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.”

The post 82 WorkTech Predictions from Industry Experts for 2024 appeared first on Best Talent Management Suites, Software, Vendors.

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy WorkTech news from the week of May 12th. This round-up covers announcements and updates from companies like BigCommerce, Pegasystems, Deloitte, and more.

Keeping tabs on the most relevant ERP and BPM news can be time-consuming. As a result, our editorial team aims to summarize the week’s top headlines in the enterprise technology marketplace. The Solutions Review editors will compile a weekly round-up of vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy WorkTech information. With that in mind, here is some of the top WorkTech news for May 12th.

Top WorkTech News From the Week of May 12th, 2023

Airtable Expands its Platform with New AI Capabilities

Airtable, a cloud collaboration service provider, has introduced Airtable AI, a new solution for deploying AI-powered applications. The new solution provides Airtable users with AI components and an intuitive, no-code interface designed to make it simple for teams to integrate AI into their data and workflows. Airtable AI includes a collection of pre-built components, templates, and prompts that can be customized and connected to support advanced and creative forms of knowledge work. These capabilities are embedded into Airtable’s platform.

Read on for more.

BigCommerce Announces a Partnership with NetSuite

BigCommerce, an open software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform, has announced details of its new partnership with Oracle NetSuite. With their collaboration, a NetSuite-provided integration will be available to connect BigCommerce to NetSuite’s business system that helps merchants streamline and automate their financial, inventory, and order management processes. The integration builds upon the existing NetSuite Connector by making it easier for BigCommerce users to connect to the NetSuite solution.

Read on for more.

Bonitasoft Introduces New Self-Contained Apps Technology to its Platform

Bonitasoft, an open-source digital process automation solution provider, has announced the first delivery of Self-Contained Apps technology to its process automation platform. The new capabilities are part of Bonita 2023.1, the latest release of the company’s flagship platform. However, these Self-Contained Apps are independent of the Bonita platform, which provides companies with several time and cost-saving benefits. These include less complex development times, faster application deliveries, simpler application scaling, enhanced development team efficiency, and lower costs for application maintenance.

Read on for more.

Certinia Appoints a New Chief Marketing Officer

Certinia, a platform for services businesses, has appointed Rick Caccia as Chief Marketing Officer. The news comes on the heels of Certinia announcing its rebrand from FinancialForce. As Chief Marketing Officer, Caccia will report to President and CEO Scott Brown, serve as a member of Certinia’s executive team, and oversee the company’s Brand and Creative, Product Marketing, Global Communications, Demand Generation, Digital Marketing, and Marketing Operations. Caccia has over twenty-five years of experience in marketing across the enterprise SaaS, data management, and security markets.

Read on for more.

Cognizant Expands its Partnership with Google Cloud

Cognizant, a global professional services company, has announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, an enterprise cloud computing provider. The partnership is powered by Google Cloud’s industry-leading AI product suite. It will accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by businesses worldwide by helping them create, migrate, and modernize their AI journeys. Additionally, Cognizant will open new Google Cloud AI Innovation Centers in San Francisco, London, and Bangalore.

Read on for more.

Contentstack Makes Several Announcements at its User Conference

Contentstack, a composable digital experience platform (DXP) provider, has announced the general availability of Contentstack Launch. This “first-of-its-kind” integrated front-end hosting service enables customers to build and push front-end code with a few clicks. The news was announced as ContentCon, the company’s second-annual user conference. Also at ContentCon, Contentstack launched the Contentstack Academy and the Go Composable resource site, which will help businesses accelerate their adoption of composable digital technologies that drive digital transformation strategies.

Read on for more.

Deloitte and Google Cloud Expand Their Long-Running Partnership

Deloitte also announced that it’s expanding its partnership with Google Cloud. The expansion will bring Google Cloud’s advanced generative AI capabilities to companies across industries. The companies will build and scale solutions that address the growing demand for Google Cloud’s Generative AI capabilities and help clients solve business challenges. For example, Deloitte’s Generative AI practice will utilize several Google Cloud technologies to bring new solutions to the market.

Read on for more.

