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In a situation where attention spans are fleeting and competition is fierce, the strategic use of storytelling emerges as a force in successful value-based selling. Sales enablement stories, when crafted with finesse, have the power to captivate, persuade, and ultimately drive conversions. If you find yourself questioning how to create high-value sales enablement content, consider these three pivotal elements that elevate sales enablement stories into high-impact narratives, seamlessly integrating the principles of value-based selling and a strategic sales enablement strategy.

1. Be Authentic

The era of scripted pitches is long gone. Modern buyers crave authenticity—they want to connect with real people and real stories. Embedding authenticity into your sales enablement story involves showcasing genuine experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Whether it’s a customer testimonial or a personal anecdote from a team member, the authenticity of your narrative establishes trust and resonates with your audience on a human level.

In the pursuit of authenticity, sales teams can leverage a powerful tool: the buyer conversation guide. This guide serves as a roadmap, empowering sales professionals to navigate conversations with a personalized touch. By providing a structured yet flexible framework, a buyer conversation guide ensures that the sales narrative aligns seamlessly with the unique needs and challenges of each prospect. This not only enhances the authenticity of the interaction but also enables sales teams to actively listen and respond to the specific concerns of the buyer.

A well-crafted buyer conversation guide goes beyond the traditional script, encouraging dynamic and meaningful exchanges. It equips sales professionals with the knowledge to ask the right questions, uncover pain points, and showcase how their product or service adds tangible value to the buyer’s journey. This personalized approach transforms the sales conversation from a mere transaction to a consultative dialogue, fostering trust and building a foundation for a long-lasting customer relationship.

View example Buyer Conversation Guide

2. Focus on your Persona

Every great story follows the classic hero’s journey, and your sales enablement story should be no different. By casting your customer in the protagonist role, you create a narrative that is relatable and emotionally compelling. This approach aligns seamlessly with the principles of value-based selling, where the focus is on solving the customer’s problems and adding tangible value to their journey.

A high-impact sales enablement story is not a one-size-fits-all affair. Recognize the diversity of your audience and tailor your narrative to resonate with different segments. This requires a keen understanding of your buyer personas and the ability to adapt your story to address their specific needs and challenges.

Digital coaching and sales mastery classes emerge as indispensable tools in this quest for knowledge. These modern methods of learning provide interactive, real-world scenarios, allowing sales teams to immerse themselves in the shoes of the buyer. Through simulated experiences, they gain insights into the intricacies of the buyer’s decision-making process, honing their skills to address objections and deliver compelling value propositions.

Credit: IDC Digital Coaching

3. Create a Visual and Interactive Story

In the age of information overload, visuals are the unsung heroes of effective communication. Incorporate visual elements into your sales enablement story, such as infographics, videos, or interactive presentations. These not only enhance the overall engagement but also make complex concepts easier to understand. A well-crafted visual narrative can significantly boost the memorability of your message, making it a valuable asset in your sales enablement strategy.

View example of a motion infographic.

Rather than presenting a one-way narrative, build your sales enablement strategy around a framework that encourages interactive engagement with your audience. Incorporate elements that invite participation, such as polls, quizzes, or interactive simulations. This not only keeps your audience actively involved but also provides valuable insights into their preferences and pain points. The interactive nature of your sales enablement story transforms it from a passive presentation to an engaging conversation, fostering a deeper connection between your brand and potential customers.

However, the effectiveness of interactive engagement also hinges on the tools at the disposal of the sales teams. To truly empower sales professionals to engage in more impactful storytelling, it’s imperative to ensure they are equipped with cutting-edge interactive tools. The value of interactive selling tools lies in their ability to guide prospects through a personalized journey and facilitate a two-way conversation. By tailoring the narrative to the specific needs and interests of each prospect, sales teams can effectively demonstrate the unique value proposition of their offering.

In the dynamic landscape of sales enablement, where innovation is key, the art of crafting high-impact stories becomes a potent weapon. By embracing authenticity, visual storytelling with interactive engagement, and adaptability, you can elevate your sales enablement strategy to new heights. These elements, when seamlessly woven together, create a narrative that not only sells but resonates, leaving a lasting impression in the minds of your audience.

Learn more about IDC’s Sales Enablement Services

Globally, cities are rediscovering the importance of their rivers as a central tenet of the health, wellbeing, and economy of a city. A river was often, if not always, the reason for a city to develop and grow, but during the 20th century city, authorities began to focus primarily on the built environment and to see water management as a less important sub issue of city management.

With the rise of environmental awareness in the 21st century, cities are beginning to relook at the interrelationship between the built environment and their rivers. We have been tracking this new direction through their research on River Cities and how technology now allows us to instrument both water and the built environment in concert.

According to our research, 28% of local governments across EMEA are already investing in smart rivers with an additional 29% considering investing in the future (IDC Survey, December 2023).

The French are Reclaiming their Rivers

France is emerging as a leader in this process, and the clearest example of this will be the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.

Paris is the most visited city in the world, and it is impossible to imagine Paris without picturing the Seine. Olympic opening ceremonies are historically held in a stadium, but France will be using the banks of the Seine for the ceremony to increase participation and celebrate the special relationship between the river and the city.

The Digital Twin Project

A further French example of this new thinking is captured in a recently published IDC Perspective Building a River Digital Twin: A Case Study of the Port de Bordeaux. This document provides an overview of a project led by the Port de Bordeaux, an entity managing marine activities across Bordeaux and the Gironde Estuary.

The objective of the project is to create a digital twin of the Estuary – the largest Estuary in Western Europe covering around 635 km2. The Gironde Estuary is formed from the meeting of the rivers of Dordogne and Garonne and spans several cities, the main one being Bordeaux with more than 250k residents. The Port de Bordeaux manages 7 terminals is the 7th largest French port in terms of traffic.

