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Contact centre solutions: 2024 buying trends revealed

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Artificial Intelligence, Call Centre Technology and Agent Coaching & Monitoring and top the list of solutions the UK’s leading industry professionals are sourcing in  2204, according to our exclusive research.

The findings have been revealed ahead of the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit, which takes place on April 29th & 30th in London.

Delegates registering to attend the event are asked which areas they needed to invest in during 2024 and beyond.

The rankings represent a slight change in requirements from 6 months ago, when the top 3 were Agent Coaching & Monitoring, Training & Development and Artificial Intelligence.

Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit: Most in-demand products & solutions 2024 (Top 10):

  1. Artificial Intelligence
  2. Call Centre Tech
  3. Agent Coaching/Monitoring
  4. Automated Customer Satisfaction Surveys
  5. Knowledge Management
  6. Customer Experience Surveys
  7. Self Service & Webchat
  8. Customer Insights Collection & Analysis
  9. Training & Development
  10. Workforce Management

To find out more about the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit, visit https://contactcentresummit.co.uk.

Are these the Top 3 priorities for customer service leaders in 2024?

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Reimagining self-service, piloting employee-facing GenAI, and exploring new offerings in the customer journey analytics (CJA) market will be top priorities for customer service and support leaders in 2024, according to Gartner.

A Gartner survey of 246 customer service and support leaders conducted September through October 2023 revealed service and support leaders’ priorities for the coming year amid their increasing responsibility for technology strategy in their organization.

“Advances in GenAI and shifting customer preferences are pushing service and support leaders to reimagine what’s possible for their organization in 2024,” said Kim Hedlin, Senior Principal, Research, in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Leaders are focused on how they can leverage technology to accomplish their top priorities, including improving customer experience and optimizing their operations.”

Leaders Pilot Employee-Facing GenAI to Assist Reps

Seventy-nine percent of service and support leaders surveyed were knowledgeable about their enterprise’s plans for GenAI adoption. Of these leaders, 83% said their enterprises either have plans to invest in GenAI or have done so already.

While much of the hype around GenAI in customer service has focused on customer-facing chatbots, many service and support leaders plan to invest in employee-facing GenAI assistants that will support reps in the next 12-18 months. Of leaders whose organization is planning to make GenAI investments, 94% report they are at least “exploring” employee-facing virtual assistants.

“Many leaders see employee-facing GenAI as an experimental step on the way to deploying customer-facing virtual assistants,” said J.J. Moncus, Principal, Research, in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Respondents indicated it’s an important way to learn the risks of GenAI while still having a human in the loop, before moving on to riskier customer-facing deployments.”

Shifts in Customer Preferences Push Leaders to Prepare for the Future of Self-Service

In order to meet younger generations of customers’ growing preference for self-service, many service and support leaders will experiment with new self-service capabilities in 2024.

However, these service and support leaders face implementation challenges. Among the service and support leaders who cited self-service adoption as a priority in the survey, 51% also named it a significant challenge for 2024. Interviews with service and support leaders revealed multiple reasons why self-service implementation is challenging, ranging from organizational resistance to data disorganization.

However, early experiments with GenAI have helped leaders to envision new possibilities within self-service.

“The GenAI hype is providing momentum for leaders’ self-service investments,” said Hedlin. “Leaders have seen glimmers of a future in which conversational interfaces powered by GenAI could handle more complex interactions than a traditional chatbot. That vision is helping shape leaders’ self-service strategy in 2024.”

Leaders Invest in CJA to Understand Customer Journeys Holistically

Fifty-six percent of service and support leaders surveyed say they plan to invest in the CJA market in the next 12-18 months. CJA enables leaders to analyze customers’ interactions with their organization over time and across channels. Of those who say they’ll be investing in CJA, 45% indicate that they’ll be investing in this market for the first time.

“Customer service and support leaders are using CJA to gain a more holistic understanding of what customers need,” said Moncus. “Customers’ and executive leaders’ expectations for service interactions will only continue to rise .Service and support leaders need to identify and understand significant customer touchpoints in order to deliver a better experience.”

