Zero Genie

Everyone publishes their 2020 predictions around this time of year.  Forrester’s are worth heeding for a number of reasons.  Here they are:

“Consumers search for deeper meaning”:  How about this finding? “More than 55% of consumers will consider company values when making a buying decision.”  Who knows about the actual percentage, but I agree with the trend.  Lots of data suggests that consumers care more than they ever did about a brand’s image and values. Forrester’s take is exactly right:  “In 2020, executives will attempt to give customers what they crave.   The results will be mixed.  Some companies will provoke ire by making surface-level commitments.  Others will misjudge how to best express values.”  So companies better be careful – especially of competitive attacks designed to call attention to corporate faux pas of one kind or another, and especially across demographic groups — like Millennials and Zippies — that “care” more than others.

Next:  “CMOs rally around customer value.”  According to Forrester:  “Smart CMOs will begin pulling back on strategies that drive short-term gains at the expense of customer affinity, including dark patterns – design patterns that manipulate customers against their own interests.”  Like the first prediction, this one focuses on consumers who are increasingly smart about their vendors – a good assumption.

#3?  “CIOs focus on people.”  This one is – I am assuming – an ongoing message to CIOs.  Forrester predicts that “the ongoing volatility and slowing growth in 2020 will still put pressure on CIOs to control costs and improve efficiency.  CIOs will look within their own organization for those efficiency gains, automating 10% of their IT tasks that are highly standardized and repetitive.”  No layoffs, but no growth.  But over time, automation will definitely displace IT professionals.  CIOs must balance retirements, turnover and automation perfectly to avoid turmoil, which, of course, is impossible.  

“There will be blood,” and CIOs know it, just as Forrester anticipates with its fourth prediction:  “Immersive, adaptive IT takes hold.”  Here we go:  

“Eighty percent of enterprises will recognize the threat of automation islands and determine that they are no longer sustainable.  Firms already have multiple robotic process automation (RPA) tools, conversational intelligence platforms, and machine-learning projects.  To address this, firms will set up automation strike teams that sit between traditional IT and domain experts and have unique roles such as robot architects and automation jump-starters.”  

Translation?  IT will help lines of business (LOBs) automate, save money and improve efficiency, which is easily correct.

Next?  “CX will continue to bifurcate.”  Absolutely, especially as marketing, customer service and the management of the overall customer experience grows – and especially as many of the more routine CX activities continue to automate.  CX “management” will transform to the management of automated CX.  

Forrester also predicts that “data strategy unlocks transformations” in 2020.  Investments in data collection, data management and data science will continue to grow in 2020 and well beyond.  Couldn’t be more accurate.  And weaponized?  Absolutely.  And there are warnings:

“In 2020, ransomware incidents will grow as attackers learn that holding data hostage is a quick path to monetization.  Increasingly savvy, these attackers will target consumer devices (and consumers) to the detriment of device manufacturers – demanding ransom from the manufacturer after notifying its affected customers that it’s up to the manufacturer to ‘fix this issue.’ But wait, that’s not all:  Attackers will use AI and machine learning to enhance existing attacks using the tremendous amounts of data now available to them.  AI technologies like natural language generation and video AI will be used to generate fake audio and video designed to fool users; as a result, deepfakes alone will cost businesses over a quarter of a billion dollars.”

Forrester gets this exactly right.  Research suggests that 2020 will explode with digital evil of all kinds. Bad bots may well defeat good bots.

Next, according to Forrester, “privacy concerns (will) gain steam” in 2020.  What took so long? The wakeup call is loud and clear:

“The backlash has begun, and more people are taking active measures to protect their privacy.  Forrester predicts that privacy class-action lawsuits will increase by 300%.  Big tech firms such as Apple and Mozilla are providing consumers with new tools that shut out data collection.  Anti-surveillance startups will receive funding.  New regulations will be handed down.” 

Again, the Forrester analysts have it right.

Now what?  “Automation (will) reshape the workforce.” According to Forrester, “automation will replace, on net, 1.06 million jobs from cubicle, coordinator, and function-specific knowledge worker personas in 2020.”  Automation will accelerate in 2020 as companies move beyond “weak AI” toward stronger and stronger AI. This trend is important.  If the truth be told, most applications of AI today are “weak,” that is defined around the automation of well-bounded, deductive tasks and processes.  While these application domains are productive, we can expect complexity of the domains to increase over the next few years and continuously over the decades.  Like analytics, the range of “smart” applications will increase dramatically in 2020. 

“Regulation makes and break markets.” This prediction is tricky because it depends upon what happens in the 2020 US presidential election.  Major questions about technology oligarchies, privacy, net neutrality, media versus technology company regulation and “surveillance,” among lots of other screaming issues hang in the balance of the next election.  Privacy regulations, like those in Europe’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, will impact the business models of many of the most successful (and valuable) companies in the world.  Even a simple tweaking of regulations will impact many companies that monetize consumer data for their very survival.  If the California approach spreads across the US, the repercussions will be felt throughout “surveillance capitalism,” as so frighteningly described by Shoshana Zuboff. The next administration will determine where the US goes on so many levels.

Finally, “for VCs,  profitability becomes the new unicorn.”  Less “moon shots” and more practical business models is the prediction.  In the trenches this means that:

“The blockchain bubble will burst, an early victim of the mindset shift in Silicon Valley.  Despite high levels of investment, the world of blockchain (and especially cryptocurrency) remains highly speculative, with scalable business-ready solutions few and far between.  AI funding will start to cool as the market saturates and as exuberance gives way to a push for results.  Meanwhile, the inherently pragmatic regulatory technology category will see its funding double yet again.”

This prediction depends upon larger market forces.  “Irrational exuberance” will disappear if overall market conditions decline, while crazy valuations will continue if the economy continues to reward optimism. This too may depend on the results of the 2020 presidential election and the state of the global economy in 2020 and beyond.

The balance among Forrester’s 2020 predictions is just right.  There’s a call to action embedded in many of the predictions, a realism that focuses on issues like the weaponization of data, regulatory policy and the need to re-invest – again – in data.  The overall takeaway is cautious exuberance, which is just right as we enter the 2020s.