technologies such as GenAI, no matter how quickly the technology landscape evolves.”

Nick Savvides, Director of Strategic Accounts, Asia Pacific, Forcepoint

“Ethical frameworks and regulation are necessary for AI and not just a distraction for organizations as they pursue their bottom line. We cannot avoid AI, as it’s the only way to scale our operations in the asymmetrical cyber battlefield. Ethical frameworks and regulatory governance will become critical to help AI function efficiently and equitably. Every new piece of software or service will have an AI or ML element to it. Establishing best practices for ethics in AI is a challenge because of how quickly the technology is developing, but several public and private-sector organizations have taken it upon themselves to deploy frameworks and information hubs for ethical questions. All of this activity is likely to spark increasing amounts of regulation in the major economies and trading blocks, which could lead to an increasingly piecemeal regulatory landscape, at least for now. It’s safe to predict that the current ‘Wild West’ era of AI and ML will fade quickly, leaving organizations with a sizable compliance burden when they want to take advantage of the technology.”

Marco Santos, CEO Americas of GFT

AI will manage itself inside and outside of the enterprise.

“Enterprises didn’t just start testing out AI tools; they began exploring AI’s applications on a foundational level. Now that they know AI’s potential for increasing internal efficiencies and speed and have tested and piloted use cases for customers, the next step will be scaling what they’ve built.

“To make this happen, we’ll see major enterprises introduce AI-powered agents to oversee and manage other technology and data-driven systems organization-wide. Internally, enterprise leadership and teams will no longer have to move from system to system to access the information and tools they need. They’ll instead interface with these dedicated AI agents that will work with all of the other systems on their behalf, significantly streamlining workflows and productivity.”

Kevin Miller, the CTO of North America at IFS

The Enterprise Will Latch Onto AR

“2024 is sure to bring what we refer to as ‘ubiquitous AR’, with increased adoption of augmented reality (AR) via mobile devices, especially glasses. There will be projects to integrate AR into existing workflows, empowering manufacturing and field service professionals with real-time information, improved collaboration, and enhanced visualization while retaining the situational awareness necessary for the safety and well-being of workers in factories and in the field. A recent report on global AR in healthcare showed the market is projected to balloon to more than 4.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2026, demonstrating the wide appeal of AR in business. Other industries, like manufacturing and field services sectors, are ripe for AR adoption.

“Manufacturing functions like design and prototyping, quality control, and maintenance can all benefit massively from AR use. Workers can, for instance, automatically measure the length of an item or ascertain if the right tool is used with their safety glasses. In the field services sector—think field engineers, mechanics, and maintenance workers—AR is already helping with remote assistance, training and onboarding, equipment maintenance, and documentation and reporting. At IFS, we have embedded AR into our software to empower customers to take advantage of the new capabilities it unlocks for them.”

Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of iGrafx

“In the rapidly evolving landscape of technological advancement, artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of innovation, especially in its role in aiding digital transformation. As we look toward the future, AI is poised to play an integral role in reshaping industries, optimizing operations, and redefining the way we interact with technology. For example, one way AI will influence digital transformation is through the enhancement of customer experiences. Personalization, driven by AI algorithms, can tailor services and products to individual customer preferences, leading to more engaging and satisfying interactions. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are set to become more sophisticated, providing real-time, efficient customer service.

“Ultimately, the role of AI in supporting and driving digital transformation is set to expand significantly in the coming years. Its impact will be felt across customer experience enhancement, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. However, for AI to truly fulfill its potential in aiding digital transformation, it is essential to address the accompanying challenges and ethical considerations. Embracing AI’s capabilities while being mindful of its implications will be key to harnessing its power in the digital era.”

Kamal Ahluwalia, President of Ikigai Labs

AI upskilling will become a pivotal requirement to transform a future-ready, diverse, and equitable workforce 

“With the rapid advancements in AI and the evolving skills required for success in the AI-driven economy, companies will increase their investments in AI training. Training and education programs will emerge to help workers from all backgrounds develop the skills they need to thrive in the new workplace. As AI continues to revolutionize the workplace, its implementation poses a risk of exacerbating existing inequalities and further marginalizing underrepresented groups. AI companies will recognize this risk and take proactive steps to address this issue, such as developing AI systems that are fair and unbiased, as well as ensuring that AI-powered jobs are accessible to all.”

