Embed cloud and AI technologies to accelerate business growth in 2023

Technology trends for 2023 will revolve on three themes: optimise, scale and pioneer.

As 2022 draws to a close in a month, businesses are now on the lookout for new trends and scaling opportunities. As the new year opens to hopefully bring in good fortune, industry leaders must remain adaptive to changes –and to look out for new ways to stand out as well.

In an interview with Andrew Ling, Head of Industries and Customer Advisory of SAP Hong Kong, Gartner identified that there are two tech trends to look out for in 2023: industry cloud platforms and adaptive AI for decision intelligence.

By 2027, the prediction is that more than 50 percent of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.

Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providing industry-specific sets of modular capabilities to support specific use cases.

Specifically for decision intelligence solutions, platform engineering is about building and operating self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and lifecycle management.

The goal of platform engineering is to optimise the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value. To reduce friction for developers, data scientists and end users, companies have begun to build operating platforms that sit between the user and the backing services on which they rely.

There is also AI or Machine Learning technology embedded in SAP Business Technology Platform, Qualtrics and Customer Experience (CX).

Adaptive AI systems continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments based on new data to adapt quickly to changes in circumstances that were not foreseen or available during initial development.

It uses real-time feedback to change its learning dynamically and to adjust goals. This makes it suitable for operations where rapid changes in the external environment or changing enterprise goals require an optimised response.

Revenue related solutions will also continue to play a big role, such as smart manufacturing, smart energy, e-commerce, and sustainability control tower for a holistic steering and reporting. In fintech, a new growth area identified is the introduction of a digital way that will put into center customer and agent engagement and experience.

Overcoming inadequacies in transformation

Whilst transforming operations may be easily adopted, the technical side of this transformation may be faced with other complications. To accelerate technology adoption, Ling identified the different pain points to properly adapt the trends.

For Industry Cloud, enterprises can use the packaged capabilities of industry cloud platforms as building blocks to create unique and differentiating digital business initiatives by providing agility, innovation and reduced time to market, whilst avoiding lock-in.

Industry clouds create value for organizations by incorporating cloud services traditionally purchased separately into pre-integrated but customizable industry-relevant solutions.

On the other hand, in AI and Machine Learning, the value of operationalised AI is in the ability to rapidly develop, deploy, adapt, and maintain AI across different environments in the enterprise.

Adding other avenues for growth, he identified other trends such as improvement in Budget and Resources where adequate business process and IT and change management experts can be introduced, and in the overall Organization by clearly defining the roles and mandates of Head of Digital Transformation and by empowering the drive to cross-BU or to implement department changes. There is also the opportunity to establish culture and environment for innovation and willingness to make changes.

Given the business diversity, engineering complexity and the demand for faster time to market, it is critical to develop data driven based decision-making mechanisms with customizable AI engineering or AI models that can self-adapt in production to support better and smarter business decisions.

However, the Gartner study emphasised that what business leaders must keep in mind in the coming year is that transformation is not just only deploying IT solutions.

To enhance an organization’s financial position during economic uncertainty, business leaders must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operations whilst also continuing digital transformation.

Three major themes will take center stage in 2023, specifically: optimise, scale, and pioneer. These will help organizations optimise resilience, operations or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, whilst pioneering new forms of engagement and opportunity.