The digital twin was built to help project participants in both their day-day tactical decision-making process (for example, information on water levels, pollution and navigation) as well as addressing longer-term and strategic challenges (adaptation and impacts of climate change). The Port de Bordeaux developed 8 core goals for the digital twin project:

  • Sharing and developing knowledge of the river.
  • Promoting the exchange of data and operational results.
  • Anticipating the effects of climate change.
  • Identifying mitigation solutions.
  • Developing economic, recreational and tourism opportunities.
  • Preserving biodiversity and environmental wealth.
  • Developing coastal and river surveillance (alert systems).
  • Fostering replicability of the platform on other rivers.

 

An innovative aspect of this project is that the project team looked beyond environmental challenges to a broader set of objectives, including, for example, economic and recreational activities. This approach is centred on the view of a river as a complex ecosystem of different stakeholders and an integral part of the identity of the region. The project has a wide target audience, and the use cases, outputs and goals were co-created with the relevant stakeholders at the design stage.

Digital twins are at an early stage of adoption for rivers and marine environments. However, the application of technologies to the blue economy is increasing.

We predict that, by 2027, threatened by water scarcity and extreme weather, 40% of large cities will have digital twins of their water resources to manage water supply, quality, resilience and behavioural change (IDC Smart Cities and Communities 2023 Futurescape).

The Port de Bordeaux is an early adopter and can provide a model and blueprint for others to follow as a core principle of the project was making as many aspects as possible open source. Local stakeholders can upload their own data and use the GIROS platform to visualize their results. This supports a broader community of users being able to take advantage of the model.

Crucially, the Bordeaux project team intentionally designed the solution to be replicable on other rivers; while the numerical model for the Gironde is geographically specific, the framework and architecture of the solution is being made publicly available.

We are soon to publish our first Tech Innovator report on companies involved in rivers and water management and are keen to hear of innovative technology solutions and case studies involving river management for future reports so please do get in touch with us jdignan@idc.com, lbarker@idc.com, rletemple@idc.com

Remi Letemple - Senior Research Analyst, IDC Government Insights - IDC

Analyst Profile
Remi Letemple leads IDC’s Worldwide Sustainable Transportation and Smart Vehicles Strategies service, where he provides strategic guidance and thought leadership on the future of mobility and transportation. Operating at a global level, he is recognized as a subject matter expert in smart mobility and transportation technologies—including connected, autonomous, shared, and electric mobility—enabled by software-defined vehicle (SDV) architectures, over-the-air (OTA) updates, cloud and edge platforms, and AI, including generative AI.

Organizations in every industry continue to focus their next chapter of digital transformation on ecosystem expansion; we hear this from organizations in every industry. Working more closely with partners in and outside your core industry to support multiple use cases and initiatives is critical for success. However, it’s not always easy. 

Knowing which use cases and initiatives to focus on is often not immediately evident, and resources, processes, and tools are disparate and misaligned.  Our recently published IDC MaturityScape Report provides a framework for guiding organizations. Within this, we defined five key dimensions, and related sub-dimensions, that organizations and their partners must consider to be successful:

  1. People: Culture, Collaboration, and Leadership
  2. Process: Platform, Intelligence, and Metrics
  3. Technology: Shared data, Shared applications, and Blended digital/physical
  4. Operations: Availability, Governance & Trust, and Environmental sustainability
  5. Innovation: Rate, Management, and Openness

For details regarding each dimension and sub-dimension, see Table 1 in IDC MaturityScape: Future of Industry Ecosystems 1.0.

In this age of AI and generative AI, let’s talk about people.  The people dimension was one of the most mature of industry ecosystems, according to our Future of Industry Ecosystems MaturityScape Benchmark Survey report (April 2023).  This is where organizations start their journey of industry ecosystem expansion. 

As they “design” which partners they should work with on which use cases and initiatives, establishing a robust culture of collaboration and innovation among industry ecosystem partners that is supported strongly by leadership is the top priority. 

A primary reason for this focus is the extensive skills gap that exist in every industry, across multiple domains.  These domains include IT, supply chain, production, service, and operations (IT has the biggest digital skills and resource gap consistently across every industry).  Filling these digital skills and resource gaps is one of the top reasons why organizations are expanding and opening their industry ecosystems. Essentially, they are looking for “access to on-demand capital”, a top-two use case focus per figure 1:

The primary difference between thrivers (those organizations advanced in their approach in working with their partners), and survivors (those early in their ecosystem development) within this realm is that thrivers have strong leadership driving an open, extended ecosystem strategy, and their collaboration is diverse and more commonly extends beyond their core industry. 

Survivors tend to have leadership that is risk averse and tactical when working with industry ecosystem partners, often settling on a standard set of pre-determined partners.  An open, diverse, dynamic ecosystem culture is still weaving its way through ecosystem survivor organizations. Thrivers are quite the opposite, working very strategically with their industry ecosystem partners. 

AI & GenAI for Skills & Knowledge Augmentation

With the current AI and GenAI hype, it is only natural to consider whether developing high-performing ecosystems is more about scale and having the right set of real humans working together well, or well-placed and well-used AI tech.  We think it is optimally a balanced mix of both. Respondents to our recent Future of Industry Ecosystems Global Survey agree, with 36% investing or planning to invest in the near term in AI and ML in support of ecosystem initiatives.  The top reasons for this, according to wave 6 of our Future Enterprise Resiliency Survey (July 2023) are as follows:

  • Anticipating/Predicting Customer Needs
  • Identifying Shared Data Monetization Opportunities
  • Improving Supply Chain Efficiency

Industry ecosystems thrive with a diverse set of people from different backgrounds, expertise, and industries. Decision making, innovation, and efficiency are improved by taking an on demand, as needed approach to working with various resources from your partner ecosystem.  However, the opportunity for knowledge, digital skills, and resource augmentation through AI and generative AI are undeniable.  Some of the ways (not an exhaustive list) that ecosystems can benefit are shown in table 1:

AI use cases for Industry Ecosystems will continue to develop, as ecosystem data models become larger and more diverse, and initiatives increase in complexity and scale.  As enterprises are seeing the benefits of augmenting processes, collaboration, and innovation with AI and generative AI, so will ecosystems.  This is one of the reasons why, according to the IDC ICT (Information & Communications Technology) Spending Guide (July 2023), that AI Platforms have seen 37% growth over the past year, far surpassing the average ICT spending of 4%.

