In this edition of Outside In, we quickly capture the key notes from the Forrester – India – Predictions 2024 event I attended last month. I found the event and the ‘predictions’ quite insightful. They may or may not necessarily come true from in exact form, but directionally the ‘4 Themes’ seem to be pretty compelling. Let’s go Outside In…
Forrester Predictions 2024 Theme: Exploration Generates Progress
4 Forrester Prediction Themes for 2024:
1) Realign with New Buyer and Customer Behaviour
2) Manifest the Experiences you want for your Customers and Employees
3) Foster creativity with GenAI across Industries
4) Make Tech work for you, More than Before
Theme 1: Realign with New Buyer and Customer Behaviour
1A) Millennials (and GenZ) will make up 90% of Business Buying Teams in 2024
Younger Buyers will push the envelope far more than ever before, requiring rethink
Further complex and longer Buying Cycles, with more Touchpoints, will create additional strain on frontline marketing and sales functions
Self-serve Content will be in demand, compelling buyer and customer touchpoints to be pre-designed based on data led insights
Accelerated rise of Influencer Relations will happen, owing to higher importance given to trusted peer relationships and industry analysts and advisors
1B) 25% B2B Marketers in APAC are going to Double their Customer Engagement Budgets
Lifecycle Revenue Marketing (LRM) will gain importance
CMOs will pivot to a post-sale Customer Lifecycle focus
Customer Personas vary from New-buyer Personas. Companies will start focusing on identifying new personas and deploying them
CMOs will create Customer Marketing Blueprints which clearly tell what marketing will do, will not do and define scope of involvement
Customer Marketing Metrics will get increased weightage on the CMO dashboards
1C) Experience with GenAI is written into 20% of new CMO Job Descriptions
FOMO will drive GenAI Adoption more than end-Objectives driving it
GenAI is going to be present in every organization in2024
Companies may be blindsided in Application of GenAI in their organizations
Investment in New Use Cases of GenAI and Technology will get ahead of governance
Role of a CMO to establish governance guardrails, GenAI Usage Policy within the organization, adhering to brand guidelines will become critical
1D) 70% B2B Buyers will have Degraded Experience from the Content that GenAI Delivers
GenAI will accelerate Volume Content Creation, at the Cost of Quality
Buyer Engagement will drop as more Content becomes misaligned with Buyer Needs. Activity metrics will dominate CMO Dashboards
Marketing teams will hastily adopt GenAI into different Content Marketing Use Cases and will achieve sub-optimal Results
GenAI ‘Content-detectors and filters’ will become mainstream, creating bigger challenges for marketing teams
Theme 2: Manifest the Experiences you want for your Customers and Employees
2A) Half of large Indian firms will experiment with Customer-facing GenAI and Fail
Customer service is the most obvious Use Case, but customers aren’t the Targets
Customer-facing GenAI will be experimental at best, but will allow us to Fail Fast and Fix Fast
The cost of large-scale Experimentation with Gen AI will continue to be prohibitive
Internal Customer Service Use Cases will scale and improve
Knowledge Management, Knowledge Delivery and Agent Effectiveness will be the top Customer Service Use Cases
2B) 25% Digital Tech spending will shift away from Maintenance
MOOSEs (Maintenance and Operations of the Organization, Systems and Equipment) will see Optimization; compared to PANDAs (Projects Aimed at New Deliverables & Assets) and OTTERs (Outcome-oriented Tech Transformation, Enhancements and Refreshers)
Businesses will spend less on maintaining Legacy Systems — and on Partners that support them
They will finally move to eliminate outdated Tech instead of paying to keep it on life support
2C) Fintech and TradFIs that neglect to design niche journeys will lose Market Share
Indian Fintechs and Neo Banks are shifting from Building Products to Targeting Persona-specific Needs
Moving from Building Products
To Targeting Personas
Hyper-personalization is the superpower for those gearing up to win in coming Year
Expect a surge in innovative Fintechs offering fresh and game-changing Solutions
TradFIs will acknowledge the strength in serving specific groups with unique Needs and Habits
Explore ways to repurpose, reshape, and creatively market Existing Offerings to their existing and new Customers
2D) 2 banks will see significantly outperform their peers and increase the Digital Maturity Gap
Customers Do More, Want More and Expect More On Mobile Banking Apps
Banks need to focus on creating consistent & seamless experience across all devices & platforms
Astute bankers will prioritize comprehensive Financial Requirements, moving beyond Transactions, embedding well-being values, and taking proactive measures
Others will struggle to justify financial well-being Program Investments, risking customer migration to providers better equipped for overall Financial Care
Theme 3: Foster creativity with GenAI across Industries
3A) 30% of India based service providers will leverage Skills Intelligence to mitigate AI Workload Talent Gaps
A Skills-Based Approach expands the view of Available Skills, beyond the Job Description. Skills Intelligence will take Centre-stage – “AI-supported technology that drives talent insights by building, maintaining, and analyzing an ontology or graph about what people know and can do”
Adaptive Organizations look beyond the Job Description; leading organizations will increasingly move from Credential-based Hiring to a Skill-centric Approach
Invest in internal programs to upskill and work well with AI and Automation
Leverage existing Analytics and Data Management Capabilities and LLMs to create a dynamic skills Ontology
3B) GenAI will not transform the business of manufacturing in 2024
Manufacturers will realize risk associated with using GenAI’s imperfect capabilities in their environments which involve complex interactions between their partners & expensive machines
High impact of mistake will be prohibitive with high risk to humans, machines leading to injury or lost productivity
Generative AI will only impact peripheral use cases in manufacturing in 2024: Use Cases in Knowledge Management, Design, Customer Service will rise; just like other Industries
3C) Open Finance will pick up speed, but 90% of financial service firms will struggle to Monetize it
FS Providers need a strong value proposition to convince customers to Share Information
FS Providers will Not effectively use shared data and will gravitate towards Cross-selling and Up-selling their Services instead of creating compelling solutions for their Customers
FS Providers will struggle with Legacy Tech as it till be incompatible with modern APIs, risk lagging behind in the race to innovation
Digital Teams will show resistance to Open Finance, perceiving it as a potential threat to their established Business Models
Theme 4: Make Tech work for you, More than Before
4A) One in five Indian firms to benefit from GenAIs Transformative Impact
“Generative AI is teaching us that the way you speak is actually code itself” - Lisa Huang – Head of AI Fidelity Investments
Successful POCs and early deployments will take time
Classical cases like Content Correlation and Generation, Customer Service Support, Collateral Development will be the first use cases to be successfully deployed
Fraud Detection and Reporting, Compliance and Regulations, Complex Planning and Simulation Engines, Design and Testing would be next
2024 will see a lot more success stories emerging in Gen AI from India but for that fundamentals must be made ready
4B) Software commitments to GenAI will drive 90% of firms to modernize their Core
Budgets will be tampered with – Traditional and Modern companies will invest in modernizing their Core
Organizations neglecting their Data and Integration Strategies will scramble to complete them at the earliest
Platform Updates/Upgrades, User Interface and Front-end Changes will be done at a much faster pace
4C) A fifth of India CIOs to revisit ITFM (IT Financial Mgmt) and Fin-Ops Practices to fix post-pandemic Technology Debt
Increased Adoption of ITFM and Fin-Ops Tools
Standard SaaS Adoption will increase to reduce cost over-runs
Learning for past failures of others and adopting best practices
Comparing all Cloud Options from cost and ease of migration point of few
ITFM/Fin-Ops/SAM Tools Adoption increase will help manage Cloud Misuse/Over-allocation/ Excess Bandwidth and License Costs
4D) Late Adopters will finally move on SaaS, with only 11% staying on the sidelines
Datacenter-less Environment is a reality
Almost 80% of the Application in any Company would move to Cloud
No new On-premise Deployment, except for critical ones and ones required for regulatory compliance. In the absence of an appropriate SaaS alternatives, they would move the workloads to IaaS, PaaS or Private Cloud
Cloud Adoption should be in line with your Cloud and Data Strategy, and if available, an AI Strategy (Bedrock of the Future)
4E) Firms pushing into GenAI experiences will be the catalyst for stricter SaaS Policies
Companies have to formulate stringent SaaS Policies – with clear Definitions & Implementation
Tighter control over SaaS Usage – Guidelines for Data Capture, Storage and Usage will be strictly followed
Data to be used for better Customer Experience, Personalized and Targeted Marketing, Better Products and Services – Fueled by Gen AI
References & Sources
1) Forrester – India – Predictions 2024 – My Notes
2) Forrester India Report – Dec 2023: Predictions 2024 – Exploration Generates Progress – 2024 Predictions for Indian Business and Technology Leaders