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Two thirds of digital experiences are damaged by outdated technology

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Nearly two thirds (63%) of ‘digital experience’ professionals say their experiences are being let down by poor and outdated technology.

That’s according to FullStory research based on surveys 700 professionals responsible for building customer experiences online, including product teams, marketers and UX professionals.

The global survey spans the USA, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and 100 ‘DX’ professionals from the UK.

According to the data, almost a third of DX professionals (30%) say that siloed tools and disjointed data are causing multiple teams to replicate work, wasting time and leading to disconnected customer experiences.

Many of those surveyed are also unhappy with their existing tools, with 68% agreeing that too many analytics platforms treat customers as nothing more than “numbers in a spreadsheet.”

To solve this, many brands have invested in additional tech, often simply building on what has come before. As a result, 66% of those surveyed said there are tools in their DX stack that they have never used. A quarter (25%) go as far as to say they rarely use “the majority” of their DX tools.

Andrew Fairbank, FullStory’s Vice President of EMEA, said: “A poor digital experience can damage everything from user acquisition to customer loyalty, and even a brand’s reputation. Over the years, the market has become flooded with tools designed to address just one or two small parts of a brand’s digital experience (DX). As such, many businesses have ended up with disjointed technologies spread across multiple teams and all doing similar jobs. The result is siloed data, less informed DX strategies, and ultimately a worse experience for customers.

“Instead of piling more tools on top of each other, brands need to treat DX as a unified function with one ‘source of truth’ for data and insight. The future of this space will be single-platform solutions, built from the ground up as a cohesive platform designed to be that single source of truth, that span journey mapping, UX analytics, frustration signals, conversion tracking and more. Ideally these platforms should be used across product management teams, CX, engineering, customer success, marketing departments and more. That will be the key to better experiences, happier customers, and increased revenue.”

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Cloud and cyber threats pushing European IT spending to $1 trillion next year

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IT spending in Europe is projected to total $1.1 trillion in 2024, an increase of 9.3% from 2023, as businesses allocate more funding to cloud solutions and heading off cyber threats.

That according to the latest forecast by Gartner, which says that despite a conflated economic situation, IT spending in Europe continues to be recession-proof.

John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “CIOs in Europe who pursued the “growth at all costs” strategy for over a decade, are now shifting the emphasis of ongoing IT projects toward cost control, efficiencies and automation, while curtailing IT initiatives with longer ROIs.”

Although artificial intelligence (AI) is a priority for CIOs this year and next, it is not yet a spending priority. There are other factors such as revenue generation, profitability and security fueling IT spending in Europe next year. “Maintaining a healthy profit margin has become pivotal for European corporations and this has ushered in a new wave of pragmatism,” said Lovelock.

Software and IT services are the two segments where CIOs in Europe are expected to increase their spending the most in 2024.

While there is sufficient spending within data center markets to maintain the existing on-premises data centers, new spending continues to skew toward cloud options (including infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is expected to grow 27% in Europe in 2024. CIOs in Europe are also shifting their priorities internally, including enhancing cybersecurity spending in the cloud and planning for AI and generative AI (GenAI).

“AI has also added a new level of concern around security ensuring that their systems are wrapped before hackers get near their sensitive data,” said Lovelock. Gartner forecasts spending on security and risk management in Europe to reach an estimated $56 billion in 2024, a 16% increase from 2023.

Table 1. Europe IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

  2022 Spending 2022 Growth (%) 2023 Spending 2023 Growth (%) 2024 Spending 2024 Growth (%)
Data Center Systems  

44,804

  

13.8

  

46,177

  

3.1

  

49,894

  

8.0
Devices       146,391 -13.3        125,483 -14.3        131,301 4.6
Software        184,362 2.6        211,182 14.6        241,837 14.5
IT Services        347,425 2.3        382,306 10.0        427,350 11.8
Communications Services  

272,854

  

-6.1

  

285,269

  

4.6

  

297,749

  

4.4
Overall IT        995,836 -2.2     1,050,417 5.5     1,148,131 9.3

Source: Gartner (November 2023)

Some of the growth in IT services is due to talent shortages in IT departments in Europe. “There is a migration of IT skills away from the enterprise IT department toward technology and service providers (TSPs),” said Lovelock. “CIOs do not have the employees nor the talents to do all the work required and turn to IT services firms to fill in the gaps.”