Next year will see a push for more affordable AI solutions.

“Large language models (LLMs) are trained on internet-scale data, making them very compute-intensive and costly to implement. As a result, we’re seeing most of the investment coming from big companies with deep pockets. This is hindering the ingenuity we’ve come to expect from startups and small companies, which ultimately hurts both buyers and providers.

“If AI-powered solutions can only be delivered by the largest companies, then AI will not move at the pace we need it to. This will spur demand in the coming year for more computationally efficient and affordable AI solutions, enabling a more diverse and nimble set of solution providers to deliver AI-powered solutions across a wide range of use cases.”

Devavrat Shah, Co-CEO and Founder of Ikigai Labs

LGMs will become the next household generative AI tech in the enterprise.

“Today, nearly every organization is experimenting with LLMs in some way. Next year, another major AI technology will emerge alongside LLMs: Large Graphical Models (LGMs). LGMs are useful for analyzing time series data. By analyzing time series data through the novel lens of tabular data, LGMs are able to forecast critical business trends, such as sales, inventory levels, and supply chain performance. These insights help guide enterprises to make better decisions.

“This is game-changing because existing AI models have not adequately addressed the challenge of analyzing tabular, time-series data (which accounts for the majority of enterprise data). Instead, LLMs and other models were created to analyze text documents. That’s limited to the enterprise use cases they’re really capable of supporting: LLMs are great for building chatbots, but they’re not designed to support detailed predictions and forecasting. Those sorts of use cases offer organizations the most business value today—and LGMs are the only technology that enables them. Enterprises already have tons of time-series data, so it’ll be easy for them to begin getting value from LGMs. As a result, in 2024, LGM adoption will take off, particularly in retail and healthcare.”

Rick Rider, the SVP of Product Management at Infor

“As we peer into 2024, a tapestry of uncertainties at the intersection of business and technology looms large. With its transformative yet controversial potential, the generative AI hype continues to shape industries. Economic uncertainty remains a constant companion, injecting dreaded unpredictability into the business world. The widening skill gap and labor challenges are pressing concerns demanding more aggressive innovative solutions. These macro trends are trickling downstream, impacting organizations of all sizes across industries. Our predictions for 2024 shed light on how these complex forces manifest in enterprise software.”

Read the full article here.

Jason Beres, Sr. VP of Developer Tools at Infragistics

AI Technology Will Not Replace Developers

“AI is moving to the forefront of software development, with IT leaders using AI to speed time to market and alleviate the developer shortage. While generative AI–based tools can speed up many common developer tasks, complex tasks remain in the domain of developers for now. AI technology will be used to augment developers rather than replace them as some tasks continue to demand skilled developer expertise.”

Low-Code/No-Code Tools Will Dominate Software Development in 2024

“In 2024, low-code/no-code tools will dominate software development as they bring the power of app development to users across the business. The rise of ‘citizen developers’ has proven that as we move toward a no-code future, people without coding experience are changing the working world. As tech companies adopt low-code/no-code, they’ll save time and money, rather than falling behind early adopters.”

Casey Ciniello, Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager at Infragistics

More Businesses Will Rely on Predictive Analytics to Make Decisions in 2024

“Making decisions based on gut instinct is a thing of the past as organizations are fully realizing the power of analytics to make data-driven decisions, evidenced by the number of software platforms incorporating embedded analytics. Analytics will be all-encompassing in 2024 as we become reliant on data for everything from everyday business research, such as inventory and purchasing, to predictive analytics that allows businesses to see into the future. Predictive analytics will drive businesses forward by helping them make informed, data-driven decisions, improve productivity, and increase sales/revenue—rather than merely reacting to events that have already occurred.”

Mark Neufurth, Lead Strategist at IONOS

“The domain industry is experiencing a spike in creativity. Recent news of Google launching .ing is just a mere look into the future for the domain industry where imagination hasn’t yet emerged to its full potential. Cutting words in half or adding ‘.dad’ is a light-hearted and funny version, and some are poisoning confusion and security threats with .zip and .mov names that can be hidden as downloadable files. Still, the industry’s main focus remains on easy access and easy-to-remember domain names that enhance the online presence. It’s a reflection of the digital realm’s constant reinvention.”

