55 WorkTech Predictions from Industry Experts for 2023
The Solutions Review editors have compiled a list of predictions for 2023 from some of the most experienced professionals across the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and Marketing Technology marketplaces.
As part of the Fourth Annual Solutions Review #WorkTechInsightJam, we called for the industry’s best and brightest to share their ERP, BPM, CRM, and Marketing Automation predictions for 2023 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 2023 and Beyond
Ramon Chen, Chief Product Officer at ActivTrak
“Technology that elevates the human experience will become the next big thing in 2023. We’re going to see a new crop of companies, like Stability AI, create AI tools that complement and extend the abilities of human workers. Also, any and all technology that supports wellness and mental health will be in high demand as voluntary or mandated remote work resulting in isolation, and the stress it puts on our everyday lives, increases.”
“In 2023, AI-driven tools will augment human efforts in virtually every function. Workers from marketing to sales to support to finance will have AI tools capable of completing half or more of their daily tasks, and the human role will be to build on, enhance, polish, or focus AI output to complete their duties. The routine minutiae will be stripped out of the workday, allowing people to spend their time applying judgment and insight. In that sense, AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence, where its best use is in automating tasks with assumptions being made through pattern analysis, but ultimately vetted by human intuition and guidance.”
Rita Selvaggi, CEO of ActivTrak
“Establishing new metrics for success will help companies survive and thrive in 2023.Focus time and collaboration time will emerge as the new foundational measures of productive work for knowledge workers—replacing total hours worked, pure outcomes measures, and ‘presence’ in offices—and will be the primary metrics contributing to outcomes-based performance goals.”
Adam Greco, Product Evangelist at Amplitude
Marketing & product teams converge
“The traditional model of marketing owning the top of the funnel and product owning the rest will continue to break as customers demand seamless experiences. As more experiences become digital, leading organizations will find that merging the marketing and product team leads to increased customer satisfaction. The customer lifecycle will include all customer touchpoints from the first introduction to the brand through brand loyalty. Organizations that continue to treat marketing and product as distinct teams will lose ground to those that combine them. The combined team may take the name of ‘customer experience’ or ‘customer growth.'”
Peter Wang, the CEO and Co-Founder of Anaconda
Machine Learning will empower employees to lean further into decision-making roles
“With the new age of work upon us, lingering fears around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning will show signs of slowing. Over the last few years, organizations and technologists have placed a concerted effort on educating the majority on how technology interacts with us in the workplace—the reality being its ability to support decision-making roles. We can expect machine learning to increasingly allow employers to identify areas that can be fully augmented, like transcription, to increase efficiency across organizations. This will be viewed as a positive step forward as we widely embrace machine learning’s ability to minimize busy work rather than fear it will take over, opening the door to furthering employee involvement in more impactful business decisions.”
Rick Hammell, CEO and Founder of Atlas
“Companies that have operated exclusively in one country may find themselves looking outside their domestic market for the first time in 2023—not to access new customer markets, but to connect with global talent. However, just as organizations entering new customer markets benefit from the most efficient sales technology, companies looking to expand to new global talent markets should look to equip worktech solutions that help efficiently guide the expansion process.
“From an HR perspective, the most essential and prevalent tool we’ll see these companies implementing is an employer-of-record (EOR) platform to serve as an ‘in-country expert’ as they scale their business globally. The country-by-country HR analytics will equip organizations with the insights and background they need to make educated decisions on where to source new talent next year.
“We expect to see organizations prioritizing investing in worktech to assist with all aspects of HR next year. Rapidly evolving technology allows companies to scale their operations without sacrificing organizational agility, including eliminating manual processes in favor of automation and a greater emphasis on data-driven decisions, including people analytics.”
Dan Shimmerman, President and CEO of Blueprint Software Systems
“While arguably still in its infancy, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to realize intelligent automation will see a wider application in the year ahead. A growing number of companies are indicating their desire to automate more complex, end-to-end business processes that are decision-based rather than just the rule-based tasks that RPA tackles. With next-generation intelligent automation platforms providing built-in AI and machine learning capabilities to automate more complete business processes, 2023 will be the year that catapults automation into its next evolution: intelligent automation.”
Read more in Dan Shimmerman’s complete prediction article.
Matthew Agnew, Director of Product of Marketing at Blueprint Software Systems
Microsoft Power Automate will become the undisputed leader in RPA and intelligent automation.
“According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for 2022, Microsoft Power Automate already holds a top spot in the coveted leader category. Due to Power Automate’s competitive pricing structure, its ease of use, and its ability to seamlessly slide into any tech stack already using Microsoft products, expect it to become the runaway leader in 2023.”
There will be more RPA migrations.
“Organizations are eager to move away from expensive, complex, and legacy RPA technologies. Expect a lot more RPA migrations to powerful, next-generation automation platforms like Microsoft Power Automate that reduce costs and enable citizen development.”
The use of digital twins will creep into automation.
“Digital twins have been in use in manufacturing and engineering for decades. Their value can also be leveraged to improve monitoring, governance, and quality in automation. Expect to start seeing digital twins for automated processes in 2023.”
Ed Macosky, Chief Innovation Officer at Boomi
CIOs turn to the cloud as they face disruptions in their ERP modernization efforts.
“While CIOs will continue their ERP modernization efforts in 2023, an economic slowdown will force them to reprioritize. With more constrained budgets, CIOs will either need to modernize projects now or pause and make do with what they have. Either way, CIOs will need a nimble modernization strategy if they want to be successful with either integrating and supporting new ERP systems or bridging the gap between old on-premises ERP systems.”