Gartner Releases its 2023 Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2023 edition of its Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems, identifying eighteen of the marketplace’s most significant manufacturing execution system (MES) vendors. The researchers behind the report—Rick Franzosa and Christian Hestermann—evaluated each listed vendor’s strengths and weaknesses and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph.

Read on for more.

Newgen Software Debuts the Newest Version of its Records Management System

Newgen Software, a global digital transformation platform provider, has launched RMS 4.0, an upgraded version of its Records Management System. The latest version introduces several user experience (UX) enhancements and expanded security functionalities, including built-in authentication mechanisms that ensure deeper security and compliance. The UX additions include a modern user interface and a customizable dashboard that, together, will enable seamless experiences and unified views of record information.

Read on for more.

Pega Introduces New Process Mining Capabilities to its Platform

Pegasystems, a low-code platform provider, has launched Pega Process Mining. This new tool will make it easier for customers of all skill levels to find and fix the process inefficiencies that hinder their business operations. These new process mining capabilities—alongside generative AI-ready APIs—will be seamlessly integrated into the Pega Platform, providing businesses with a unified solution for continuously optimizing their Pega workflows. Pega Process Mining, which stems from last year’s acquisition of Everflow, uses AI and dedicated algorithms to model and analyze their processes ‘as-is’ lifecycle based on event log data.

Read on for more.

Robin Details New AI-Powered Functionalities for its Hybrid Workplace Experience Solution

Robin, a hybrid workplace experience company, has announced the rollout of new AI-powered automation functionalities designed to streamline the process of scheduling in-office visits, fully automate the end-to-end desk booking experience, optimize space utilization, foster employee connections, gather workplace insights, and ensure people have the space they need to do their best work.

Read on for more.

Zscaler Expands its Digital Experience Platform with New AI Features

Zscaler, a cloud security provider, has announced new advancements for Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), an integrated solution that provides users with end-to-end visibility and IT troubleshooting capabilities. The new additions to the solution include AI-powered insights that empower IT operations and service desk teams with the insights, diagnostics, and remediation they need to ensure flawless digital experiences, support workforce productivity, and accelerate the troubleshooting process.

Read on for more.

Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as the Solutions Review editors will use it to share new articles from the Expert Insights Series, Contributed Shorts videos, Expert Roundtable videos, event replays, and other curated content to help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend with changing industry expectations. All to meet the demand for what its editors do best: bring industry experts together to publish the web’s leading insights for enterprise technology practitioners.

Why Your Next Business Investment Should Be iPaaS, by Lisa Rabideau of Deltek

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series, Lisa Rabideau, the Senior Director of Product Strategy and Engineering at Deltek, explains why your company’s next investment should be Integration Platform-as-a-Service Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS). In the article, Rabideau explains how iPaaS can help eliminate data siloes, improve business agility, streamline workflows, and serve as the foundation for your business integration strategy.

Read on for more.

How to Reduce Automation Costs During a Recession, by Dan Shimmerman of Blueprint Software Systems

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series, Dan Shimmerman, the President and Chief Executive Officer at Blueprint Software Systems, outlines a few ways companies can reduce automation costs during a recession. In the piece, Shimmerman delves into the roles citizen development, low-code/no-code development platforms, and intelligent automation platforms can play in cost reduction strategies.

Read on for more.

Three Intersecting Trends That Power Self-Contained Applications, by Charles Souillard of Bonitasoft

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series, Charles Souillard, the CEO and co-founder of Bonitasoft, explains how composability, containerization, and the move to modern on-prem deployments can power self-contained applications. Other subjects covered in the article include enterprise composability, containerization, on-premise deployments, and what the future might hold for automation and BPM projects.

Read on for more.

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

The post Top WorkTech News From the Week of May 12th: Updates from BigCommerce, Pegasystems, Deloitte, and More appeared first on Best Talent Management Suites, Software, Vendors.

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy WorkTech news from the week of April 21st. This round-up covers announcements and updates from companies like Oracle, Nintex, My Office Apps, and more.