Anticipated stories in the IT and enterprise tech industries in 2024.

“The year 2024 is expected to be heavily influenced by artificial intelligence, serving as the foundation for new services across various sectors. AI technologies are set to become more widespread, with a trend toward consolidation and the establishment of standards. Furthermore, AI models are projected to become more efficient on diverse hardware, reducing the dependency on GPU-based infrastructure and accelerating technological advancements across industries, thus bypassing potential platform-based monopolies.”

Neeha Curtis, the Chief Communications Officer of Jugo

“We will see a lot of brands and people in general rethinking our approach to social media and digital spaces. We’ll see a growing need for building digital communities, fostering discussions, and encouraging diverse perspectives. It’s about using these powerful tools to unite rather than divide.

In 2024, the imperative for communicators, marketers, and storytellers will be to go beyond simply informing or entertaining; it will be to connect. In a world that’s become increasingly divided, our biggest challenge—and perhaps our most significant opportunity—is to use our skills and tools to bring people closer together and boost understanding and empathy. It’s a tall order, but it’s more important now than ever.”

Jaina Mistry, Director of Content and Email Marketing at Litmus

“Inbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft) are increasingly focused on protecting their users from spam and phishing emails. They’re implementing stricter rules for email marketers, and those who don’t comply may have their emails sent to spam folders or blocked altogether. To avoid these penalties, email marketers should focus on sending engaging, relevant, and personalized emails. They’ll need to segment their email lists to ensure they send the right messages to the right people and incorporate personalization techniques to make each email sound like it was written specifically for the recipient.

“In 2024, every email marketer should have a robust re-engagement campaign to attempt to re-engage dormant subscribers who have not opened or clicked an email in a while and weed out those subscribers who are no longer active. They will shift their focus from the volume of emails sent to the quality of their audience and list size to ensure deliverability rates.”

Jess Materna, Director of Product Marketing at Litmus

“Marketers think of email as tried and true—but for email to remain the essential communication tool across generations, marketers will need to evolve their use of the channel to reflect subscriber expectations in 2024. While older generations may rely on email for its universality and familiarity, younger generations likely see the value in email for business purposes but expect a more personalized, conversational tone that imitates engagement on social platforms. The key for marketers is crafting an omnichannel experience that leverages email’s reach while adapting its use to be more relational, transitioning from purely promotional emails to messages with a more human, one-to-one feel. Creating a personalized customer experience inclusive of emerging preferences will cement email’s lasting role as a cornerstone of cross-generational marketing success.”

Ned Rhinelander, the Chief Technology Officer at meQuilibrium

We must treat AI like a coworker.

“In 2024, we can expect unprecedented integration of artificial intelligence in the workforce. For most workers, AI will become a side-by-side co-worker. While this may feel threatening, it presents opportunities. The core skills for success—growth mindset, positivity, self-awareness, and sound judgment—will be as critical as ever when interacting with AI. We must direct AI with a clear sense of purpose, delegating specific tasks rather than strategy. The soft skills we use with human coworkers will prove even more vital when leveraging this new technology.”

Paul Barrett, CTO at NETSCOUT

A Push for Greater AI Explainability

“The business community has witnessed significant advances in artificial intelligence over the last two years. Yet a defining characteristic of sophisticated AI systems, including neural networks, is that they do not always behave as expected. Indeed, the path an AI system chooses to arrive at a destination may vary significantly from how a human expert would respond to the same challenge. Studying these choices and building AI explainability tools will become increasingly important as AI systems become more sophisticated. Organizations must be able to analyze AI systems’ decision-making to put adequate safeguards in place. Additionally, the outputs that AI systems provide to explain their thinking will be critical for making further improvements over time.”

Shiva Nathan, Founder & CEO of Onymos

Alternatives to Low-Code/No-Code Will Continue to Gain Traction

“While low-code/no-code tools have gained popularity for their rapid development capabilities, concerns regarding scalability, customization, and the ability to handle complex functionalities will drive enterprises to seek out new, pro-code tools. These tools, including Features-as-a-Service, enable enterprises to continue rapid application development and empower them to focus on the complex features and functionality that will set them apart from the competition. They do so by offering a wide range of common functionalities—i.e., chat, location, and access—out of the box and granting them full ownership of licensed source code. This provides enterprise engineering teams with the flexibility needed to tailor features and functionalities to meet their requirements.”