Inflation continues to impact consumer purchasing power, and while businesses and consumers are expected to increase their spending on devices in 2024, the level of IT spending on devices is not estimated to go back to 2021 levels until 2027. In Europe, Austria, Ireland and Finland are projected to record the biggest bounce back in consumer spending in 2024.

The top three most mature countries in Europe will represent 51% of total IT spending in Europe in 2024. IT spending in the U.K., Germany and France is projected to total $588 billion in 2024, up 9.8% from 2023.

Among the international monetary fund (IMF) developing countries (Hungary and Poland), IT spending is estimated to total $32.3 billion in 2024, up 9.2% from 2023.

Investment in cloud is a key differentiator between mature and developing countries. Not all cloud application, platforms and services are offered in emerging countries which impairs adoption. “The lack of cloud specific skills available to deploy, maintain and run cloud is a significant barrier in developing countries Mature countries are large enough to attract cloud providers and IT talent,” said Lovelock.

Gartner’s IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of the sales by over a thousand vendors across the entire range of IT products and services. Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data on which to base its forecast.

The Gartner quarterly IT spending forecast delivers a unique perspective on IT spending across the hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications segments. These reports help Gartner clients understand market opportunities and challenges. The most recent IT spending forecast research is available to Gartner clients in “Gartner Market Databook, 3Q23 Update.”

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Contact & customer service centres: 2023/24 buying trends revealed

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Artificial Intelligence, Agent Coaching & Monitoring and Call Centre Technology top the list of solutions the UK’s leading industry professionals are sourcing in 2023/24.

The findings have been revealed following the recent Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit, which took place last week.

Delegates registering to attend the event were asked which areas they needed to invest in during 2023/24 and beyond.

The rankings represent a change in requirements from 12 months ago, when the top 3 were Agent Coaching & Monitoring, Training & Development and Artificial Intelligence.

Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit: Most in-demand products & solutions (Top 5):

  1. Artificial intelligence
  2. Agent Coaching/Monitoring
  3. Call Centre Tech
  4. Training & Development
  5. Seld Service/Web Chat

To find out more about the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit, visit https://contactcentresummit.co.uk.

Analyst identifies the three technologies that will ‘transform’ customer care this decade

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Generative AI, digital customer service, and conversational user interfaces (CUIs) will transform customer service and support by 2028, according to Gartner.“The common theme of these three technologies are their ability to streamline the customer journey and enable customer service leaders to meet customers’ growing expectations,” said Drew Kraus, VP Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice. “Within the next five years, we expect these technologies to change the face of customer service and support.”

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2023 report describes the most important maturing technologies for supporting customers. There is a range of technological maturities, varying from embryonic (Customer Technology Platform), to highly-hyped (generative AI), to mature yet with significant adoption opportunity still remaining (Contact Center as a Service). More than half of the innovation profiles included in the Hype Cycle fall into the Trough of Disillusionment section (see Figure 1).

The Gartner Hype Cycle provides a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of a specific business goal. It allows clients to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.

Figure 1: Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2023

Source: Gartner (August 2023)

Generative AIGartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of customer service and support organizations will be applying generative AI technology in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience (CX). Generative AI, which is currently at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, will primarily be used for content creation, AI-supported chatbots and automation of human work.

Generative AI’s biggest impact is likely to be on customer experience. According to a recent Gartner poll, 38% of leaders see improving customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of initiatives to deploy applications trained on large language models.

“The impact of AI on the customer service function cannot be overstated,” said Kraus, “Not only do we expect organizations to replace 20-30% of their agents with generative AI, but also anticipate it creating new jobs to implement such capabilities.”

Conversational User Interfaces

CUIs are human-computer interfaces that enable natural language interactions for the purpose of fulfilling a request, such as answering a question or completing a task. CUIs provide direct control between the customer service agent and the applications they are operating. When used to automate support via chatbots, this technology improves customer experience and self-service adoption.