Strive for Flexibility through Industry Ecosystems

Wherever your organization is on the ecosystem digital transformation journey, consider the approach to working with partners on a continuum. There may be times when a simple, small team of ecosystem partners is working on a specific, short-term project, and other times when big challenges like environmental sustainability, game-changing innovation, or quality and safety require a diverse number of partners to come together as a single team for an extended period of time. 

This flexible, dynamic, on-demand approach to working with industry ecosystem partners (complemented by AI) is critical to ensure the long-term viability and growth of every organization.

Learn More

Jeffrey Hojlo - Research Vice President - IDC

Analyst Profile
As Research Vice President, Future of Industry Ecosystems, Innovation Strategies, & Energy Insights at IDC, Jeff Hojlo leads one of IDC's Future Enterprise practices at IDC - the Future of Industry Ecosystems. This practice focuses on three areas that help create and optimize trusted industry ecosystems and next generation value chains in discrete and process manufacturing, construction, healthcare, retail, and other industries: shared data & insight, shared applications, and shared operations & expertise. Mr. Hojlo manages a group focused on the research and analysis of the design, simulation, innovation, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) market, including emerging strategies across discrete and process manufacturing industry such as product innovation platforms and the closed loop digital thread of product design, development, digital manufacturing, supply chain, and SLM. He also manages IDC's North American Energy Insights group, with a focus on key topics such as energy transition & sustainability, distributed energy resource management, and digital transformation in the Oil & Gas and Utilities industries.

Welcome to the era of xOps where the focus is on sharpening operations capabilities – ranging from visibility to governance to optimization and efficiency for maximizing the business value.

Cloud investments continue to be critical for most organizations, but many are shifting focus to a holistic approach of migration, operations, and optimization under the strategy of CloudOps and governance that also extends to FinOps and GreenOps.

The Ops focus is to optimize and manage applications and services in hybrid cloud through a complex, automated, and governed approach. The goal is to leverage intelligence and AI capabilities to get faster insights into operations to improve efficiency as well as reduce costs and carbon footprint.

Beyond GenAI, cloud costs optimization and sustainability have captured our attention in every conversation with European end-users and cloud vendors in 2023. While cloud costs optimization practices (FinOps) are becoming the norm, sustainability operations (GreenOps) are still at an early stage of maturity, but with Europe leading the path.

This extended focus on GreenOps builds on last year’s FinOps focus highlighted in IDC blog: The Era of FinOps: Focus is Shifting from Cloud Features to Cloud Value.

Why Europe?

European organizations are facing macro-economic uncertainties including inflation, talent-gap, climate crisis, and contention in Eastern Europe. In addition, the new European regulations around sustainability that enter into force in January 2024 (CSRD and ESRS), along with the increasingly sustainability awareness among the young European generation, further puts cloud vendors under pressure.

As a result, IDC’s European CloudOps survey, 2023 (N=1,057) showed that sustainability (37%) and FinOps (31%) are the top two areas that organizations have identified for investment to optimize their cloud operations. We are expecting these results to be even more markable in 2024.

The Future of FinOps and GreenOps in 2024 and Beyond

FinOps and GreenOps remain to be critical in 2024 and beyond. In fact, we expect that by the end of this year, cloud costs and complexity will drive 65% of large organizations in EMEA to increase their maturity with optimization practices, resulting in 2X greater efficiency and cost effectiveness than all organizations.

We believe there are huge opportunities for cloud vendors in both spaces. Enabling organizations with FinOps capabilities can help customers get a better understanding of their cloud spending trends in order to optimize the spend, bring transparency and accountability, and boost ROI from investments.

GreenOps, on the other hand, can bring capabilities to reduce the environmental footprint in the cloud. GrenOps also involves practices like waste reduction, switching off resources, and the transition to renewable energy, but also promoting a new company culture with a greater environmental responsibility.

Conclusion

Despite different objectives, the two approaches must go hand in hand as one is a big contributor to the other, and vice versa. The CloudOps community also agreed that providing granular data across cloud costs and carbon footprint (scope 1, 2, and 3), along with tailored insights and recommendations, would play a critical role in enhancing cloud vendors’ competitive advantage.

Furthermore, cloud providers need to be meticulous in measuring data, sharing what they have included and excluded, and providing data metrics. Finally, cloud vendors should also educate stakeholders, especially in less mature markets like GreenOps, resulting in a greater trust with their customers.

Stay tuned on the new EMEA CloudOps research and survey and join us on Tuesday, January 23rd, at 11am GMT, where we will discuss the new IDC FutureScape 2024: European Cloud, including trends and opportunities around FinOps and GreenOps.

After much back-and-forth on work models, bold ultimatums from employers and staunch resistance from workers, European businesses are in the process of codifying different ways of where, how, when, and why we work. One of the many reasons for this change is the speed with which technology, especially artificial intelligence and GenAI, have made it possible to work equally well in varying, flexible work models.

The downside of this rapid technology development has been that European organizations simply cannot hire enough workers with current or deep skills – both technical and human. Do you manage highly distributed teams performing complex and interdependent tasks? Certainly not easy. Finding employees trained sufficiently well to safely transition to the use of Gen AI solutions? Not easy either.

Enter the promise of automation and in particular the ability of AI and Gen AI tools to both facilitate repetitive tasks like coding, data entry, research, and content creation but also to amplify the effectiveness of learning in the flow of work and secure company assets.

