By Amy Townsend

Today, Aragon Research kicked off our 2021 Transform Tour (sponsored by Avaya) with our first event of the year: ‘Transform Tour 2021: Transformation via Automation’. This event included two insightful presentations that took a deep dive into how enterprises can use automation to their advantage to transform both business processes and customer experiences in 2021 and beyond. 

This blog will provide a recap of the event. If you’d like to watch the on-demand playback of the entire event, you can do so by clicking here. 

Analyst Session

The topic for our analyst session was: ‘5 Strategic Predictions for Second Half 2021’. Our analysts discussed their predictions for key topics such as artificial intelligence, digital labor, employee engagement, computer vision, and tPaaS.

Our analysts:

• Jim Lundy, Founder, CEO, and Lead Analyst
• Betsy Burton, VP of Research and Aragon Fellow
• Craig Kennedy, Sr. Director of Research
• Ken Dulaney, VP of Research and Aragon Fellow

Key Takeaways:

• By 2025, over 80% of the Fortune 500 will deploy AI-enabled behavior-based security software (75% probability).
  
  • AI is becoming a game-changer in enterprise security software as technology providers find new ways to use AI to detect and respond to potential cybersecurity threats. 
• Through 2025, digital labor growth will exceed 100% yearly due to the deployment of role-specific chatbots/virtual agents (70% probability).
  • The steady growth in digital labor is being fueled by the rapid adoption of AI-powered chatbots, or virtual agents, across many industry verticals. 
• By EY 2022, computer vision will be a differentiating capability in the leading predictive analytics offerings (80% probability).
  • Computer vision is the ability to combine artificial intelligence, video, and predictive analytics.
• By 2025, the tPaaS market will subsume 60% of the iPaaS market (70% probability).
  • If you’re looking to transform your business, not just automate it, you should look at the tPaaS market (transformation platform-as-a-service).
• By 2023, 1 in 10 major enterprises will use employee engagement metrics as a component of year-end evaluations (60% probability).
  • Employee engagement metrics take the emotion out of evaluations. These metrics will help provide insight for evaluating remote employees. 

If you’re interested in receiving more guidance in these areas, consider scheduling an inquiry with our analysts. 

Guest Panelist Session

The topic for our guest panelist session was: ‘Transformation via Automation: The Customer Experience’. Our guest panelists discussed how their companies sped up transformation efforts to maintain a positive customer experience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and shared their advice for other companies who are also going through a digital transformation journey. 

Our guest panelists: 

• Simon Harrison, CMO of Avaya
• Michael Londgren, CMO of Seismic
• Niki Hall, CMO of Contentsquare

Key Takeaways:

• “Digital doesn’t mean doing the same thing as before but digitally. It means completely rethinking or fundamentally reimagining your approach to that process.” - Michael Londgren, Seismic
• “A successful digital transformation requires changing business processes and providing support. You can’t just spin everything up and continue with work.” - Simon Harrison, Avaya
• Contentsquare adopted a weekly video blast as a response to COVID-19, where executives would document the top 3 takeaways of the week and give a shout-out to goals reached. 
• Seismic shifted their All-Hands meeting from once a week to once a month to balance the changes of remote work.
• “Flexibility is key for empowering your employees, especially during remote work.” - Niki Hall, Contentsquare
• “We’re not going back to work, we’re going forward to work.” -  Simon Harrison, Avaya
• “We saw a deeper adoption of interactive content and social selling from our customers during the pandemic.” - Michael Londgren, Seismic
• The core focus for a successful remote workforce is communication and trust.
• “The unplanned fluidity of working virtually has actually improved productivity.” - Simon Harrison, Avaya
• Hosting pre-recorded virtual events has increased speaker availability/presence, changed the event from a customer event to an industry event, and increased reach by 10x. 
• “Instead of just responding to the pandemic, we re-thought what was possible and opened new opportunities. Digital transformation opens up new opportunities.” - Michael Londgren, Seismic

Next Steps

If you missed the event, you can access the recorded playback by clicking this link.

Registration is now open for our next stop of the 2021 Transform Tour: ‘Transform Tour 2021: The Power of Disruptive Technologies'. This event will take place (virtually) on June 8th, 2021 at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET.