I was thinking about the most relevant trends for 2022. Almost everything we know about digital has changed and morphed in the last two years. So I looked at what my peers were predicting about the future. I counted over 500 different trends and predictions and it was hard to find a common theme that resonated with me. In the end, I narrowed them down to 5 major trends that I knew my customers were often talking about. So here is my 2022 prediction list.
1) Hybrid Workforce (People + AI)
2) Decentralized Finance becomes mainstream
3) Business Metaverse emerges
4) Digital Offshoring (Digishoring)
5) Convergence of Employee and Customer Experience
+1) First Fully Autonomous Businesses
I was thinking about the most relevant trends for 2022. Almost everything we know about digital has changed and morphed in the last two years. So I looked at what my peers were predicting about the future. I counted over 500 different trends and predictions and it was hard to find a common theme that resonated with me. In the end, I narrowed them down to 5 major trends that I knew my customers were often talking about. So here is my 2022 prediction list.
1) Hybrid Workforce (People + AI)
2) Decentralized Finance becomes mainstream
3) Business Metaverse emerges
4) Digital Offshoring (Digishoring)
5) Convergence of Employee and Customer Experience
+1) First Fully Autonomous Businesses
I was thinking about the most relevant trends for 2022. Almost everything we know about digital has changed and morphed in the last two years. So I looked at what my peers were predicting about the future. I counted over 500 different trends and predictions and it was hard to find a common theme that resonated with me. In the end, I narrowed them down to 5 major trends that I knew my customers were often talking about. So here is my 2022 prediction list.
A lot of us got tired of hearing the term new normal, however, there is a new world, at least in digital, that's here to stay. The trends we will talk about have all started before the pandemic but the last two years made them dominant. There is increased investment and executive focus on each of them.
Given this channel, I’m only going to discuss digital trends that impact value creation. Technology predictions often focus on how IT gets things done. Like the increased roles of DevOps, AI ops, cloud migration, or things like data fabric.
Frankly, the customer doesn't care about any of that. What matters to them is how technology transforms customer interactions to reduce the time and cost of delivering products and services.
The most important trend for me is the emergence of the HYBRID WORKFORCE, Forrester Research calls it the new Automation Fabric. The collaboration of people with artificial intelligence to perform various tasks. This trend is accelerated because of the current massive talent shortage and the increasing AI capability. And that is the new digital workforce. This is something we’ve been talking about for years. Anticipating that with all the advancements in artificial intelligence one-day entire jobs can be performed with AI and automation. In the last two years, we have seen these become reality and the trend will continue. What is amazing is that this is happening in some of the most conservative industries like transportation and healthcare. You see an AI-enabled workforce everywhere from supply chain planning to drug discovery to allocating hospital beds to predicting the spread of disease. AI is augmenting doctors, researchers, call center agents, and hospital administrators.
The second big trend I see is DECENTRALIZED FINANCE becoming mainstream. Decentralized Finance means the elimination of any middlemen between people like buyers and sellers. In other words, having direct control of money, investments, real estate, and contracts without banks, title companies, or lawyers. I think we are living this trend already. The underlying decentralized blockchains are in place. Smart contracts for financial transactions are well defined and the regulatory environment is finally catching up with the needs of the participants. Most fintech companies and even traditional banks and brokers have already set up practices for crypto and blockchain and the trend will continue. In some ways, even central bank digital currencies will accelerate the trend of trusting non-centralized payment and settlement systems. And this is a lot more than just owning Bitcoin or NFTs.
Business order management, tracking, and settlement is a trillion-dollar problem that can be made much more efficient and cheaper with decentralized finance. Validating shipments and delivery on the blockchain, managing suppliers especially global suppliers is notoriously difficult. 98% of the companies do not have end-to-end supply chain visibility. This can all change with Decentralized Finance tools. Another area I predict will be growing is decentralized real estate. This is one industry where all processes have intermediaries from brokers to title companies to inspectors. Decentralized finance will slowly take a role in all these areas of real estate.
The third trend is the BUSINESS METAVERSE. This means the virtualization of business transactions, products, and services. There are multiple trends here. These include the augmented and virtual reality applications, that have really been focused on consumer entertainment. The Metaverse also applies to virtual assets from NFTs to digital products to digital real estate to crypto. Businesses started Metaverse applications in the pandemic ranging from customer service to training and digital product delivery. This trend will continue. If more customers are willing to consume products digitally (as they are) and invest in virtual ownership (as they do) this trend has great potential. The real test of the Metaverse trend will be to see business-to-business transactions virtually like consulting engagements or engineering projects. It is close but I do not see that at scale in 2022.
The fourth trend I see is DIGITAL OFFSHORING or DIgishoring as some call it. As more and more processes are automated or performed by AI then you can offload more and more of your business functions to Automated Bots instead of offshoring companies.
Businesses in the pandemic already considered temporary offshoring. The idea was that the business environment is changing too fast for 10-year outsourcing contracts. Companies like the low cost of offshoring but would like more control over changing processes or business models. Some providers started offering extra flexibility by automating the processes with bots or AI instead of offshore workers in India or the Philippines. The assumption is that it is faster to reconfigure bots as business requirements change than retraining remote workforces. I believe digitshoring will definitely continue from outsourcing vendors. I also expect in-house digital worker services, offering call center agent bots, accountant bots to handle seasonal surges of workforce demand.
The fifth trend I see is the convergence of CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE. For most companies, customers get a much better experience on their websites or mobile platforms than their employees. As we are all becoming more remote and the line between employees, consumers, and the gig economy blurs, everyone expects the same seamless experience. We want the employee benefits portal or purchasing system to be as easy to use as Amazon or Spotify. If internal systems and processes are complex and frustrating then workers will continue to leave. Employee experience is not why workers leave companies but it can be one of the reasons they stay. HR departments know this and it is a lot cheaper to provide a better employee experience through systems and processes than to chase the ever-increasing compensation from competitors.
The plus trend often talked about is AUTONOMOUS BUSINESSES. This means AI taking over all the work from humans. Some predict that we will see the first self-operating enterprises this year. This would require end-to-end processes to be performed without human interaction. Also requires advancements in smart contracts to operate between the business and its traditional suppliers and customers. Also, payment systems would have to be automated based on those smart contracts whether traditional finance or crypto. We’ve been waiting for autonomous businesses since the Ethereum blockchain launched in 2014. I think we will be there in 5-10 years but not in this year yet.
So there you have it. My insights are based on what I see out there. What trends do you see? Drop me a line and let me know.
Talk Soon.