The following 3 predictions are examples of what work in Europe might look like in the next five years, considering the areas of work personalization, skills development and the impact of climate change on office design.

Future of Work Predictions for 2024 and Beyond

  • Prediction 1: 60% of Large Businesses will upgrade hardware and software technologies to increase worker retention with personalized work experiences and enhanced collaboration by 2025.

Rapidly evolving technologies and work methods are forcing companies to upgrade hardware and implement new software technologies that support better employee experiences, personalization and improved collaboration.

Collaboration apps are becoming more visual and continue to develop features unlike multiplayer games that enable a more personalized view of work and teams, better targeting of projects, and hands-on collaboration apps. Meetings and other work resources, including collaboration resources (workflow, meetings, new document formats, etc.) are translated and transcribed in real time, captured, analyzed and exploited by other integrated business data sources. The results enable faster and more personalized decisions and collaboration, including summaries using generative AI. AI solutions are gradually increasing the ways people consume content and data, and AI itself will become a digital collaborator.

  • Prediction 2: Enterprises will leverage personalized technology skills development to drive $1T in productivity gains by 2026, enabled by GenAI and automation everywhere.

As the development and use of technology in everyday work environments becomes more complex, organizations struggle to find experts for programming, security, architecture, operations, management and many other roles. IDC data from 2023 shows that 43 % percent of organizations lack the capability support needed to successfully implement automation.

One of the reasons Gen AI adoption and experimentation has grown so rapidly is that everyday workers can see its immediate value. As new jobs come online due to new automation requirements and workers learn new skills, Gen AI is being incorporated into tools that create employee training. Workers with entry-level skills can better target individual learning needs based on the speed with which Gen AI can generate code, summarize data, and create first-draft multimedia products. This customized approach ensures that people (including IT staff) receive the most appropriate training, optimizing efforts to increase their skills and competencies as jobs evolve, plus the need to program GenAI applications themselves.

  • Prediction 3: By 2028, organizations will invest in office climate havens, using asset-based/renewable energy to defray 30% of their ongoing operating costs.

It is not just work patterns that are rapidly changing. The environment we live and work in is rapidly changing too. As uncontrolled wildfires, climate change and extreme weather events become more common in Europe, the consequences are affecting human health and the ability to work effectively. Sustainability measures are no longer considered optional as organizations worldwide recognize them as necessary components of strategic planning and sustainable operational excellence.

In future, progressive companies will adopt a combination of innovative building design, digital twins, robotics and integrated climate systems to create climate havens where workers and their families can both find relief and focus on work. Unfortunately, simply rebuilding existing buildings with AI or robotics adds energy demand to an already struggling European energy infrastructure.

Companies that invest heavily in asset-based energy (hydro/tidal, geothermal, solar and wind) on-site in their climate havens, support both their operating costs and potentially create a secondary revenue stream when they feed electricity back into the grid. This is reversing the long-term trend of digital organizations threatening their local communities through excessive power usage, while improving community relations, employee retention and talent recruitment.

 

All the above predictions have much in common – they seek to better understand the intersection of technology and human behavior. Science fiction predicts dystopian visions of mechanized and artificially controlled societies where human efficacy is threatened. IDC far from that point of view, but we also see how the concerns raised by new technologies such as Gen AI can play a big role in hindering adoption—for better or for worse.

Organizational leaders must invest time and money in the strategic planning for the adoption of AI and GenAI technologies, as well as the new roles and ways of working they create. This is not just a technology issue that affects computing, security, hardware, infrastructure, and integration requirements. It is also a human issue that must be addressed employee empowerment through skill development and the development of appropriate, re-imagined career paths.

For more information on the impact of Automation on the European Future of Work, please access the following resources:

Meike Escherich - Associate Research Director, European Future of Work - IDC

Analyst Profile
Meike Escherich is an associate research director with IDC's European Future of Work practice, based in the UK. In this role, she provides coverage of key technology trends across the Future of Work, specializing in how to enable and foster teamwork in a flexible work environment. Her research looks at how technologies influence workers' skills and behaviors, organizational culture, worker experience and how the workspace itself is enabling the future enterprise.

IDC recently published a new document that offers a holistic assessment of how Communications SPs are evolving their communications infrastructure and operations through digital transformation to become more agile at offering advanced digital and managed services to business customers. The IDC MarketScape on Worldwide Communications Service Provider Digital Infrastructure and Services evaluated 12 global Communications SPs.

Communications SPs face common challenges, including service commoditization, fierce competition, and a lack of flexibility to innovate rapidly to meet shifting market needs. To capitalize on new opportunities, Communications SPs across the globe are accelerating their focus on digital transformation across communication networks, IT, and business operations to become more agile digital service providers and transition from telco to techco. This transformation is inevitable to stay relevant and support the needs of organizations as they face the full impact of digital business evolution.

Key Trends Representative of the Digital Business Evolution
The shifting digital business landscape and the requirement to be judicious about capital investments is leading more enterprises to depend on IT partners for best-in-class technology, and managed service options, that help them to manage their internal skills gaps. Some important trends that are driving digital business services transition include:

