Executive Insights for Supplier Intelligence

The environment around customer experience is being disrupted by a series of technical and organizational shifts ranging from artificial intelligence to work-from-home to deep customer analytics. When times change, it’s helpful for people to have a framework to organize their thinking and actions. I believe there are two dominant frameworks used to organize business approaches to customers. One is rooted in the efficiency of the contact center (let’s call it “CC thinking”), and the more marketing-centric framework is based on maximizing customer value (for argument’s sake, “CX thinking”).

By the late 2020s, Gen Alpha will move into the workforce, introducing a new dynamic. With the potential for up to five or six generations in the workplace, enterprises are often challenged to understand how to bridge the generation gap and create a cohesive workforce. The answer can be found within your technology stack. 

Nearly every analytics provider has GenAI capabilities that incorporate NLP either in preview or generally available. Enterprises are adopting GenAI as well. In fact, 85% of enterprises believe that investment in GenAI technology in the next 24 months is important or critical (from the ISG 2023 Future Workplace Study). And the recently completed ISG Buyer Behavior research on AI shows enterprises are experiencing positive outcomes from their AI investments.

To protect their digital assets and drive business growth, they need a new approach to security: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). CTEM software continuously monitors and manages the enterprise’s exposure to cyber risks, enabling a swift and effective response to any security incident. In this analyst perspective, we will explore how CTEM software works, why it is essential in today’s IT landscape and how it can align with broader business objectives. 

Digital transformation continues to be a priority among service providers operating in the U.S. They continue to revolutionize healthcare by enhancing efficiency, accessibility and quality of patient care. Integrated electronic health records (EHRs) streamline information sharing among healthcare providers, fostering a more cohesive and patient-centric approach. Telemedicine services use digital technologies to enable remote consultations, improving access to medical expertise and reducing geographical barriers. Data analytics and AI empower healthcare organizations to derive meaningful insights, leading to more informed decision-making, personalized treatments and proactive health management. Overall, the synergy between digital transformation and IT services is reshaping the healthcare landscape, driving innovation and optimizing patient and provider outcomes.

The intelligent automation services market in the U.S. and around the globe is undergoing dynamic changes driven by the integration of advanced technologies, a focus on hyperautomation, the shift towards cloudcentric
solutions, increased emphasis on security and compliance and a growing trend towards customer-centric offerings. IT service providers play a pivotal role in shaping and delivering these trends as they cater to
businesses’ evolving needs in an increasingly automated landscape.

Over the last couple of years, North American telecom, media and entertainment enterprises have navigated through inflation, continued competition, regulatory hindrances, layoffs and disruption of business models. With the widespread rollout of 5G and fiber-to-the-x (FTTx), growth in data traffic continues unabated. Enterprises are balancing variety, accessibility and quality of content with freemium models. Technological advancements have however reduced data carriage costs, accommodating users in a regulated industry where spectrum and customer attention are always scarce.

The year 2022 left a marked impact on the global and U.S. analytics market with Generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) getting unprecedented attention and playing a substantial role in driving growth. In 2023, enterprises and providers were making investments and taking initiatives to convert the GenAI hype into reality by generating the necessary momentum. This momentum, with the backdrop of enterprises increasingly relying on data-driven decision-making, further propelled the growth of the analytics market in the U.S. Ongoing economic uncertainty combined with reduced consumer activity has pushed enterprises to seek new ways of generating revenue, based on strong data-led business decisions.

The recent launch of the AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 corporations and research institutions engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) development (including AMD, CERN, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Meta, NASA, Oracle, ServiceNow and Sony Group), aims to achieve the following objectives: 

Governance, risk management and compliance are essential tactics for a successful organization. Effective GRC practices help organizations achieve business objectives, mitigate risks and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. As a chief information officer or IT leader, it is important to evaluate new technologies and determine their impact on the business, including whether they fit within the scope of current GRC programs and processes.

Doing more by doing less means using artificial intelligence and related technologies to make financial planning and analysis organizations more productive. By eliminating low-value and unproductive work, AI enables FP&A teams to free up considerable time for more useful and consequential forecasting, planning, budgeting, analysis and reporting. AI isn’t some far-off capability.

Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence used to generate new, seemingly real content. Broadly speaking, AI has traditionally been used to identify patterns in data and apply those patterns to categorize and predict behaviors. For instance, it can organize customers into groups (or clusters) with similar characteristics, or predict which customers are most likely to respond to certain offers.

Changing market dynamics drive the functional architecture design, including intelligent capabilities and human augmentation, to amplify performance. The performance component has expanded beyond speed and incorporates efficiency, experience and economics, directly impacting all value chain stakeholders. With the introduction of emerging technologies, humanmachine augmentation can seamlessly manage more complex activities than ever before. The independent software vendors (ISVs) market is evolving with the emergence of platforms that connect and integrate solutions, capabilities and products to develop offerings specific to an industry, persona and function. This drives innovation to introduce autonomy and intelligent orchestration that helps automation drive changes to the next level. Once there is a clear vision and path for automation, augmentation and autonomy, businesses aim to extract intelligence and build visualization panes that present actionable information. This enterprise intelligence visualization practice is driven by analytics and data sciences converging with ML on a platform-like offering to drive deep business insights.

The manufacturing industry has undergone a dramatic transformation over the years and more so recently. Rising inflation, regional conflicts, supply chain issues and talent management (attracting and retaining employees) are some pressing issues the industry faces. Thus, companies are looking to embrace digital transformation initiatives in smart manufacturing, supply chain and aftermarket services. A recent ISG study on smart manufacturing reveals that productivity improvements, cost savings and supply chain resilience are the biggest motivators for starting smart manufacturing initiatives. Modern manufacturing firms also need a well-defined aftermarket sales and service strategy to drive CX and operational efficiency by integrating aftermarket offerings into core business processes.

The widespread adoption of cloud technology in the U.S. is fueling innovation and improving CX. It has pushed enterprises to make significant investments in migrating to public cloud infrastructure. In the last four quarters, ISG has observed a steady demand for cloud computing in the region, mainly due to the increasing digitalization of business operations and the growing need for high-performance computing solutions for business-critical workloads. This demand is primarily driven by the rapid expansion and evolution of various technological segments, with application modernization and AI and ML technologies leading the charge. Enterprises in the U.S. are also looking to reengineer their legacy software applications to align them with current business needs and next-generation cloud infrastructure.

In the wake of the pandemic, organizations have found it essential to embrace cloud technologies to be able to continue on their journey toward achieving digital excellence. As organizations must embrace cloud technologies to sustain their growth momentum, creating a resilient and comprehensive strategy for adopting multiple cloud platforms has become a pivotal driver for growth. Amidst this, organizations grapple with security concerns, cost overruns and operational inflexibility due to the unoptimized utilization of cloud resources, resulting in increased system downtimes and rising cloud bills.

Insurers face some unusual challenges such as responding to the rapidly evolving risk landscape due to extreme weather conditions, increased cyberattacks and their ever-changing forms, consistent hyper-inflation scenarios amid perpetually uncertain macro-economic situations. Catering to the fast-changing insurance needs of  customers with the correct value proposition at an optimal price is tough within the present business and IT landscape.

Geopolitical tensions, fluctuating energy demands, environmental concerns and the increase in renewable energy sources have posed multiple challenges for the traditional fossil fuel sector. Despite the shift toward sustainable energy sources, investments are ongoing, especially in the upstream segment, to meet the expected peak oil and gas demand in the 2030s. North America records the highest investments, accounting for more than one-third of the global investments. Despite price volatility and environmental nd production concerns, the region’s shale oil and gas production has transformed it into a major energy exporter.

Banks are undergoing digital transformation to improve efficiency, meet evolving customer demands, and create resilient systems to become market-relevant and gain a competitive edge.

Global enterprises fear a possible economic slowdown but are also curious about the possibilities of the latest generative AI technology. These fears and enthusiasms impact the approach to workplace technology investment decisions for large organizations and SMBs. The workplace technology landscape has multiple areas that impact the employee experience and the organization’s outlook. This report dives deep into two important areas: front-end technologies that are employee facing and are the entry point for digital workplace and back-end technologies that IT administrators leverage to ensure uninterrupted, secured and cost-effective management of IT estate that delivers the workplace to employees. Both areas focus on employee experience enhancement in two different aspects and have  different sets of technologies that interest a large organization versus an SMB.