There are so many CEOs and business leaders can do to prepare for the next decade as corporate boards should brace for the increasing impact of digital migration, artificial intelligence (AI), and cultural shifts on their companies. Below are the trends which are predicted by top CEOs.
The emerging technology advances pose great changes in how businesses can attract customers and retain the people in their business. CEOs can prepare their organizations by paying attention and measuring how well people in their organization is doing. In 2020, direct-to-customer (D2C) companies will observe email unsubscribe rate growing around 40 percent and eventually, the rate will grow higher as platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google are becoming increasingly expensive, several brands are expected to find alternative channels to promote their business. Here, CEOs will have a huge responsibility in maintaining their employees and their performance as the sales are likely to go down for a time being. Brands will have to rethink their marketing strategies and modernize more traditional engagement. Such approaches will maintain customer loyalty while creating unique and meaningful ways to increase their customer base. With personalization leaving D2C brands with limited options to evolve, they must adopt new channels to create a direct relationship and drive engagement with customers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) which had made big waves in 2019 and marketing noise around it was an all-time high, in 2020 it will be even more than that. Start-ups are increasingly touting themselves as AI companies to secure more funding and attract clients regardless of what they are actually offering. Such companies and others will repackage their offerings with some AI air around it to impress shareholders and customers alike. 2020 will be a tough year for AI with people getting more and more involved with it and the distance between marketing and reality is increasing. Companies will need to pour huge investments in order to keep the infrastructure running that can handle AI capabilities.
There is a drastic increase in reliance on digital platforms that requires to have digital trust bank to use when things fail. To build this digital trust, businesses need to communicate with customers clearly or things are likely to fail. Many customers began worried when a digital transaction fails and they eventually began to lose trust in the digital platform which is why they must be taught about often failures happening every now and then because the digital platforms are not perfect. CEOs need to take proactive steps to ensure the customers understand the risks and failures.
The cloud has ensured a lot of services and there are certain benefits as agility and speed of innovation but the organizations have seen the costs that can spiral out of control if the cloud is not managed properly. Financial governance will become center this year as CTOs seek to understand their cloud ROI and hold departments responsible for their cloud usage, this means there will be a focus on tools for calculating the costs against the usage. As the individuals and departments can be held accountable for their usages, there will streamline the process in the usage of the cloud services. In 2020, CEOs are running thousands of experiments to try new methods. For instance, Netflix is getting people to the content they want to watch faster and created a USD 25 Billion business for Amazon by using its cloud service. The competition and challenges are making the market unstable and CEOs are trying various things to address the issues.