Keeping tabs on the most relevant ERP and BPM news can be time-consuming. As a result, our editorial team aims to summarize the week’s top headlines in the enterprise technology marketplace. The Solutions Review editors will compile a weekly round-up of vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy WorkTech information. With that in mind, here is some of the top WorkTech news for April 21st.

Top WorkTech News From the Week of April 21st, 2023

FieldBin Introduces New Features to its Field Management Software

FieldBin, a field service management (FSM) software provider, has announced several new features for its application. These include GPS stamping improved location and time tracking, inventory management for multiple locations, and expanded customer messaging capabilities, including email and text confirmations, technician reminders, live chat support, “on my way” notifications, and 24/7 assistance. The new features also coincide with FieldBin’s addition of custom tax rate capabilities for countries outside the United States.

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Infor Reveals a New Talent Empowerment Solution

Infor, an industry cloud solution provider, has announced the Infor Talent Empowerment solution, designed to help organizations personalize career mobility in the workplace. The Talent Empowerment solution provides users with a new employee experience within the Infor HR Talent platform that can help improve employee retention and engagement by empowering individuals with personalized career paths. The personalized career paths are developed with Infor’s behavioral assessment Talent Science, which enables companies to go deeper than conventional career journeys.

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Mendix Announces Plans to Develop a Technology Partner Community

Mendix, a global provider of enterprise application development solutions, has announced its plans to develop an extensive technology partner community to help enterprises and software startups accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. Mendix, a Siemens business, is also part of Siemens Xcelerator, which will help it expand its low-code ecosystem with more technology partners and integrated solutions. Alongside the news, Mendix announced that ISV partner In Motion built a suite of cloud-native solutions to enable and accelerate insurers’ sales, claims, distribution, reinsurance, policy administration, and other processes.

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My Office Apps Releases a New Integration with QuickBooks Online

My Office Apps, a business improvement software provider, has announced a new integration with QuickBooks Online. The new integration provides businesses with a two-way sync between Kechie—My Office Apps’ ERP solution—and QuickBooks, meaning data can seamlessly flow between the two systems. For example, when information is updated in Kechie, it will automatically update in QuickBooks Online, and vice versa. Some of the processes that can be synced with the integrations include purchase orders, customers, sales orders, inventory updates, and vendor information.

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Nintex Details its Transition Plan for Office 365 Customers

Nintex, a global provider of process intelligence and automation solution, has released details on a transition plan for Nintex Workflow for Office 365 customers. The news comes on the heels of Microsoft’s decision to retire its existing Microsoft SharePoint 2013 workflow engine in Microsoft Office 365. Nintex has partnered with Microsoft in anticipation of this announcement and previously announced the Nintex Upgrade Program, which will provide clients with the tools, services, and support they need to create a clear transition path to Nintex Automation Cloud.

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OneStream Software Launches the OneStream Solution Exchange

OneStream Software, a corporate performance management (CPM) solution provider, has launched the OneStream Solution Exchange. The Solution Exchange builds on the OneStream MarketPlace and the OneStream Wave Developer conference to expand the OneStream platform development experience with new partner-built and community-shared solutions. Solution Exchange consists of three solution portals—MarketPlace, PartnerPlace, and OpenPlace—to accelerate the development and delivery of new tools that extend the value of the OneStream platform.

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Oracle Expands its Fusion Cloud Applications Suite with New Supply Chain Planning Features

Oracle has introduced new capabilities to the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite to help organizations accelerate their supply chain planning efforts, improve financial accuracy, and increase operational efficiencies. The update introduces new planning, usage-based pricing, AI-powered lead time estimates, and rebate management capabilities to the Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) solution and expanded quote-to-cash processes in Oracle Fusion Applications.

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Oracle Expands the Oracle ME Platform with an AI-Powered Tool

Oracle also announced several updates for Oracle ME, an employee experience platform in the Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) solution suite. One of the primary updates is the debut of Oracle Grow. This AI-powered tool connects learning, career mobility, and skills growth in a personalized experience that provides users with self-directed learning, skills development, and visibility into career growth opportunities. The new solution also delivers personalized insights and intelligence guidance in a single interface that pulls information from Oracle Learning, Oracle Dynamic Skills, and Oracle Talent Management.