  • Cloud-centric digital application strategies that provide compelling business and technology benefits have accelerated the implementation of digital platforms. As organizations move applications to the cloud, the right mix of secure and flexible network services becomes essential to underpin their digital business strategy.
  • Managed services become a more attractive option for organizations, as cloud-centric digital strategies expand, to help simplify complex tasks through optimized network-as-a-service experience that can be tailored to its specific business and to help companies manage their lack of internal expertise.
  • Composable services that offer flexible pricing models by applying a consumption methodology to simplify the buying process, create cost-effective service bundles, and can help organizations reduce the cost of managed services and connectivity over the long term.
  • The evolving threat landscape continues to drive demand for managed/cloud-based delivery models for integrated security management to address cost, complexity, and the lack of internal security staff. It is increasingly convenient for organizations to acquire integrated security features and tools as part of managed services, that can also address data sovereignty concerns.
  • The intelligence of the digital infrastructure to ensure a differentiated experience is accelerating the use of AI and Gen AI models with advanced analytics to turn large amounts of data into valuable business insights, benefits, and outcomes.
  • Comprehensive API capabilities to better expose the full value of the network, service, and partner assets to help drive automation under an open environment that can integrate with a broad range of proprietary and legacy solutions.
  • ESG requirements are moving higher in priority for organizations, in some cases, closely tracking behind profit and revenue. Sustainability is becoming an important factor in driving organizations’ managed service investment requirements that can offer energy-efficient as-a-service models.
  • Strategic service provider partnerships have become paramount to help organizations embark upon new journeys that will improve operational efficiency, business resiliency, and customer experience with their digital infrastructure and services transformation, beyond just connectedness.

2023 IDC MarketScape for Digital Infrastructure and Services Evaluates 12 Communications SPs

The 2023 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Communications Service Provider Digital Infrastructure and Services evaluates 12 Communications SPs across 20 scoring criteria categories, including 10 each of strategy and capabilities. Communications SPs had to meet a minimum threshold of annual revenue and network portfolio that offers a range of managed services including managed WAN, managed cloud, managed security, managed Internet of Things (IoT), multi-access edge computing (MEC), and other network services targeting business customers. The analysis also evaluated the underlying intelligence of their digital infrastructure such as network virtual/cloud-native functions, NaaS platform, API integration, and AI capabilities.

This research includes the analysis of twelve communications service providers including AT&T, BT, Comcast, e&Enterprise, Lumen, NTT, Orange, Reliance-Jio, Telefonica, Telstra, Verizon, and Vodafone, who are positioned in the leaders and major players categories. The analysis identified that all 12 of the Communications SPs have a strong digital transformation plan, but some are more progressed than others for now.

The ample landscape of service providers offering digital infrastructure and managed services means organizations can face increasingly complex choices in service provider selection for their agile digital infrastructure modernization needs. The 2023 IDC MarketScape for worldwide communications service provider digital infrastructure and services is meant to be a guide for helping organizations evaluate Communications SPs to become their strategic partner in this important digital business evolution.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IDC MARKETSCAPE: WORLDWIDE COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES 2023 VENDOR ASSESSMENT

We also recommend you take advantage of these recent resources from our tech market experts:

2023 Telecommunications Service Provider Transformation Plans and Strategies Survey Highlights

Cloud Service Providers’ Publicly Announced Contracts with Communications Service Providers: Full-Year 2022

Who Do Telecom Service Providers See as the Best Partner to Help with Their Digital Transformation?

Peter Chahal - Research Director, Worldwide Telecommunications Services and Strategies - IDC

Analyst Profile
Peter Chahal is a Research Director at IDC's Network and Telecommunications research practice covering telecommunication services and strategies. Some of the key areas of his research includes mobile broadband services, 5G monetization, SD-WAN, wireline broadband services, and other emerging telecom digital services. Peter’s also looks at telecommunication service providers’ broader strategies and how those strategies influence telecommunication providers’ digital transformations. His research helps telecommunication service providers and vendors have a better understanding of the worldwide telecommunications market and discover new opportunities for growth.

Without a doubt, generative AI (GenAI) has been the most talked about innovation this year, and it looks like it is only going to grow in 2024 and beyond. Love it or hate it, ignoring GenAI and its benefits for organizations means losing out on a tool that is set to revolutionize the way we work.

Now, organizations are faced with a critical decision: do they build their own GenAI capabilities or opt for ready-made solutions from vendors? This pivotal choice can shape the trajectory of innovation within an organization.

In this blog, we will explore the various considerations when making the build vs. buy decision and delve into the impact of GenAI on productivity, functional excellence, and industry-specific applications.

GenAI Unleashes Innovation

GenAI transforms an organization’s knowledge and makes it accessible to employees, customers, and suppliers. It connects data to insights, unlocking lots of information in an organization and turning it into a valuable asset.

Boosting Productivity

Staying ahead of the competition often hinges on the ability to maximize productivity while driving operational efficiencies. GenAI shines in productivity use cases, automating tasks like summarizing reports, generating job descriptions, and even coding in languages like Java and Python. By automating these processes, GenAI enhances workforce efficiency, reduces human errors, and augments overall output.

To boost productivity with GenAI, you have two options. You can integrate it into existing commercial apps or opt for standalone GenAI apps. This flexibility enables customization to meet specific requirements. Companies often choose this path to overcome challenges like finding specialized AI talent and limited budgets.

However, this approach may have trade-offs, such as lower control over model governance, data security, privacy, and compliance issues. Careful consideration is necessary when deciding to build or buy GenAI for productivity enhancements.

Functional Excellence

GenAI also plays a vital role in enhancing functional excellence by automating processes, optimizing decision-making, and providing highly personalized, context-aware solutions. Companies can modify open-source models or use existing models from AI platforms to align GenAI with their business needs.

The adoption of GenAI for functional excellence is facilitated by well-harmonized institutional data, in-house talent, budget availability, and a moderate risk appetite. While it offers contextual experiences and operational efficiencies, companies need to be aware of the potential challenges, including model governance and data security.

Industry-Specific Applications

GenAI’s impact in industry-specific contexts is profound. It empowers companies to create new digital business models, design innovative products and services, and establish unique competitive advantages. Fine-tuning existing models or developing custom models are the primary approaches for industry-specific GenAI implementations.

Industries often turn to GenAI for applications such as groundbreaking drug discovery in the life sciences sector and generative material design in manufacturing. While these implementations offer tremendous value, they also come with high costs and the responsibility of managing regular model refreshes.