“Customers increasingly expect to be able to interact with the applications they use in a natural way, and this has been accelerated by the emergence of large language model-enabled enterprise applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 CoPilot,” said Kraus. “CUIs will be vital for driving efficiency and meeting customers’ changing expectations.”

Digital Customer Service

As organizations have introduced a proliferation of digital engagement channels, customers have grown to expect instantaneous, effortless customer service experiences. Simultaneously, introducing more channels can increase customer effort as customers move between them.

Digital customer service offerings focus on seamless conversation orchestration across digital channels. The desire for self-service, combined with the emergence of conversational AI, has led to an evolution of most engagement models. As such, Gartner sees the emergence of a new area of customer care referred to as “digital customer service.”

“Digital customer service will transform customer experience outcomes by reducing friction and eliminating unnecessary customer effort,” said Kraus. “By creating a seamless customer experience, this technology will reduce churn and enhance customer satisfaction.”

Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

AI capabilities to push global contact centre market to 16% growth in 2023

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The global contact centre (including conversational AI and virtual assistant) end-user spending is projected to total $18.6 billion in 2023, an increase of 16.2% from 2022, according to Gartner.

“Near-term investment growth rates for CC and CC conversational AI and virtual assistants are expected to dip as business volatility creates a lengthening of decision cycles,” said Megan Marek Fernandez, Director Analyst at Gartner. “Longer-term, generative AI and growing maturity of conversational AI will accelerate contact center platform replacement as customer experience (CX) leaders look to simultaneously improve the efficiency of customer service operations and the overall customer experience.”

The global conversational AI and virtual assistant market represents the fastest-growing segment in the contact center forecast, helping to spur 24% growth in 2024 (see Table 1).

Conversational AI capabilities are receiving greater investment as contact center decision makers look to incorporate conversational AI as part of a long-term strategy to reduce reliance on live agents. While the number of customer service interactions that are touched by AI continues to increase, most of these interactions are augmented with CC AI instead of fully offloaded to a virtual agent.

Overall, Gartner estimates around 3% of interactions will be handled via CC AI in 2023, growing to 14% of interactions in 2027.

Table 1. Worldwide Contact Center and CC Conversational AI and Virtual Assistant End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

2022
Spending		 2022
Growth (%)		 2023
Spending		 2023
Growth (%)		 2024
Spending		 2024
Growth (%)
16,077 17.6 18,690 16.2 23,171 24.0

Source: Gartner (July 2023)

Gartner expects general economic and geopolitical uncertainty to create some budget restrictions in 2023, resulting in a slowdown of premises-based contact center replacements and upgrade projects. However, customer-facing projects may be viewed as an important part of revenue retention and generation strategies.

“This means that while many IT investment areas will be weakened as budgets tighten, customer service and support initiatives that have the potential to differentiate the customer experience or streamline customer service operations could receive easier investment ‘buy-in,” said Marek Fernandez. “These factors will help contact center as a service (CCaaS) projects receive funding associated with broader corporate digital transformation budgets.”

Gartner expects CCaaS investment growth to accelerate as decision makers implement cloud-based contact center capabilities to modernize their customer service operations. This includes adoption among contact centers with many thousands of agents, which have been slow to adopt CCaaS. As part of modernization projects, CCaaS solutions will be implemented to support a broader mix of communications channels and will feature more significant uptake of advanced dashboards, analytics, routing, workforce optimization (WFO), knowledge and insight, and conversational AI capabilities.

Only 8% of B2B & B2C customers used a chatbot during most recent customer service interaction

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Only 8% of customers used a chatbot during their most recent customer service experience, and of those just 25% said they would use that chatbot again in the future.

New research from Gartner suggests that despite customer service and support leaders’ growing focus on chatbots, customer use of them remains low, suggesting they don’t consistently help customers accomplish their goals.

Its survey of 497 B2B and B2C customers from December 2022 through February 2023 found the ability of a chatbot to move the customer’s issue forward was the top driver of adoption, explaining 18% of the variance in customers’ likelihood to use their chatbot again.