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Virtuozzo Releases the 2.0 Versions of its WordPress Hosting Platform

Virtuozzo, a cloud hosting enabler for service providers, has released the 2.0 version of its WordPress hosting platform. The new release introduces an updated user interface allowing automated website deployment and cloud infrastructure management for companies that run their businesses on WordPress. With Virtuozzo’s updated Application Platform for WordPress, service providers can offer enterprise-grade and cost-effective WordPress hosting of websites, databases, security, CDN, and associated software stacks.

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Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as the Solutions Review editors will use it to share new articles from the Expert Insights Series, Contributed Shorts videos, Expert Roundtable videos, event replays, and other curated content to help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend with changing industry expectations. All to meet the demand for what its editors do best: bring industry experts together to publish the web’s leading insights for enterprise technology practitioners.

The Best Robotic Process Automation Certifications to Take Online in 2023

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the method many organizations use to optimize day-to-day operations. However, becoming an RPA professional is easier said than done, which is where online certification programs can help. With this in mind, we’ve compiled this list of the best robotic process automation certifications from leading online professional education platforms and notable universities.

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Application Modernization: Is Microservice Over Monolithic Still a Question?, by Yann Guernion of Broadcom

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series, Yann Guernion, a Solution Specialist for NetOps at Broadcom, delves into application modernization and whether “microservice vs. monolithic” is still a debate worth having. The article also examines the benefits and limitations that companies can encounter when working with containerization.

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How the Metaverse Will Transform the Industrial Product Life Cycle and Value Chain, by Jiani Zhang of Capgemini Engineering

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series, Jiani Zhang, the Executive Vice President and Chief Software Officer at Capgemini Engineering, explores how the metaverse might change the industrial product life cycle and value chain. In the article, Zhang explains how research can streamline the design process, how digital layouts can optimize factory planning, and how to predict servicing with environment simulations.

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

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Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc.

Cornerstone OnDemand presents a powerful and fully customizable cloud-based Talent Management Suite comprised of an integrated package of modules designed for large businesses. This suite handles all the matters related to recruitment, employment, and training. The vendor also presents a trimmed-down version as well, which caters to the needs of small to midsized businesses. This version contains performance and learning modules, while the full version contains seven modules. Each application with Cornerstone is built using a single code base that gives users one centralized talent management system. In early 2020, Cornerstone acquired Saba Software for $1.395 million.

Upon completion of the transaction, Cornerstone will become a private company with the flexibility and resources to continue to provide leading talent management Software as a Service solutions. Additionally, Cornerstone will benefit from the operating capabilities, capital support, and deep sector expertise of Clearlake and its strong track record with software platform investments.

In a media statement, Phil Saunders, Chief Executive Officer of Cornerstone, said, “Clearlake’s investment reflects their confidence in our talented people, the power of our SaaS solutions and our value proposition for our customers. With this transaction, we plan to continue to pursue new software capabilities that advance our customers’ efforts to optimize workforce agility, transform skill development, deliver personalized, engaging growth experiences, and align their organizations around a shared definition of success. We’re thrilled to welcome Clearlake as a partner that appreciates the impact our SaaS solutions have on the lives of the people at work and our customer-centric philosophy as we accelerate our innovation.”

To learn more about Cornerstone, click here.

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Solutions Review is proud to release its new resource for comparing talent management and human capital management software, the

Top providers highlighted include ADP, ApplicantStack, Arcoro, BambooHR, Cegid, Ceridian, ClearCompany, Cornerstone OnDemand, Deltek, HealthcareSource, iCIMS, Intersog, Meta4, Namely, Oracle, PageUp, PeopleAdmin, PeopleFluent, SAP, SilkRoad Technology, TalentQuest, TalentSoft, UKG, and Workday.

The process for evaluating talent management and human capital management platforms can be complex. These complexities grow more obvious when one considers the convergence of product capabilities offered by traditional human resources software and vendors in this space.