The Trustworthiness of SaaS Will Be Questioned

“In today’s SaaS-driven business world, many companies deploy third-party software to help reduce costs, save resources, streamline areas of their business, and accelerate project timelines. While SaaS has many benefits, enterprises often don’t understand how their data is being used by their own SaaS providers. Zoom became a high-profile example of this when critical details emerged about the company’s use of customer data to train AI models. This specific development spurred spirited conversations in 2023 around data ownership in SaaS, and these discussions will only continue in 2024. However, on the heels of more recent SaaS ‘vendor compromise’ cyber-attacks, the conversations in the year to come will focus on the overall trustworthiness of these solutions and why other approaches to software development, like using pro-code technology, could be the best and most secure moving forward.”

Arthur Lozinski, CEO and Co-Founder, Oomnitza

“In 2024, enterprises will make significant gains in reducing the use of tickets for managing services and driving business processes related to asset lifecycle management. Generative AI and LLMs will enable deeper, more conversational chatbox implementations that, together with IT automation tools, can significantly reduce ticket volume. AI is central to enabling this sea change because it can ingest and analyze the massive volumes of ticket histories, knowledge bases, Slack channels, and other information that are already being used in the enterprise. The data that flows across those channels can be used to create these deeper, more conversational, and specialized LLMs. In 2023, we saw early first steps with our partners in development, and in 2024, these early efforts are going to materialize into a rapidly growing trend.”

Mike Loukides, Vice President of Emerging Tech Content at O’Reilly Media

GenAI Will Change the Nature of Work for Programmers

“GenAI will change the nature of work for programmers and how future programmers learn. Writing source code will become easier and faster, but programming is less about grinding out lines of code than it is about solving problems. GenAI will allow programmers to spend more time understanding the problems they need to solve, managing complexity, and testing the results, resulting in better software that’s more reliable and easier to use.”

A New Generation of AI-Assisted Programming Tools 

“Copilot is just the start. We’ll see a new generation of AI-assisted programming tools. We are already seeing tools for managing prompts; we will soon have libraries of prompts designed to direct GenAI to accomplish specific tasks. And, while Copilot is primarily useful for low-level coding, we will soon see generative AI tools for high-level tasks like software architecture and design.”

Padmanabhan Raman, CEO and Co-Founder of Osa Commerce

Optimizing Use of AI Will Determine Future Supply Chain Winners

“AI and predictive analytics will separate the winners and losers over the next decade across manufacturing and retail. Leaders who harness big data to optimize inventory, forecast demand, control costs, and personalized recommendations will dominate their less analytical peers. Companies that fail to adopt will see spiraling costs and plummeting efficiency.”

Yifat Baror, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Osa Commerce

Automation is Necessary to Supplement Labor Shortages

“Automation, especially in warehouses and transportation, will become mission-critical over the next few years as labor shortages persist. Companies that invest in the latest technologies that can easily integrate with robotics or self-driving vehicles, automated inventory systems, or AI and predictive solutions will be best positioned to address workforce gaps, control rising labor costs, and attract younger tech-savvy talent.”

Agur Jõgi, CTO at Pipedrive 

Further development of AI-based solutions. 

“Due to high performance, enhanced reliability, business agility, and cost efficiency, companies and organizations of all sizes will continue to migrate from private clouds to public clouds, eliminating the need to invest in hardware and software to maintain the infrastructure and enabling allocation of resources to business development. 

“Based on data and patterns, in 2024, we will start seeing useable AI products in high-level automated B2B and B2C decision-making or business management processes as a result of AI’s prominent capability of detecting patterns, trends, strengths, and weaknesses of any technological system or analyzing behavioral patterns of team performance or consumer data. AI will also increase the quality assurance of SaaS products and services by increasing the speed and efficiency of data-driven quality management and minimizing mistakes or defects in the development and production processes.”