“While many customer service and support leaders look to chatbots as the future of the function, customers clearly need some convincing,” said Michael Rendelman, Senior Specialist, Research, in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice. “To improve chatbot adoption, the key is to focus on improving the chatbot’s ability to move customers’ issues forward.”

Resolution rates vary greatly by issue type: Just 17% of billing disputes are resolved by customers who used a chatbot at some stage in their journey (see Figure 1), while resolution rates for customers making a return or cancellation were as high as 58%.

Figure 1. Resolution Rates by Service Issue Type for Chatbot Users

Source: Gartner (June 2023)

While service organizations have a deep understanding of the capabilities and limitations of their chatbots, and what issues are a good match for chatbots to resolve, customers do not. The survey found customers are just 2% more likely to use a chatbot for a return/cancellation than use it for a billing dispute, despite a significant difference in resolution rates between the two.

“Chatbots aren’t effective for all issue types,” said Rendelman. “As generative AI makes them more advanced, customer confusion about what chatbots can and can’t do is likely to get worse. It’s up to service and support leaders to guide customers to chatbots when it’s appropriate for their issue and to other channels when another channel is more appropriate.”

These are the technologies impacting customer service and support in 2023

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The technologies with the most current value to service and support organisations are those that support assisted service.

That’s according to a Gartner survey of over 200 customer service and support leaders conducted December 2022 through February 2023, which revealed that the top technologies currently impacting customer service include: case management systems, internal collaboration tools and cloud-based contact centre systems to be of most value in 2023.

“Today, the most impactful technologies in service are ones that support reps to deliver low-effort, value-enhanced experiences in the live channel,” said Lauren Villeneuve, Sr. Director, Advisory in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “These technologies are critical to continue to shift customers’ transactional issues to self-service so reps can focus on more complex issues.”

Figure 1. Top Five Most Valuable Technologies in Service (% of Respondents)

Source: Gartner (May 2023)

Customer service and support leaders generally saw more future value in technologies that help them understand their customers’ multichannel service journeys.
Leaders named several advanced Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics methods among the anticipated-most-valuable technologies in service across the next two years, such as predictive analytics (85% respondents indicate high future value), digital experience analytics (84%) and customer journey analytics (83%).

Digital channel capabilities — in particular, using chatbots and delivering service via live chat — are also anticipated to see significant increases in value over the next two years.

“Customer service and support leaders recognize that the future lies not in simply adding more channels, but in delivering a continuous multichannel experience supported by consistent knowledge content and smooth, nonrepetitive channel transitions,” said Villeneuve.

Virtual Customer Assistants and Chatbots Are Expected to Grow the Most in Value

Survey respondents also recognize the growing need for investment in virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and chatbots. Of all the technologies asked about in the survey, they held the largest increase between current and future value: Roughly three-fourths of leaders indicated that chatbots will be highly or very highly valuable to their organization in two years.

Concurrently, VoC analytics methods are expected to have the largest increase in anticipated deployment by the end of 2023. As customer service and support leaders look to move beyond surveys for capturing VoC, a majority are expected to deploy or pilot some kind of sentiment analysis (72%), customer journey analytics (68%) and digital experience analytics (65%) by the end of the year.

“This signals that customer service and support leaders see the value of tracking customer experience as they navigate digital and multiple channel offerings,” said Villeneuve.

“The technology landscape in service and support is constantly evolving – and we expect it will continue to do so, particularly with the recent advent of generative AI,” Villeneue said. “For now, leaders are continuing to find value in the technologies which have traditionally supported service and are looking towards these technological advancements to further mature the function.”

2023’s top 10 data and analytics trends identified

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A Gartner study has identified what it says are the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 – stating they can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities.

“The need to deliver provable value to the organization at scale is driving these trends in D&A,” said Gareth Herschel, VP Analyst at Gartner. “Chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) and D&A leaders must engage with their organizations’ stakeholders to understand the best approach to drive D&A adoption. This means more and better analysis and insights, taking human psychology and values into account.”

Gartner analysts presented the top 10 D&A trends business and IT leaders must engage and incorporate into their D&A strategy  at the recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit.

Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics for 2023

Source: Gartner (May 2023)

Trend 1: Value Optimisation

Most D&A leaders struggle to articulate the value they deliver for the organization in business terms. Value optimization from an organization’s data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio requires an integrated set of value-management competencies including value storytelling, value stream analysis, ranking and prioritizing investments, and measuring business outcomes to ensure expected value is realized.

“D&A leaders must optimize value by building value stories that establish clear links between D&A initiatives and the organization’s mission-critical priorities,” said Herschel.

Trend 2: Managing AI Risk

The growing use of AI has exposed companies to new risks such as ethical risks, poisoning of training data or fraud detection circumvention, which must be mitigated. Managing AI risks is not only about being compliant with regulations. Effective AI governance and responsible AI practices are also critical to building trust among stakeholders and catalyzing AI adoption and use.

Trend 3: Observability

Observability is a characteristic that allows the D&A system’s behavior to be understood and allows questions about their behavior to be answered.

“Observability enables organizations to reduce the time it takes to identify the root cause of performance-impacting problems and make timely, cost-effective business decisions using reliable and accurate data,” said Herschel. “D&A leaders need to evaluate data observability tools to understand the needs of the primary users and determine how the tools fit into the overall enterprise ecosystem.”

Trend 4: Data Sharing Is Essential

Data sharing includes sharing data both internally (between or among departments or across subsidiaries) and externally (between or among parties outside the ownership and control of your organization). Organizations can create “data as a product,” where D&A assets are prepared as a deliverable or shared product.

“Data sharing collaborations, including those external to an organization, increase data sharing value by adding reusable, previously created data assets,” said Kevin Gabbard, Senior Director, Analyst at Gartner. “Adopt a data fabric design to enable a single architecture for data sharing across heterogeneous internal and external data sources.”

Trend 5: D&A Sustainability

It is not enough for D&A leaders to provide analysis and insights for enterprise ESG (environmental, social, and governance) projects. D&A leaders must also try to optimize their own processes for sustainability improvement. The potential benefits are enormous. D&A and AI practitioners are becoming more aware of their growing energy footprint. As a result, a variety of practices are emerging, such as the use of renewable energy by (cloud) data centers, the use of more energy-efficient hardware, and the usage of small data and other machine learning (ML) techniques.

Trend 6: Practical Data Fabric

Data fabric is a data management design pattern leveraging all types of metadata to observe, analyze and recommend data management solutions. By assembling and enriching the semantics of the underlying data, and applying continuous analytics over metadata, data fabric generates alerts and recommendations that can be actioned by both humans and systems. It enables business users to consume data with confidence and facilitates less-skilled citizen developers to become more versatile in the integration and modeling process.

Trend 7: Emergent AI

ChatGPT and generative AI are the vanguard of the coming emergent AI trend. Emergent AI will change how most companies operate in terms of scalability, versatility and adaptability. The next wave of AI will enable organizations to apply AI in situations where it is not feasible today, making AI ever more pervasive and valuable.

Trend 8: Converged and Composable Ecosystems

Converged D&A ecosystems design and deploy the D&A platform to operate and function cohesively through seamless integrations, governance, and technical interoperability. An ecosystem’s composability is delivered by architecting, assembling and deploying configurable applications and services.

With the right architecture D&A systems can be more modular, adaptable and flexible to scale dynamically and be more streamlined to meet the growing and changing business needs and enable evolution as the business and operating environment inevitably change.

Trend 9: Consumers Become Creators

The percentage of time users spend in predefined dashboards will be replaced by conversational, dynamic and embedded user experiences that address specific content consumers’ point-in-time needs.

Organizations can expand the adoption and impact of analytics by giving content consumers easy to use automated and embedded insights and conversational experiences they need to become content creators.

Trend 10: Humans Remain the Key Decision Makers

Not every decision can or should be automated. D&A groups are explicitly addressing decision support and the human role in automated and augmented decision making.

“Efforts to drive decision automation without considering the human role in decisions will result in a data-driven organization without conscience or consistent purpose,” said Herschel. “Organizations’ data literacy programs need to emphasize combining data and analytics with human decision-making.”