The marketplace for talent management software is mature and crowded with a variety of solution providers, tools, and products to meet even the most advanced needs. There are companies we refer to as ‘mega-vendors’ who offer enterprise-class tools while others tout cutting-edge capabilities designed for niche verticals. Still, there are also talent management vendors that integrate with popular open-source technologies and feature robust user communities. 

This resource features five important questions to ask during the buying process, five key capabilities to consider, and full, one-page vendor profiles that provide a solution overview, three key features, contact information, and our own ‘Bottom Line’ analysis. Companion research can be found at solutionsreview.com. 

Download the complete report.

About Solutions Review

Solutions Review is a collection of technology news sites that aggregates, curates, and creates the best content within leading technology categories. Solutions Review’s mission is to connect buyers of enterprise technology with the best solution sellers. Over the past four years, Solutions Review has launched ten technology buyer’s guide sites in categories ranging from cybersecurity to wireless 802.11, as well as mobility management, business intelligence and data analytics, data integration, and cloud platforms.

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The healthcare operations solution provider, symplr,

HealthcareSource presents a talent management suite focused entirely on the healthcare industry with a number of features including applicant tracking, onboarding, learning management, performance management, and much more. HealthcareSource recognizes that the key to providing quality patient service is to find the ideal candidate for the job. This vendor prides itself on bringing together software, service, content, and analytics to help healthcare organizations build a highly trained workforce. Recently, HealthcareSource was acquired by symplr for an undisclosed amount.

HealthcareSource’s talent management software and services broaden symplr’s product portfolio with solutions designed to improve hiring speed, staff engagement, team skillsets, and employee retention while reducing premium labor spend. Through integration with symplr’s workforce management software and deep credentialing capabilities, the combined talent management platform will offer healthcare organizations a more cost-effective and process-efficient solution to hire, keep, optimize, and grow their workforces. 

In a press statement, Michael Grossi, CEO of HealthcareSource, said, “for over two decades, the HealthcareSource mission has been to help healthcare organizations hire, keep, and grow quality talent to more effectively and efficiently deliver quality care for their patients and residents. With this acquisition, we can better deliver on this promise through the expanded breadth and depth of the symplr software and services portfolio, driving even more impactful results for our customers.”

Growth through strategic acquisitions, combined with strong organic growth and product integration, are integral parts of symplr’s strategy to provide an enterprise software platform for managing healthcare operations. This acquisition represents symplr’s twelfth acquisition in the past six years, and its seventh under sponsorship from Clearlake since November 2018.

To learn more about HealthcareSource, click here.

The post Symplr Completes Acquisition of HealthcareSource from Francisco Partners appeared first on Best Talent Management Suites, Software, Vendors.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently announced the winners of its new

Peer Insights Voice of the Customer does not include an expansive vendor listing or proprietary graphic to help organizations select the best tools. Rather, it provides reviews that go through a strict validation process to ensure they are authentic. Gartner Peer Insights are meant to be a complement to its expert-led research reports. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways.

Cornerstone OnDemand Records the Highest Overall Score

Receiving an overall rating of 4.7, Cornerstone OnDemand boasts the top score in this report. Though this provider received the top overall score, it should be noted that it received the second-lowest number of reviews, only getting 11. The vendors that are Cornerstone OnDemand’s closest competition in terms of overall scores are UKG and Darwinbox, both earning a rating of 4.6 and receiving 69 and 20 reviews, respectively. Workday, ADP, PeopleStrong, and Zucchetti Group are all close behind, each with ratings of 4.5 stars.

The Average Willingness to Recommend Rating is 87 Percent

The willingness to recommend scores ranged from 75-100 percent. The top vendor with regard to this metric is Zucchetti Group, which is the only provider to earn 100 percent. Just below the top vendor are Workday (93 percent), Ceridian (92 percent), and Zoho (90 percent). As with the highest overall score, readers should be aware that Zucchetti Group received only 13 votes, while Workday, Ceridian, and Zoho got 89, 60, and 10 responses, respectively.