The ‘Buy’ Perspective

The ‘Buy’ perspective offers a way to quickly access GenAI benefits by leveraging enterprise applications with GenAI capabilities or native GenAI applications. These solutions empower businesses to harness GenAI’s capabilities without extensive in-house development efforts. However, they may lack competitive differentiation and offer limited customization.

The ‘Buy’ approach is suitable for enterprises wanting quick access to GenAI benefits, especially those with low maturity around enterprise data management and AI. It can kickstart the GenAI journey while establishing a foundation for data management, governance, and the skills needed for further GenAI development.

Fine-Tuning GenAI Models

Fine-tuning existing models is a powerful strategy that involves modifying open-source or commercial models to align with specific business requirements. This approach offers robust solutions, control over training data, and superior performance. However, it requires labeled data sets and regular updates.

Three main avenues for fine-tuning generative AI models include fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and prompt engineering. Each approach has its advantages and is suitable for different use cases.

Building Your Own GenAI Model

Building your own GenAI model involves developing a foundational model using institutional data. This approach offers the highest level of control, governance, and transparency. It is ideal for organizations aiming to create unique products or services derived from proprietary data.

However, building your own model comes with challenges, including the need for a proficient data science team, high costs related to data collection and infrastructure, and a requirement for expertise in machine learning.

Converting GenAI’s potential into use cases that generate business value requires a clear-eyed understanding of current limitations and challenges. GenAI technology is powerful, but it is not fully mature and presents opportunities for misuse.

IDC’s leading-edge expertise and insight into GenAI trends, opportunities, requirements, and challenges help you elevate conversations and better engage with your customers.

Are you ready to meet the challenge? Contact us today to discuss how IDC can help you succeed with GenAI.

With the introduction of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 series in late 2022, the world witnessed a surge in investment in generative AI. IDC predicts that worldwide spending on AI solutions will surpass $500 billion by 2027, signifying a significant shift in technology investments toward AI implementation and the adoption of AI-enhanced products and services.

IDC recently hosted a FutureScape webinar by Ritu Jyoti, group vice president of Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation Market Research and Advisory Services. This webinar highlights some of the top 10 worldwide AI and automation predictions for 2024 and beyond. Watch now on-demand.

“ChatGPT’s explosive global popularity has given us AI’s first true inflection point in public adoption,” says Ritu Jyoti. “As AI and automation investments grow, focus on outcomes, governance, and risk management is paramount.”

IDC’s FutureScape 2024 research focuses on the external drivers that will alter the global business ecosystem over the next 12 to 24 months. It also addresses the issues technology and IT teams will face as they define, build, and govern the technologies required to thrive in a digital-first world.

A closer look at IDC’s top ten predictions for artificial intelligence, GenAI, and automation reveals the following:

  • Prediction 1: Tempering GenAI’s Risks: Accelerated efficiency and catastrophic risk are the two sides to the shiny new GenAI coin. To reduce the risks, cloud and software platform providers will bundle GenAI safety and governance packages with their primary services to add value and differentiate their offerings.
  • Prediction 2: Diverse Regulatory Requirements: Efforts to regulate the deployment and development of AI systems will vary across regions and countries. These diverse regulatory requirements are likely to result in organizations taking more phased approaches to AI rollouts. This will also increase time to value.
  • Prediction 3: Conversation as the Standard UI: Conversation is already emerging as the standard user interface (UI) for both enterprise and consumer applications and solutions. These conversational AI interfaces will significantly affect customer engagement, sales, marketing, and even the IT help desk.
  • Prediction 4: The Focus Shifts to Outcomes: As their understanding of automation matures, project sponsors have shifted from a technology focus to an outcomes mindset where they require tangible proof of value delivered for their investments This is measured by KPIs aligned with business and financial outcomes.
  • Prediction 5: GenAI-based Tools Automate Software Quality: Because of the value GenAI brings to automated testing, IDC expects it to quickly change the landscape of software testing. Vendors will become capable of producing a significant percentage of tests to decrease manual efforts and improve test coverage leading to better code quality.
  • Prediction 6: GenAI Transforms Application Modernization IT Services: Increased utilization of AI in application modernization IT services can streamline efficiency, enhance services delivery speed, and bolster IT services margins.
  • Prediction 7: Bringing AI to Knowledge Discovery: The latest advances in generative AI have prompted a surge of demand for capabilities such as natural language question answering and conversational search to support self-service knowledge discovery.
  • Prediction 8: Monetizing GenAI: While technology is a source of advantage, it is the business model that will help businesses monetize generative AI and drive lasting competitive advantage. By 2024, 33% of G2000 companies will exploit innovative business models to double their monetization potential of GenAI.
  • Prediction 9: AGI on the Horizon: Multiple groups are working toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and companies will be experimenting with AGI systems by 2028. As it progresses, AGI will be transformative, impacting everything from the labor market to how we understand concepts like intelligence and creativity.
  • Prediction 10: Chip Priorities Change: Until AI workloads that require the offload of tasks from server processors to accelerators standardize on algorithms and software stacks tuned to server processors, purchase of accelerators (GPU, FPGA, and AI ASIC and ASSP) will eat into purchase of server processors (CPUs).

Are you interested in learning more? Access the complete IDC FutureScape event series and stay updated on the latest IT industry trends.

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NRF24 Retail’s Big Show in New York City is fast approaching, and we, IDC Retail Insights will be there. We cannot wait to talk with retailers, technology companies, and industry experts, share our views and learn more about what matters for the industry in 2024 and beyond.

As we prepare for the event, let’s summarize the critical technological imperatives that retailers must embrace to thrive in today’s ever-evolving business environment. Our insights are drawn from IDC Retail Insights’ Global Retail Survey 2023, where over 800 retailers worldwide shared their strategic priorities. Let’s dive into it!

