What Happened This Month: The enterprise applications market is marked by new releases incorporating generative AI, which improves productivity and efficiency. Still, many users remain wary of the technology, with a particular emphasis on the data used to train models. Vendors are also rolling out industry-specific versions of their software, intending to improve time to value and ROI.
Technology Developments
What? Generally available generative AI-infused products continue to hit the market, focused on leveraging AI across entire workflows, instead of just being used to handle isolated tasks. Generative AI is being used for front-end, back-end, and cross-department functions and workflows, as evidenced by new product releases from Salesforce, ServiceNow, OpenText, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and many others.
- Why? Generative AI is viewed as a must-have, table-stakes capability in enterprise-focused applications. However, vendors realize that the key to delivering a solid ROI will be ensuring that generative AI is delivered across the enterprise, incorporating data wherever it lives, as well as leveraging data from outside the organization.
- What It Means: Enterprises must assess whether they derive value from generative AI pilot programs. Meanwhile, vendors may need to assess their pricing models to ensure they can meet the technological needs of their customers, while also keeping compute costs under control. See my Enterprising Insights podcast for more information.
What? Customers are acknowledging the value of AI-powered features within UCaaS platforms, according to a NETSCOUT UCaaS survey. The results indicated that 57 percent of survey respondents indicated AI prioritization of messages based on urgency was extremely important; 56 percent of respondents considered the use of AI for editing messages as extremely important; 54 percent of respondents view AI-generated text summaries of voice messages and calls as extremely important; 53 percent of respondents see AI-generated text responses and AI-generated to-do task lists as extremely important.
- Why? Organizations are increasingly focused on driving productivity and efficiency, and AI is being seen as a viable engine to power that transformation.
- What It Means: Vendors have been highlighting the potential value of generative AI since the technology became commercially available last year. The survey indicates that their messaging—and the technology’s capabilities—are resonating with buyers. You can read the original blog post with the results here.
New Products or Services
What? Pegasystems announced several enhancements to its Pega GenAI Blueprint application, allowing users to collaborate and map out potential business applications and workflows, which can be created within Pega App Studio.
- Why? Blueprint addresses two key bottlenecks in application development: translating an idea into the initial application or workflow and incorporating stakeholder feedback. Pega users can adopt Blueprint to visualize processes and greatly reduce the time to create the software to connect back-end systems to front-end systems, such as legacy ERP to modern customer service apps.
- What It Means: Because the app supports real-time collaboration with stakeholders, the time required to incorporate changes or feedback can be significantly reduced. While interesting and powerful, even more functionality and value will be available later this year when the application’s generative AI prompts can be grounded in more specific datasets. This should further reduce the time it takes to create a viable application or workflow. See my research note for more details.
What? Oracle NetSuite announced NetSuite SuiteSuccess Healthcare Edition, a new solution to assist healthcare organizations with improving business efficiency and supporting compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. The solution leverages advancements in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to help streamline business processes, expand insights, improve decision-making, optimize resource allocation, and enhance patient care.
- Why? SaaS vendors increasingly realize that customers need solutions specifically designed to address their industry-specific needs. They are unable or unwilling to use generic software that requires significant customization. Oracle is launching this solution to meet the needs of its large and growing base of healthcare customers. See my research note for more details.
- What It Means: Offering a healthcare industry-specific solution is critical to ensuring that Oracle can continue to expand its customer base and compete against smaller, more entrenched industry ERP providers. As NetSuite targets mid-market companies, it must ensure that the solution provides the maximum out-of-the-box functionality possible to reduce time-to-value and increase customer ROI.
What? Salesforce announced several artificial intelligence and data capabilities to help retail and supplier organizations improve productivity and efficiency within its Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud offering. The retail-focused solution provides tools that help companies unlock and unify customer data and industry market research to make all steps of the route-to-market process more efficient and intelligent. Furthermore, as the Consumer Goods Cloud platform is being integrated with Salesforce Data Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud users will be able to connect account data with broader industry data to create more comprehensive, unified profiles for each customer and generate segments and micro-segments that allow them to plan more precise assortments and promotions at the hyper-local level.