UKG is the Customers’ Choice for Both Large and Midsize Enterprises

By receiving over 25 reviews and an average rating equal to or greater than the market average rating, UKG established itself as the Customers’ Choice for large and midsize enterprises. Workday also earned distinction in the large enterprise category, as did ADP in the midsize enterprise category. All three of those providers, as well as Ceridian and SAP, were named the Customers’ Choice for North America. Oracle, PeopleStrong, and Workday also earned category distinction for the Asia/Pacific region.

Read Gartner’s 2021 Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises.

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The editors at Solutions Review highlight the updates found in the latest iteration of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management and provide an analysis of the new report.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has released its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management. The researchers define workforce engagement management (WEM) software as “a collection of technologies that expands on those of the mature workforce optimization (WFO) market by addressing functions that help increase employee engagement within customer service departments.” Core capabilities for providers in this space include evaluation and improvement, time management, metrics and recognition (sometimes referred to as performance management), assistance and task management, voice of the employee (VoE), recruitment, and onboarding.

According to Gartner, workforce engagement management has not yet been widely embraced by most businesses. Many organizations look at investment in WEM solutions as a way to improve operational performance without taking into account that these solutions can be crucial to enhance employee engagement. However, the rise in working from home due to COVID-19 increases the need for optimized employee engagement management.

Gartner adjusts its evaluation and inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as software markets evolve. Jacada and WalkMe were dropped for 2021 because they no longer met the criteria for inclusion. Conversely, Lifesize was added to this year’s report.

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of seven vendors that it considers most significant in the marketplace, and provides readers with a graph (the Magic Quadrant) plotting the vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways.

NICE is the overall leader in this year’s report, winning out in both ability to execute and completeness of vision. NICE recently introduced an Enhanced Strategic Planner (ESP) for long-term planning involving any channel, goal, or SLA, enabling users to improve their customer experience while simultaneously optimizing processes. The only other leader in this year’s Magic Quadrant is Verint, a customer engagement software provider that offers CEC and WEM functionality through SaaS, hosted, on-prem, and managed services. The vendor promotes engagement with the unique features of its CEC portfolio, including knowledge management, virtual assistant, and employee community capabilities.

The visionaries quadrant is the most populous section of this year’s report, containing Calabrio, Genesys, and Aspect Software. Calabrio is the closest to the X-axis in this section, and according to Gartner, it has achieved significant revenue growth over the past two years. The vendor also offers free post-implementation consultancy through its Calabrio Uplift program. Calabrio’s closest competition is Genesys. The provider’s products are already established in many contact centers, making it easier to train new call agents. Rounding out the visionaries section is Aspect Software, which primarily serves large enterprises around the world. Additionally, Aspect delivers standard connectors for competing contact center platform, payroll, and customer engagement center providers.

No challengers were named in this year’s Magic Quadrant, leaving the two remaining vendors in the niche players section. Eleveo (formerly Zoom) provides an established solution for agent evaluation and coaching that is enhanced by interaction analytics. The vendor also offers competitive and flexible pricing models. Rounding out this year’s report is Lifesize, which is focused on expanding its Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform in order to include greater WEM functionality as the market continues to adapt to the emergence of new agent working environments. According to Gartner, the provider’s suite is a cost-effective option that effectively addresses basic WEM functions.

Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management.

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The editors at Solutions Review highlight what’s changed since the last iteration of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises and analyze the new report.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2020 version of its Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises. According to Gartner, “cloud human capital management (HCM) suites deliver functionality that helps organizations attract, develop, engage, retain, and manage their workforces. These solutions support a range of HCM capabilities (to varying degrees), including HR administrative functions (admin HR), HR service management (HRSM), talent management (TM) applications, and workforce management (WFM).

A leading factor in the selection process is the overall user experience (UX). According to the researcher, as enterprises support workforces with continually rising connectivity expectations, in-person conversations with HR admins are being replaced by interactions with applications and devices. This move to digital HR administration drives the need for personalized UX, while applications become the face of HR departments. Additionally, user interface (UI) options for HCM suites are increasing with the integration of chatbots and/or virtual assistants. This integration enables users to complete basic transactions and retrieve information without leaving their corporate chat windows.