Razat Gaurav, CEO at Planview

Sync or Sink: How Companies are Using Data to Drive Success

“The ability to connect past results and current realities with a probability of success for future objectives through effective data utilization will emerge as a defining factor in 2024. This will separate the successful innovators from those struggling to keep pace with evolving market demands. Often, data resides not in one or two or three systems but in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of different systems.

“Looking forward, we can anticipate a growing divide between organizations that harness the power of data for strategic alignment and predictive capabilities and those that neglect this critical aspect. Those adept at synchronizing data to align with their goals and OKRs will continue to thrive, leveraging their insights for rapid adaptation and maintaining a competitive advantage. In contrast, organizations failing to prioritize data-driven decision-making risk lagging behind, facing challenges in navigating the dynamic business landscape.”

Cameron Van Orman, Chief Strategy Officer at Planview

Adopting AI for Pragmatic Progress

“In 2024, generative AI will transition to the ‘slope of enlightenment’ phase of the technology hype cycle from its current position somewhere between the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ and ‘trough of disillusionment’ phases. The initial excitement around AI enablers will give way to more pragmatic expectations, focused on targeted applications that offer tangible value as enterprises move beyond experimentation to focus on practical implementations. Overall, this marks a pivotal moment, signaling a more mature and purpose-driven era for generative AI. With this, attention will shift from ‘enablers’ to applications, highlighting how enterprises are directing investments toward initiatives that drive efficiency and meaningful change.”

Eric Schrader, Chief Product Officer at Propel Software

The era of continuous business transformation kicks off.

“The old adage of ‘the only constant is change’ has finally arrived in the manufacturing industry. Gone are the days of static business processes and tech stacks that are updated every few years or even decades. Instead, manufacturers are embracing continuous transformation where they identify a need or pain point, deliver a solution using an agile approach, and quickly move on to address the next problem. This nimble and responsive approach will help manufacturers to quickly capitalize on revenue opportunities and adjust to market changes, making them more resilient, efficient, and profitable.

“With technology evolving at a remarkable pace, it opens up new opportunities to change the way companies do business. As a result, business transformation has become increasingly tied to digital transformation. Next year, we will see many manufacturers focusing on the customer outcome and how their products deliver that desired outcome. And they will be looking closely at teams, processes, and technology to support those outcomes.”

In 2024, we’ll see more manufacturers transform their businesses by focusing on revenue growth, capturing market share, and building brand loyalty.

“Successful technology solutions will be those that can quickly pivot to support business needs as they evolve. Many manufacturers will lean in on a new technology category, product value management (PVM). PVM will help drive business transformation for many with a single continuous product thread that enables companies to grow profits by collaborating across the enterprise on a continuous data product thread, sharing insights that chasm between the front office and back office.

“Adapting to change while keeping customer experiences top of mind is the only way to continue growing revenue and increasing profits. Starting with those goals in mind will ultimately make the path to business transformation success much easier.”

Dave Rowe, the Chief Product Officer & EVP of Global Transformation at Rimini Street

Demand to maximize the ROI of existing investment will outshine new technology implementations

“All organizations, at some level, are entertaining the idea of cloud adoption for their current operations. In 2024, we will see a bigger conversation about known technologies. Although it is not a new implementation, we expect organizations to weigh the pros and cons of a cloud-native approach and whether they should migrate all their data and workloads to the cloud.

“There is a dark side to the cloud conversation, one that relates to the unexpected costs, the motives to move everything to the cloud, and its management. As we approach and move into 2024, leaders will opt for a pragmatic strategy versus using the cloud for all their operations. Within their environments, they will strategically choose where the cloud makes more sense, specifically looking at the use of applications and data, cross-department functions, the costs of moving and maintenance, and, of course, the ROI of their previous investments.

“With current massive bills accumulating for enterprises, questions will shift from ‘Are you all in the cloud yet?’ to ‘Do you know when and how you need the cloud?’ And as software vendors continue to push their own cloud products there seems to be an increasing trend of data ‘repatriation’—moving it to the data center or more managed facilities where organizations can have more control. Ultimately, this will be a matter of finding the balance that works for the organization’s goals and not what software vendors try to dictate.”

John Bates, the CEO of SER Group

The end of enterprise email.

