The New Normal Arrives: Trends that Will Take Enterprises Forward in 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic swept the global business landscape at the dawn of 2020, and it became increasingly difficult for many enterprises to balance their books. The speed and extent of recovery were questions that defied an easy answer. But, one decision was made apparent: enterprises needed digital transformation more than ever.

The need of survival set the next business of order. Leaders pushed strategic investments into new technologies and created new ways of working. The shift to digital models helped them navigate operational and financial challenges while rapidly catering to the needs of employees, customers, and shareholders.

In hindsight, it is safe to say that digital technologies have proven a strong case for themselves, and as per the prevailing sentiments, are set to scale on a new, high-growth trajectory in 2021.

Understanding what drivers have supported and will support the sustainability of business growth in the second year of the pandemic is necessary to let enterprises know where to move the needle. A look at the top five may help.

Resurgence of Customer Experience

By now, most C-suite executives have led their companies to embrace digitization in more ways than one, to serve customers without interruption. To win in the next normal, leaders are turning agile towards redefining their business models while capitalizing on three key priorities—digital excellence, contactless engagement, and dynamic customer insights.

Self-service digital tools, powered by AI, are tipped as a catalyst in reshaping customer experiences. Innovations related to chatbots and virtual assistants will pick momentum to help organizations maintain regular, real-time, and context-aware interactions. These new-age channels can help solve queries in a jiffy while elevating the customer satisfaction quotient and eliminating the need for humans to interrupt, thus boosting cost savings.

2021 will see enterprises accelerate innovation with AI technologies. By putting AI in the cloud and gleaning faster insights, CXOs will be able to anticipate customer behaviors to deliver personalized content and cater to needs efficiently.

Improved Employee Experiences to Be Watchwords

COVID-19 has widened the gap between organizations and their people while striking right at the roots of employee engagement. As we step into 2021, we would see leaders relying on the 4C’s—Communication, Collaboration, Care, and Consistency—to make employee interactions seamless and create a culture of inclusiveness.

Many progressive, employee-centric organizations will become proactive towards cross-functional work strategies, remote work models, internal mobility programs, and virtual collaborations to enable a foundation for seamless interactions among team members while redefining productivity at the same time.

Looking ahead towards a more sophisticated employee engagement approach, enterprises will pivot from remote to hybrid workforce scenarios in the post-pandemic world. Hybrid workplace combined remote and in-office work options, giving people the flexibility to work from anywhere. With hybrid model in place, companies can experience absolute workforce transformation while bolstering employee productivity along with a happy organizational culture built on transparency, proactive upskilling,
enhanced flexibility, high employee morale, personalized human connections, and new possibilities for work-life balance. This will greatly drive a positive shift in the realms of employee performance and engagement.

Demand for Gig Workers to Increase

Post-2020, there is strong optimism about the future of gig workers. Experts predict a 2X increase in the size of the gig economy and that enterprises of all sizes would have plans to hire contingent workers to augment staff while trying to optimize spending in the wake of COVID-19. Demand for gig workers would be particularly high in IT, ITES, digital, and e-commerce sectors, looking to build a talent base of specialized skills while keeping the cost bar low.

Technology will supplement this shift. We would see enterprises keenly investing in virtual desktop platforms to allow seamless collaborations. Leaders would switch to more scalable cloud platforms to introduce powerful layer of security and compliance across functions. Innovations with job platforms would pick new steam with AI technologies, making it easy for companies to attract the right talent while saving a lot on resources.

As for what’s to come in 2021, gig workers will be provided the ‘employee’ status. COVID exposed deep-seated inequalities against workers who are not in full-time work. Leaders, in a welcome move, would identify contractual workers outside the ‘traditional employee-employer relationships’ and safeguard their interests by rolling out social security measures that encompass health and age benefits.

Cybersecurity to Be a Key Priority

The digital response to COVID-19 and the proliferation of remote, unsecured devices did open new vulnerabilities. Intrusion attempts were more in the first six months of 2020 than in all of 2019. Thus, it became expedient for enterprises to improve cybersecurity capabilities, and the trend is set to scale in 2021.

As enterprises move to a hybrid workplace, the C-suite has plans to ramp up cybersecurity budgets and emphasized the need to hire full-time staff for safeguarding security interests. Most CXOs have identified network and message security as key focus areas to ensure business resilience. AI technologies are helping protect user data against the exponential rise in breaches,

phishing, and endpoint security attacks. Meaningful investments in IoT and hardware authentication are in the offing to strengthen identify and access management and tackle the privilege access credential abuse. Some may explore the promise of Blockchain technology to transform cybersecurity and reinforce peer-to-peer transactions.

2021 makes it imperative for the C-suite to take a hard, honest review of what they need, not only from a perspective of risk management, but also cost savings, and close gaps in cybersecurity with the power of the new technologies.

AI Scales as a Linchpin of Digital Transformation

Enterprises, grappled with COVID-induced uncertainty, pulled innovations, and established new models to stay afloat. AI, out of all, emerged as a game-changer in areas of efficiency, planning, and security. 2021 will witness greater democratization of this technology.

AI will help enterprises embed intelligence across business functions, far better than before, and with the confluence of IoT, it will help executives capture and process data, detect anomalies, and deliver actionable outcomes. What’s more? It will help automate routine tasks while freeing up employees to do more strategic, complex tasks. AI will transform CX initiatives, helping leaders use actionable data to target the right set of audience and build traction faster.  It will enable threat intelligence and help CXOs identify patterns in data to enable security.

Heading into 2021, we will see the trend of AI personalization gaining ground. More and more companies are anticipated to go beyond ‘algorithms’ and make AI fit to needs for better experiences. From a technology standpoint, 2021 seems a positive year for the adoption and expansion of AI use cases.