Top 4 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023
Can the cloud cater to your industry’s needs? What’s so super about super apps? How will technology drive your strategic goals? The answers matter to your tech investments.
Today we’ll discuss how four of the top strategic technology trends for 2023 are driving organizational and digital transformation today and over the next five years.
Cloud Platforms
The first trend is industry cloud platforms. Industry cloud platforms combine traditional cloud capabilities with customizable solutions to support specific verticals like retail, insurance, banking, healthcare, and manufacturing. These customizable solutions can add tremendous value to your business capabilities. They’re more adaptable, support faster innovation, and let you reduce redundancy and capture value more quickly.
For example, Goldman Sachs is partnering with AWS to offer some clients an industry cloud platform — a financial cloud for data. Now those clients can use the same AI tools and analytics that Goldman Sachs uses on its own trading floor. We predict that by 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives. Plan to focus on your industry cloud platform strategy over the next year.
How can you start?
First, create fusion teams of business technologists and IT stakeholders to foster an enterprisewide understanding of applying cloud to business capabilities. Then, use industry cloud platforms to complement and strengthen your existing technology portfolio rather than a full-scale replacement of systems. Make sure to create principles for when to deploy the cloud for optimization vs. transformation of business capabilities.
Super apps
Our next trend is about keeping up with the digital-native and mobile-first experiences. Consumers want to order a pizza, do their banking, and start a group chat all in the same app. And that means you need to be ready for super apps. Super apps aren’t just composite mobile apps. They’re built as platforms and provide more personalized experiences through built-in mini-apps that cover a broad range of uses. Super apps reduce friction throughout the user experience, so they increase value for a larger user base and provide more engagement for customers, partners, and employees.
We predict that by 2027, more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple super apps. Over the next three years, more consumers will engage through super apps across industries like finance, retail, and healthcare, and workforce adoption will gain even more traction.
Consider these examples: The Revolut super-app is disrupting traditional financial services by expanding its digital banking ecosystem into businesses where small and midsize companies and freelancers can offer their services. Walmart’s Me@Walmart app allows employees to manage their work schedules, request time off, swap shifts, and attest to health assessments all in one app.
Adaptive Artificial intelligence
Our third trend is adaptive artificial intelligence. AI systems that learn from and adapt to change may sound like science fiction, but we’re using them already to improve AI modeling in dynamic and volatile conditions like supply chain disruptions. We predict that by 2026, enterprises that build adaptive AI systems will have 25% more AI models in production than enterprises that don’t.
So how does it work?
Unlike traditional AI systems, adaptive AI can revise its own code to adjust for real-world changes that weren’t known or foreseen when the code was first written. Adaptive AI learns by applying graph analytics to retrain AI models, allowing applications to adapt more quickly and drive better decision outcomes. Adaptive AI systems require that your current processes be reengineered, and that’s not gonna happen overnight.
These steps will help you get started —
First, assess the readiness of decision flows for augmented or automated decision-making. Then, build your foundation by complementing your current AI implementations instead of a complete overhaul. Finally, reengineer decision flows to make them flexible and capable of being updated as more information is gathered.
Whatever technology trends you’re focused on, you’ll need to prioritize sustainability.
Sustainability isn’t just about your IT infrastructure and solutions. It’s about how you use technology to deliver sustainable outcomes for your organization. We predict that by 2025, 75% of executives will be responsible for sustainable technology outcomes, and 25% will have compensation linked to their sustainable technology impact. Sustainable by default must be your mantra and objective. That means making your IT organization more sustainable but also using IT to help the organization, as a whole, and your customers become more sustainable.
Whether you’re looking to apply strategic technologies to optimize your systems, scale your business, or pioneer digital transformation, objective advice will help you make smarter and faster decisions today, tomorrow, and into the future.