“Enterprise email has been on a sharp downward trajectory for some time now, usurped by more spontaneous and collaborative chat and content exchange platforms like Microsoft Teams. As content becomes more ‘conscious’ and able to relay information about itself, the need for busy and jaded human professionals to have to visually scan, respond/address, or discard individual email messages will cease. Emailed requests and attached invoices, contracts, or applications will simply announce and identify their existence and file themselves or trigger automated processing, according to their type and priority level.”

Surface-level RPA will be left in the dust.

“Robotic process automation (RPA) tools are great at doing routine things very well. But, superseded by real, adaptive machine intelligence, RPA as a technology has largely outlived its usefulness. Scraping information from the screen of one app and pasting it onto the screen of another means that the technology doesn’t ‘understand’ what it is doing, preventing it from making an intelligent decision about what to do next. To perform a next-level content task requires intelligent insight into the information’s properties and relative importance. In 2024, intelligent content automation will increasingly replace RPA, enabling smarter processing/more advanced automation.

“After all, why keep doing mundane things over and over again when there are ways to run and manage them in more efficient and dynamic ways, aided by AI? Increasingly now we’ll see process automation incorporate deeper learning from content and data. Intelligence which will feed continuously into a growing and ever richer corporate knowledge base.”

The world won’t end because of AI. Not in 2024, at least.

“World politicians are missing the point about AI, deep learning, and its potential to do harm. The technology is great at understanding language, deciphering images, and comparing, cross-analyzing, and drawing first-line conclusions from the contents of large libraries. It’s also excelling at translating these into easy-to-digest prose and images. But, as far as the technology has come, AI hasn’t yet passed what could be deemed the new Turing test of modern-day machine intelligence – the ability to do the ironing and put clothes away. So we’re not at risk of an AI-driven nuclear war. For now, anyway.

“What we can expect is that new AI applications will be ‘crash-tested’ for safety before being unleashed. This is how real-time environments like foreign exchange trading desks will be protected. Currently, around 75 percent of all AI applications probably risk being stifled by government over-regulation, an anti-innovation stance that must now be challenged if we are to reap the fuller benefits of AI as a society and global economy.”

Kuldeep Yadav, Senior Vice President of AI & Labs for SHL

“In 2024, we are likely to see organizations taking notice of their interviewing practices and applying AI technology to get better visibility across the interview lifecycle. There will be much more scrutiny from candidates on why there are a greater number of interviewing rounds (and they have to spend a lot of time). Organizations will look to optimize their time spent in interviewing and increasing the quality” of hire.”

Sara Gutierrez, Chief Science Office at SHL

“Although we saw economic struggles coming out of the pandemic, we also witnessed the most buoyant job market in recent history. This led to the Great Resignation, with employees having agency and power and employers having to work hard to attract and retain talent—the result: higher starting salaries, greater flexibility, more work-life balance, and so on.

“That pendulum has shifted. A tight labor market, fewer opportunities, job insecurity, and a cost-of-living crisis mean employers are back in the driving seat. While it might be tempting for organizations to pull back from employee-oriented initiatives, such action will be short-sighted. Organizations that continue to invest in their people, offering development, mobility, and career growth in 2024, will reap the rewards in the months and years to come.”

Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling

AI-powered Human quality translation will increase productivity by 10X or more.

“At the beginning of 2023, everyone believed that LLMs alone would produce human-quality translations. Over the year, we identified multiple gaps in LLM translations ranging from hallucinations to subpar performance in languages other than English. Like cloud storage or services, AI-powered Human quality translation is increasingly moving toward a cost at which the ROI of translating nearly all content becomes attractive, creating a competitive advantage for those companies that use it to access the global market.

“Contrary to the shared belief that the language services industry will shrink in 2024, it will grow as more content gets localized, but it costs less to do. 2024 will be the year the cost of translation plummets. Translators powered by Language AI and AI-powered Language Quality Assurance increase their productivity by 10X or more.”

Eric Bierry, the CEO of Sopra Banking Software

AI is the final tipping point for hybrid systems with legacy and digital layers.

“Organizations used to be able to get away with taking a piecemeal approach to digitization, tackling the slowest and most inefficient components of their legacy systems, one at a time. While this was once considered a safer, more cautious approach than a full rip-and-replace, these same organizations are now dealing with the consequences: lasagna-like architectures composed of a mix of both legacy and digital layers.