Amara Graham, the Head of Developer Experience at Camunda
2023 will see more organizations relying on existing processes as opposed to architecting new ones
“Process automation will focus on optimizing existing processes rather than designing or architecting new ones. Companies should focus on auditing processes, services, and data to run faster and leaner. Transitioning to reusable components and connectors/plugin architectures allows for fast implementations and integrations. One size doesn’t fit all. Any out-of-the-box solutions need to be flexible with availability- for example, APIs, SDKs, and other programmatic implementations.”
To be successful in 2023, companies need to get ahead of developer pain points.
“The three biggest pain points facing developers in the new year are likely to be tighter budgets, fewer developers (or hiring freezes), and high potential to accrue tech debt. To get around these potential obstacles, development teams need to invest in reuse, automation, and knowledge sharing that allow for scaling up or down in terms of budget, teams, and tech debt. On top of this, organizations need to consider rotations for regular tasks like on-call or support. This allows developers to learn and explore new areas and skills but also keeps the knowledge shared—good for onboarding and offboarding. Nothing is worse than a teammate who leaves and takes all the expected knowledge with them.
“In addition, organizations should be transparent about the year ahead upfront. Being coy about a hiring freeze when developers already feel stretched will do no favors. Similarly, if there is no budget for a replatform or new tooling, make that appear within the organization, so there is no false hope.”
Bernd Ruecker, Co-Founder and Chief Technologist at Camunda
In 2023, organizations will lean heavily on process orchestration tools to meet full automation potential.
“Business processes will continue to grow more complex at the same time that the number of endpoints involved increases. Legacy systems, microservices, manual tasks, RPA bots, AI/ML tools, and IoT devices that already adequately automate individual tasks in a process must be reconciled. To guarantee that these various tasks run smoothly within a process and can carry out appropriate analyzes and optimizations, process orchestration tools will be critical. This is because they coordinate the end-to-end process and integrate various endpoints. If companies don’t manage to orchestrate their processes end-to-end, they only automate and optimize locally and don’t exploit the full potential that automation offers.
“In addition, process orchestration supports companies in gradually migrating from legacy systems to modern, microservice-based architectures. A good orchestration tool is software and device agnostic, works within an organization’s existing tech stack, and allows individual tasks to be gradually automated outside of a legacy system. Another trend is the increased use of “low-code” in process orchestration. Low-code tools are typically applied to automate simple processes. A smarter way of doing low-code is to use flexible and extensible tools, often domain-specific, which allows applying low-code to more complex scenarios in process orchestration, counteracting the lack of skilled software developers for core and mission-critical processes.”
Alexis Chevallot, Co-Founder and CEO of Capto
“The gap between big corporations and SMEs will be significantly narrowed thanks to greater and more affordable access to open-source tailored solutions. One example of this is RPA. To date, many SMEs are left out of the RPA market due to the high cost of proprietary software, which hinders their operational efficiency and scale. I see this changing in 2023 with the rise of more and more companies using open-source technologies to drastically lower the cost and maintenance of RPA robots. The same is true for AI and IoT technologies.”
Marchela Georgieva, Co-Founder and COO of Capto
“After a challenging 2022 for sourcing and retaining talent, in 2023, more companies will start to adopt a people’s approach to growth. This will translate into leaders realizing that citizen developer tools no longer fit the economic landscape in which people demand to do valuable work and to play to their strengths and interests. With this, the requirement for non-IT staff to learn and use low/ no-code tools will slowly become dated. As a response, organizations will start to outsource related activities more and more. This will enable open-source solutions to reach the next level of maturity in their market adoption.”
John Thielens, CTO of Cleo
Making B2B Ecosystems Stronger Without Adding Cost
“Companies who do not digitally transform B2B collaborative systems by enabling automation and advanced data analysis to make their organization more accessible to potential partners will be pushed out of supply chain networks and will not survive. As we face the possibility of a recessive economy, businesses need to provide added value through B2B partnerships and flexible sourcing models to maintain revenue and optimize supply chain agility. Companies need to do this without taking on significant fixed costs—they must do more with their IT infrastructure and without taking on additional employees due to a recessive economic outlook. So, companies need to outsource their technology solution development and implementation, but they also need to retain control of their data. This significantly reduces transformation costs and provides continuous operational data streams for analysis.”
Mahesh Rajasekharan, the CEO of Cleo
The Recessive Economy will Drive More Spending on Automation-enabling Technology
“There are two main challenges facing supply chain-oriented companies today: establishing agility and managing profitable growth through operational excellence amidst a recessive economy. We’re entering what is likely to be a very fearful environment of uncertainty and cost reduction due to stagflation fears. These fears will scare companies away from large investments that do not have a demonstrable track record of securing ROI. However, companies very much recognize the ROI provided by integration- and automation-enabling investments and digitizing processes—50% of organizations that invested in integration technology saw a $1M increase in revenue in 2021.
“Labor shortages, the great resignation, corporate downsizing, and decreasing consumer demand all point to automation-enabling digitization. Companies that succeed in digitizing processes and deploying automation will find they can provide added value and increase productivity despite leveraging fewer resources. Those organizations that fail to digitize processes by the end of 2023 will find that they cannot keep up with, or recruit the same level of talent as, competitors who do.”