Multilevel Loyalty Strategy for a Greater Retail and Customer Experience

We predict that “by 2024, 40% of Retailers Will Adopt a Multilevel Loyalty Strategy, Leveraging a Unified View of the Customer, to Increase Retention Rate by 20% and Net Promoter Score by 35%”.  Retailers worldwide are on the brink of customer loyalty revolution, with a staggering 35% gearing up to unveil cutting-edge multilevel programs within just three years, as revealed by IDC’s 2023 Global Retail Survey.

The once-reliable methods like points and promotions are losing their edge, lacking the spark needed to captivate customers. Now, in an era where privacy regulations tighten and accessing third-party data becomes limited, the game-changer lies in collecting firsthand customer data—it’s the cornerstone of tomorrow’s success.

But the game is evolving, and the retail world is diving headfirst into the realm of immersive tech. By embracing this tech-savvy frontier, retailers can elevate loyalty strategies, crafting experiences finely tuned for the ever-evolving Alpha and Gen Z consumers.

Brands like Ralph Lauren and Lacoste are venturing into Web3 for exclusive immersive experiences and community building.

The real challenge is about seamlessly delivering these immersive experiences across every retail touchpoint, navigating a landscape growing more complex by the day. That’s why empowering workforce with digital tools isn’t just essential; it’s a key differentiator for maintaining contextualized customer experiences.

Meanwhile, in the hospitality sector, a digital revolution is reshaping the guest experience, demanding personalized, predictive experiences despite ongoing labour shortages. This calls for a strategic fusion of systems and capabilities, a dynamic approach to cater to the digital-driven needs of today’s guests.

Investing in Technology to Deliver Efficiencies and Effectiveness in the Omnichannel Customer Journey

Retailers are navigating challenging a business environment and are under pressure to increase revenue and reduce costs. According to our IDC Global Retail Survey, while customer experience is at the top of retailers’ concerns, increasing operational efficiency is the second most important business priority for retailers.

This is mainly due to the greater complexity of the business environment the industry faces.

Let’s consider, for example, the role of brick-and-mortar in today’s omnichannel operations. The physical store is the pillar of retail operations today, but it must be connected and fully integrated with digital operations to play its role as the centrepiece of the customer journey.

One strategic imperative for retailers is investing in in-store Technology, such as AI, Computer Vision, and IoT, to digitize, automate, and streamline the omnichannel experience in-store.

While retailers are navigating challenging territories and need to do more with less, they haven’t stopped investing in technology. Top investment areas in 2024 include physical infrastructure, cloud, and managed services.

Therefore, another digital transformation imperative is investing in IT Infrastructure, including network infrastructure to connect the physical store and rethink cloud and edge balance to provide a seamless omnichannel experience.

A transformation imperative that should not be overlooked to streamline the efficiency of retailers’ operations is linked to the importance of embracing a best-of-breed Retail Commerce Platform. Retailers are investing in modular and headless platforms, to move towards composable architectures that match the needs of modern omnichannel retail.

As we can see, retailers should be laser-focused on the technological imperatives that make omnichannel operations more efficient and in turn generate better omnichannel customer experience.

AI and Augmented Reality for Customer Experience

In today’s landscape, AI is everywhere as it’s revolutionizing how consumer brands approach customer experiences. This shift places a heightened emphasis on human-centric approaches, especially as AI and GenAI streamlines routine tasks.

In this augmented context, organizations are placing a premium on customer empathy, trust, and privacy. However, this requires a fundamental leadership’s cultural shift and a business transformation, detached from traditional hierarchies towards flatter structures, identifying shared metrics, and nurturing a collaborative culture where innovation thrives.

Retailers growing attention to and investment in advanced analytics, AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) are unlocking and demonstrating the potential of generative AI (GenAI). It is a point of no return, where retailers are shifting from being merely data-rich to strategically data-driven organizations.

Omnipresence across different channels, such as social media networks, marketplaces, ecommerce, in combination with personalized engagements allow retailers to extract real-time value from every interaction. AI’s impact on CX personalization is profound, evolving from static segments to real-time, context-driven experiences.

The depth of coherent customer data leverages the integration of AI and ML analytics, notably in predictive product recommendations. Our IDC’s 2024 Retail Predictions say that “by 2028, 50% of retailers will offer AI-enabled contextualized recommendations to enhance customer engagement, increasing real-time interactions by 30% and overall conversion rate by 20%”.

These AI algorithms amplify omni-channel strategies, empowering both store associates and digital agents for seamless customer engagements as well as contextualized marketing and merchandising. AI isn’t merely a buzzword; it’s a game-changer. Particularly, it’s reshaping new revenue streams, such as Retail Media Networks, facilitating and powering orchestration across interconnected systems, aiming to seamlessly handle pricing, inventory, forecasting, planning, and maintain consistency across channels and partners.

Importance of the Supply Chain on the Customer Journey and Sustainability

Retail logistics have seen a few challenges in recent years, including disrupted sourcing streams and workforce shortages, but supply chains have started to readjust. Despite things getting better, retailers are preparing for the future by anticipating challenges like those experienced in the recent past, and now investing in making the Supply Chain even more resilient through greater automation and data insight has become a digital transformation imperative.

The primary reason for investing in the supply chain is to increase efficiency and improve product availability, resulting in a better omnichannel customer experience. Sustainability is also a big factor in retailers’ strategic imperatives related to improving the efficiency of the supply chain.

Fortunately, these two objectives—efficiency and sustainability—are not in conflict with each other. Investing in supply chain efficiency has the potential to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and make operations more sustainable.

Retailers are taking a proactive approach to address the challenges of the future. By investing in supply chain resilience, they are ensuring that they can continue to provide the best possible customer experience while also being mindful of the environment.

Let’s Meet at NRF!

As we anticipate key themes for IT vendors and retailers in 2024, we expect these 10 Imperatives for Success to be prominent topics in our conversations at NRF in January. If you’re attending NRF, reach out to us to arrange a meeting or visit our booth at number #1032.

We look forward to meeting you there!

What do customers expect from brands? They expect contextually relevant experiences. This should manifest throughout digital journeys with their preferred brands regardless of the business model. They value relevant content, next steps, and contextual awareness throughout their journeys. For brands, contextual awareness means that they can communicate to customers that the brand understands the nuances of each customer interaction, with every communication conveyed in a sensitive and acceptable way from the customer’s perspective.

Most customers (B2C) or buyers (B2B) will not engage with vendors when the communication is not contextually aware. The decision to view content or communications (or not) is based on brands meeting their expectations (or not). B2B buyers are also B2C customers in their personal lives and carry over high expectations of contextual awareness from consumer brand interactions into decisions made in their work lives.  IDC’s 2023 B2B Technology Buyer Survey responses prove this point.

Source: 2023 B2B Tech Buyer Survey Findings: Growth Depends on Brands Adapting to the Permanent Changes in B2B Buyer Behavior, IDC #US51260123, September 2023. N=400

The experiences that customers expect from brands are, increasingly, all digital. Online transactions have become the majority; among Gen Z, 67% lean toward an online-first mentality, while younger millennials are at 75%. Digital communications, delivered with contextual awareness at the right moment in time, allow brands to demonstrate cognitive empathy, competence, and integrity which together create digital trust.

Callout: With digital engagement dominating engagement mode, the use of contextually relevant content, informed by unified customer data, will be imperative for brands to maintain, nurture, and grow customer relationships.

Source: Future of CX: Applying Digital Trust to Deliver Authentic Content in the Customer Experience, IDC #US51201323, September 2023

The challenge for brands, across all go-to-market (GTM) models, is delivering the digital experience reality that customers expect. Meeting customer expectations is a fast-moving target that is difficult to meet without a tremendous amount of data and insights.  In IDC’s latest monthly survey (October 2023), less than one-half of respondents (47%) say they are mostly or entirely digital businesses (leaders), with the rest (53%) reporting that they are somewhat or not digital businesses (followers). CEOs recognize that proficiency in digital strategy is almost as important as proficiency in business strategy (46% vs. 49% in our 2023 survey).

The Three Technologies

What are the CX technology investments that your brand should be making to aspire to or maintain leadership in CX in your markets?

  • Customer data platforms (CDPs), which create and continually update unified customer data profiles, are the basis for understanding customers’ needs in their interactions with your brand. CDPs provide a unified and connected data fabric that delivers a continual understanding of customer context from previous interactions combined with current, real-time interactions. 75.2% of IDC survey respondents plan to increase this area of CX technology spending over the next 12 months.
  • Predictive AI (AI, ML, advanced analytics), which delivers active learning from customer insights in the data by gathering customer intelligence, generating and analyzing insights, and evaluating actions based on real-time feedback from each engagement. Sentiment measurement also plays a significant role in active learning for contextual awareness, as real-time sentiment sensing can be an early warning signal for positive or negative changes in customer behavior. 58.1% of survey respondents plan to maintain or increase this area of CX technology spending over the next 12 months.
  • Generative AI, which is already being used in marketing, sales, and service applications to deliver interactions with individualized content in digital communications including emails and web pages with automatic branding elements to maintain communications consistency. Generative AI is also improving customer support interactions by adding organizational knowledge bases to improve digital assistant and agent quality. One-third of organizations are already investing significantly in Generative AI for training, acquisition, and implementation of Generative AI-enhanced software and consulting services in the next 18 months. Customer support, marketing, and sales organizations report their top Generative AI business focus is improved customer satisfaction, with an average response of 58%.

How do these three technologies interact with each other? Here is one example, with CDPs performing data aggregation and customer context, Predictive AI insights, and Generative AI activation which is the personalized interaction sent to the customer through a communication channel that is most likely digital but could also be physical (in-store).

Source: IDC, 2023

What business outcomes are possible using these three technologies?

  • A global technology brand achieved a 5x lift in conversions by using AI-driven insights to reallocate media spend, with 96% AI accuracy for predicted user behavior.
  • A global pharmaceutical brand achieved a 40% increase in cosmetics sales due to better personalization, with a 40% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA) for completed purchases.
  • A global automobile brand experienced a 300%+ increase in advertising click-through rates (CTRs), a 2.5x increased conversion rate in the top customer segment, with a 38% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA).

The business outcomes for Generative AI will be more available with increased adoption of use cases in production. IDC’s C-suite tech survey results provide a preview of the top expected business outcome areas in these business groups:

  • CX, Service and Support: improved customer satisfaction (64.7%)
  • Marketing: revenue growth (57.2%)
  • Sales: increased operational efficiency and employee productivity (69.9%)

A Glimpse into the Future

In this blog, we have focused on three technologies that increase insight, trust, and engagement with your customers now. Let’s look into the future with IDC FutureScape 2024 predictions that are based on the technologies described in this blog.

  • Customer data platforms will deliver high-quality data for predictive AI and GenAI, activating 80% of real-time personalized customer interactions at scale for G2000 firms with 4x engagement gains by 2026.
  • By 2025, 65% of G1000 companies will adopt trust-based marketing programs, harness greater value from zero- and first-party data, and improve marketing profitability by 50%.
  • Pervasive sentiment and intent AI will propel 55% of G1000 firms to conduct all marketing journeys as real-time, two-way conversations by 2025, improving leads to purchase conversions by 40%.

Is your firm future-proofed to achieve the outcomes from these predictions?  If you use the three technologies discussed here, you can confidently answer – Yes! If you don’t have these technologies, and you see your firm as a digital follower – Watch Out! Your customers, revenue, and market share are at risk from your competitors who are digital business leaders.

Learn More About the Future of Customer Experience