“In the banking industry, for instance, organizations have moved specific areas of their business—such as payment processing or lending—to digital, cloud-based formats while leaving other legacy systems untouched. This approach has not only introduced significant costs and inefficiencies, but a huge gap between these organizations and the rest of the market. Enterprises will have no choice but to begin digitizing their operations from end-to-end in the coming year.”

Claus Jepsen, CTO and CPO, Unit4

The term AI is greatly overhyped and will distract leaders from their end goal.

“Company leaders need to ensure they are asking the right questions. For example, a particular vendor’s AI strategy is irrelevant if leaders don’t understand how deploying AI will support their business objectives. In the ERP industry, 80 percent of automation can happen without deploying AI—it’s more of a buzzword than a strategy. AI will continue to be an overhyped distraction for business leaders in 2024 until companies can determine how AI can best supplement their goals—and without the proper data, this question is nearly impossible to answer. Focus on establishing the user cases and collecting the right data to make informed decisions about your business, rather than jumping on the AI bandwagon.”

The role of the CIO is evolving into a “data philosopher.” 

“Gone are the days of CIOs being involved in the tactical elements of servers—or what I like to call ‘server junkies.’ In 2024, the role of the CIO will evolve to create more value-add for businesses as they begin to make sense of company data. Technology is a facilitator to finding an answer within siloed sets of data pools, not the answer itself. CIOs will now begin to determine the right questions to ask to meet business objectives and leverage technology to help find the answers within company data.”

Integration-as-a-service will become the next industry buzzword.

“In 2023, business leaders slowly began understanding the value of integration-as-a-service. In 2024, implementation will begin to take off. Integration-as-a-service has required more time than initially anticipated for company leaders to understand its value proposition. We saw some progress in 2023, but the industry still requires more maturing and understanding before implementation skyrockets. I expect integration-as-a-service to become more prominent as leaders begin to understand the value-add for their organizations and recognize its purpose and availability from vendors and partners.”

Kevin Beasley, CIO, and Joe Scioscia, EVP with VAI 

“Limited budgets and difficulty finding IT talent have long hampered tech adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. Continued economic uncertainty will only add to headwinds for companies in 2024. Mid-market companies with limited budgets will be forced to pick and choose how and when they digitize, and these trends and technologies are poised to stand out in 2024:

• Artificial Intelligence: Many companies will take a wait-and-see approach to AI. They’ll utilize AI when it contributes directly to business value, such as in predictive analytics and purchasing forecasting.
• Big Data: Data is the lifeblood of AI, and many enterprises have access to large amounts of valuable data that can be mined to improve the business in various ways. As the use of AI expands to companies of all sizes, many will struggle to answer core data governance questions: who has access to data, who has the right to change it, and is it protected from outsiders? Many firms must work with experienced partners to address these challenges directly.
• Mobile Tools – RF guns and other mobile tools will be important in 2024 for order scanning and picking in warehouses. RF guns, in particular, have long been the workhorses of distribution companies, and they maintain some advantages over mobile technology, including speed. But Android-based devices are getting better and are more familiar to new workers. Training new employees to use smartphones is easier because they’re intuitive and familiar.

“Software vendors serving the mid-market will thrive when they can offer solutions that contribute directly to customers’ bottom lines. Tools that extend relationships with customers, like AI-based recommendation engines and predictive ordering, for example, are becoming more and more common, and they’re leveling the playing field between SMBs and their larger competitors.”

Andy Patel, Researcher at WithSecure

Democratization of AI & 2024 Uses – Get Ready

“Open-source AI will continue to improve and be taken into widespread use. These models herald a democratization of AI, shifting power away from a few closed companies and into the hands of humankind. A great deal of research and innovation will happen in that space in 2024. And whilst I don’t expect adherents in either camp of the safety debate to switch sides, the number of high-profile open-source proponents will likely grow.”

Image and video-generative AI services will start to catch up with text generation in terms of accessibility.

“As these models become easier to prompt and control, Midjourney (and the like) will continue to add functionalities such as 3D and video. Expect a consolidation of these different offerings as the biggest players start to dominate. And the sheer quantity of AI-generated images will mean that nearly every image on the internet, including historical images, will soon be suspicious to someone.”

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