2020 Enterprise Forecast: Automation & Efficiency Reign Supreme
To kick off 2020 (a new year and a new decade!), I asked our team here at Work-Bench as well as our portfolio companies to reflect on some of the biggest enterprise trends and technologies they foresee emerging in the year ahead.
While we’ve been laser focused on enterprise tech investing since day one, it’s clear that enterprise tech has become the hottest ticket item on VC radars, thanks to a record breaking year in 2019. According to PitchBook data, in 2019 enterprise startups attracted $30B in funding, which is almost double the previous year and about one third more than that of consumer startups. Also, Gartner recently published a report highlighting how the enterprise software market is poised to grow up to $503B, with IT spending projected to top $3.9T in 2020, and exceed $4T by 2021.
With all this cash flowing around the ecosystem, there’s plenty of room for growth for enterprise startups — here are a few predictions of where the industry will be heading:
Smart orchestration will redefine enterprise efficiencies in the Slack era
“Smart orchestration will be the next phase of efficiency of the always-connected Slack era. Connecting the right people at the right time in a large company is a lot more difficult than it sounds. When you overlay these collaboration challenges with relevant tooling and workflows, everything from recovering from a website outage to closing your monthly finance books will be way more efficient.”
-Jon Lehr, Co-Founder & General Partner, Work-Bench
RPA vs. IPA: Enterprises admit not all automation is equal
“The excitement around robotic process automation (RPA) will start to plateau as first-mover enterprises turn to intelligent process automation (IPA) to automate more cognitive and valuable business activities. With tightly focused use cases targeting non-technical users, IPA products automate manual workflows covering a much wider variety of business data. It’s an approach that generates fast ROI for every enterprise that embraces the change — and much more satisfied employees that can finally focus on work that matters.”
-Harald Collet, CEO of Alkymi
AI & ML will hit their stride in delivering business value to the Fortune 500
“While a handful of leading tech companies have been leveraging artificial intelligence for years, broader industry investment in AI is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the majority of the Fortune 1000, 2018 was the year of attracting and growing talent and 2019 was focused on model and infrastructure development. Now, they are seeing the fruits of those investments: 2020 is the year AI is going live, broadly, across a huge range of industries.”
-Adam Wenchel, CEO, Arthur AI
“In 2020, there will be a reckoning around machine learning as the profound effects it can have on an organization’s workflows are realized. ML teams will move past figuring out how to do ML and move toward value extraction. ML is a lifecycle, and we’re in the midst of a transformative shift in enterprise operations as those cycles are set in motion.”
-Diego Oppenheimer, CEO, Algorithmia
Data Process Automation (DPA) will open the floodgates for data driven businesses
“Enterprises are poised to take full advantage of their data assets by ‘automating’ the processing of their data. Fortune 1000 enterprises have been collecting data for years, and investments in analytics and data science are enabling more and more data driven business decisions. The only bottleneck left now is the painful, manual process of preparing raw data to be usable. Data processing automation (DPA) is beginning to, and will continue to, enable enterprises to automate away manual, ad-hoc data processing, and open the floodgates for data driven businesses.”
- Tim Delisle, CEO, Datalogue