As a strategic planning assumption, Gartner projects that by 2023, 60 percent of large enterprises will have invested in a major initiative to improve their manager experience by automating administration of worker-related HCM tasks. Additionally, it’s predicted that by 2025, 60 percent of global midmarket and large enterprises will have invested in a cloud-deployed HCM suite for administrative HR and talent management. However, they will still need to source 20 percent to 30 percent of their HCM requirements through other solutions.

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of 11 providers that it considers most significant in the marketplace and provides readers with a graph (the Magic Quadrant) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision. The chart is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways.

Gartner adjusts its evaluation and inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as software markets evolve. As a result, ADP (Vantage HCM) and Ramco have been dropped from last year’s report.

Placements are largely the same this year as they were in the previous report. The only major change is that Ceridian is a leader this year after being a challenger in the previous year. This shift is possible since the vendor has expanded its global footprint. Ceridian was also praised for its understanding of the HCM market. Leading the pack in this category is Workday. Significant enhancements from the provider this year include expanded use cases and efforts around skill analytics, enhanced employee profiles, credentials, and developing an internal talent marketplace.

Workday’s strongest competitor this year is Oracle, which beat the former out in terms of completeness of vision. The vendor differentiates itself by having over 200 transactions that managers and employees can complete through a mobile device, supporting its strong UX scores. Ultimate Software, which recently merged with Kronos to form the Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), has expanded capability for suite extensibility and has been able to bring in third-party system data for reporting. The final leader this year, SAP, scored the highest of all the vendors in this report for its global capabilities. The provider supports local best practices and compliance in 99 countries.

There are no challengers or visionaries in this year’s Magic Quadrant, making the remaining six vendors niche players. ADP Workforce Now is placed closest to the x-axis and is mainly used by businesses with 500 employees or fewer. The provider plans to integrate other ADP products, such as ADP Standout, for employee engagement. Kronos (UKG) is in closest competition with ADP. After its merger with Ultimate Software, Kronos is likely to continue to target enterprises with fewer than 2,500 employees because of its strong adoption and experience in the lower midmarket. Trailing close behind is Talentsoft. After adding TalentsoftHub, the provider now has core HR functionality to expand into a full HCM suite option. Talentsoft has also supported customers through an e-learning platform in response to COVID-19.

Cornerstone OnDemand is also a niche player this year. The vendor’s HR suite will be enhanced with improved organization visualization and modeling capabilities originating from its acquisition of Saba Software in April 2020. Infor and Cegid (Meta4) are the final providers in this year’s Magic Quadrant and are also each other’s closest competitors. Infor continues to maintain its strong industry vertical knowledge, emphasizing functionality for healthcare and manufacturing, and has added other industries over the years. Cegid, which acquired Meta4 in 2019, is making enhancements to its process automation and onboarding functionality.

Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises.

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Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Software

Before the merger, Kronos’ HCM software provided an end-to-end employee lifecycle management solution, and because workforce needs are constantly changing, Kronos solutions are designed to evolve with you to help meet the challenges you face every day, regardless of your industry or where you do business. Designed for small and medium-sized businesses, Kronos HCM solutions help organizations increase employee engagement for stronger business results. 

Additionally, Ultimate Software’s UltiPro HCM software suite provides businesses under 1,000 employees with full visibility of the entire employee lifecycle from recruiting to retirement. UltiPro HCM can be scaled to meet the demands of businesses of different sizes in a number of different industries and is able to reduce administrative workloads by automating all of the company’s HR processes.

In a press statement, Aron Ain, CEO of the joint company, said, “our new brand, UKG, truly unites Ultimate Software and Kronos, both as a business and as people. Our new brand is rooted in our combined passion and history of focusing on people at work. We believe the UKG brand represents our continued commitment to our employees, customers, and their employees — while at the same time giving us a modern new identity for our future together as one organization. Separately, Ultimate and Kronos have proven that remarkable cultures led by inspired people drive success, and now we are together as UKG, one company with people at our core.”

UKG will bring together each company’s award-winning solutions, including Workforce Dimensions, Workforce Ready, and UltiPro HCM and HR service delivery solutions.

Learn more about UKG.

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