Interview: Predicting the business tech trends in 2023

As part of Bdaily’s latest feature, Innovation Week, we hear from Showpad’s chief product officer, Tony Grout to discuss the world of business tech.

Founded in 2011, Showpad’s engagement applications lay the groundwork for impactful buyer interactions, while the platform’s training and coaching tools help to create informed, upskilled, and trusted advising teams.

The data and insights generated fuel continuous learning and improvement, leading to more valuable content, more prepared sellers, better conversations and faster conversions. The bottom line is impact: sellers close more deals, faster with Showpad.

Tony’s role at Showpad is to listen to their customers and the broader market and work with our product teams to ensure we’re accelerating our users’ ability to drive revenue cycles. Tony said, “we focus our energy on where it will have the most impact for our users. In turn, this helps make them and their companies measurably more successful.”

In recent years, tech has transformed how businesses operate, reminiscing on the year past, I asked what key trends are seen in business tech. Tony said: “There are a few key trends that came up in 2022 in the business tech sphere.

“One is that there was much more recognition that just adding more point solution technology tools has made the technology landscape significantly more complicated for most businesses without delivering the expected value.”

Business tech trends have also been massively influenced by the explosion of hybrid working. Tony noted that this phenomenon meant that, “‘The Future of Work’ became ‘The Now of Work’, with hybrid working becoming even more accepted and technology continuing to be a key contributor in reducing the friction of the hybrid working model.

“We also saw the explosion of AI/Ml happen at the end of the year with platforms like ChatGPT opening up and the consumerisation of this technology becoming an overnight reality for much wider audiences.

“Specifically with the work we do at Showpad, it was also clear in 2022 that buyers continue to be more well-informed in their buying journey before engaging with sellers.”

Looking forward to 2023, I wanted to find out what key trends we might see in the year ahead. Tony said: “I think there are three main trends we are likely to see in business tech this year.

“Firstly, the consolidation of business tech stacks. The economic climate is forcing the conversation around business tech ROI and keeping operations lean, to drive toward profitability over pure growth at any cost. In our industry, we see that companies still highly value software that helps them drive faster, higher-value deal closing.

“In 2023, I expect companies to reduce the number of tools they have by stepping back from a best-of-breed with integrations strategy to how to get more juice for the squeeze from a smaller number of tools that cover a broader range of functions.

“Secondly, viewing data as currency will be key this year. Many companies are still early in their journey on how to monetise the data and insights they have as part of their business model. Logistics companies worked out years ago that moving a parcel was a commodity business, they recognised that using the logistics data in real-time supply chain management was where there was differentiated value. Other industries will now start to make that leap.

“Lastly, I think we will see AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) coming into the fabric of business technology. Previously, AI/ML has been bolted onto many products more as a marketing gimmick than adding real customer value. In 2023, we can expect AI/ML to be embedded in the workflow of every use case.”

With AI/ML seeing some massive advancements, it’s clear that it will become incredibly prominent in the world of Business. Tony commented, “With the hype around OpenAI and ChatGPT, AI/ML has arrived straight to the consumer, so I think we are absolutely going to see this playing a bigger role within business technology. You see business tech companies now running as fast as they can to harness this in their product.

As artificial intelligence gets… well… more intelligent, Tony believes there will be a few key ways that this will be realised. Tony said, “we should expect smarter products that will span from having capabilities that:

1. Create truly actionable insights that go beyond walls of charts on a web page where we have to work out what question we need answering and what decisions and actions we should take based on those charts. Instead, we will have the AI/ML highlight what decision we need to make, what action is next including guidance on how we might improve the outcome of that action.

2. Recommend improvements to parts of a business workflow through general AI/ML models. This could help business people, for example, write more compelling emails and provide feedback on what generally makes the business artefacts we’re creating more impactful.

3. Install AI/ML that learns from the company’s specific workflows to ascertain what a successful sales process looks like for specific companies and for specific customers. In selling, this will allow us to go beyond account-based selling and guided selling to having AI/ML help us and the buyer have a truly personalised, highly valuable guided buying experience.“

If Tony’s assumptions on the year ahead are anything to go off of, it’s apparent that tech will shape industry practises more and more in the years to come. With ChatGPT and OpenAI gaining such notoriety, it will be exciting to watch what new software will emerge onto the market, driving investment along with it.

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily

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