- Why? Organizations are awash in data and, as such, want to provide a more granular level of personalization and relevancy across sales, market, and support functions. In addition to first-party customer data, companies often seek to incorporate third-party, syndicated data on similar audiences and personas, which can provide additional insights to improve personalization and CX. The Consumer Goods Cloud offering makes integrating this information easier and harmonizing it with existing customer journey data.
- What It Means: On two fronts, offerings such as Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud are likely to become more commonplace. First, large SaaS vendors increasingly offer industry-specific solutions that provide more out-of-the-box functionality to reduce time to value and increase ROI. Second, as organizations desire to provide the most personalized engagement across all channels and functions, they seek additional data sources and ways to combine this information with existing customer data. You can read more in my research note.
What? Microsoft announced the Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the company’s Copilot-first contact center solution, which is designed to leverage generative AI across all customer engagement channels. Available as a standalone contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offering, the solution maximizes customers’ investment in existing technology by connecting to any CRM or custom app and tightly integrating with other Microsoft applications.
- Why? The market for CCaaS solutions is at an exciting point in its evolution; some end customers believe seats will contract due to the growing use of AI as a catalyst for driving more self-service interactions, while others believe humans will still be necessary to ensure excellent sales, support, and service experiences. This has led to vendors with significant AI capabilities eyeing the opportunity to replace incumbent CCaaS and on-premises contact center vendors with AI-enabled solutions.
- What It Means: As Microsoft targets incumbent CCaaS vendors in the market, the key for Microsoft is being capable of handling internal support issues, for which it has a massive amount of internal knowledge, and delivering KPI improvements for each of its clients. Microsoft’s experience deploying AI may provide the company with a leg up against some of the more entrenched CCaaS vendors that do not have the company’s muscle and expertise. You can read my research note focusing on the news here.
Market Developments
What? SAP announced it will acquire digital adoption platform provider WalkMe for US $1.5 billion.
- Why? SAP is focused on getting its customers to migrate to its S4/HANA cloud-based offering. It has been on an acquisition spree, snatching up business transformation management companies Signavio and LeanIX. The WalkMe acquisition further rounds out SAP’s capabilities by providing tools required to assess and manage technology assets before a cloud migration or digital transformation initiative.
- What It Means: SAP is pushing its customers to meet a deadline for migrating to its cloud-based solutions. The integration of technology from WalkMe should help to remove some of the administrative and technical barriers that impact digital transformation efforts. The acquisition also enables SAP to introduce its offerings to WalkMe’s existing client base. You can read more in a research note written by me and my colleague, Dr. Bob Sutor.
What? Adobe updated its terms and conditions, stating that the company will not train AI on user content stored locally or in the cloud.
- Why? Adobe had faced criticism that it had changed its terms of service to allow the software company to “access your content through both automated and manual methods,” and “techniques such as machine learning” may be used to analyze content to improve services, software, and user experiences. The confusion stemmed from the wording of the terms of service, as opposed to an actual change in Adobe’s stance on training AI models (content review is done in the cloud only, and is only done to check for pornography, violent content, etc.).
- What It Means: Adobe and other vendors that use AI and train models need to review their processes and language around data use, given users’ heightened concerns about data privacy and security. Wariness around AI and how large companies use data to feed their models is on the rise, and organizations need to be very careful in explaining any data monitoring or review. See my Enterprising Insights podcast which covers this topic.
What? Nice announced 1CX, a new Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution designed for rapid implementation and fast ROI. This new offering is priced at a market-shattering $5 per user, per month, and leverages NICE’s full-featured omnichannel cloud PBX and fully featured workforce collaboration tools across all devices and channels.
- Why? Competition in the UCaaS space is fierce, with vendors competing in a constantly evolving market. As AI matures and becomes even more powerful, the technological capabilities of each vendor are likely to be essentially equivalent, and vendors will need other ways of differentiating their offerings.
- What It Means: As competition continues to increase among vendors, other vendors may release product offerings designed to compete on price and use them to generate revenue from new segments while also priming them for additional up-sells in the future.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Quantum June 2024 Monthly Market Snapshot Report
Enterprising Insights, Episode 31 – Market Insight Report Spotlights
Enterprising Insights, Episode 30 – Predictions at the Halfway Point of 2024
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
