The “As a Service” Economy has exploded over the last few years, (we even referenced it in our 2022 Insights Outlook), and it doesn’t appear to be something that’s going to abate anytime soon. However, one new area of evolution will be how DTC transforming from business model to sales channel will continue to intersect with our as a service world. Why? A need to reimagine CX with the notion of on demand service at the core will be essential to the digital transformation and ecommerce strategies of tomorrow. To succeed in a new world order driven by one-click service and subscriptions, brands will need to dig much more deeply into the consumer mindset, really understand where they are in their decision journey, and then make sure to put specific emotional triggers in front of them to create the best CX possible to drive conversions. Slick CX will no longer be enough in a landscape now driven by a brand’s ability to demonstrate and act upon authentic intentionality towards its customers.

To do this, in the year ahead and beyond, organizations will really need to think about getting into the customer’s headspace much earlier. This will require a lot more discipline around implementing processes that are iterative and capable of straddling product/service scenarios, simultaneously. Expect to see an increasing list of niche as a service offerings designed to further realize the notion of bringing the as a service concept to life in nearly every industry from banking to auto. Additionally, look for new means of brand innovation that will make better use of first party data combined with other data sets to help improve customer understanding to do so. One time purchases and transactions will continue to become a thing of the past as day to day relationships that allow brands to anticipate and serve become the Holy Grail of new brand loyalty models that are now relationship based versus transaction driven.

While the phrase “stakeholder capitalism,” put forth by Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray in his book Tomorrow’s Capitalist last year, may have not taken hold as broadly as we might have liked it to, the underpinnings of it as an idea that must guide the highest levels of leadership, absolutely has. Whether it is tackling everything from diversity, equity, and inclusion, to sustainability, to the undeniable realities and dire implications of climate change, what has become abundantly clear is that it is now essential for organizations to find ways of making their stakeholders feel anti fragile at a time when the notion of it seems almost absurd with a black swan event lurking around every corner. What can potentially make the difference this time and cut through the clutter of all the talk of equity and right sizing the environment these last few years? A new generation of senior leadership.

For the first time in about thirty years, Baby Boomers, known for their sometimes passive, lip service approach to management, are being replaced by Generation X at the highest echelons of corporate leadership. The often overlooked first Generation ever to be named for a letter and the one inextricably linked to the grunge and angst of the early aughts, is now on the receiving end of perhaps the greatest transference of leadership in modern history. Ironically despite its reputation, what Gen X likely will bring to the C-Suite is a refreshing hunger for real and meaningful change, and the self-accountability to get it done. It will be fascinating to see what the era of latch key kids left to fend for themselves, before the age of helicopter parenting came into vogue, will do to enact the type of positive creative destruction that doesn’t just sound good in the Board Room, but actually delivers on the promise of making tomorrow better than today.

As all organizations continue to struggle to acquire and retain customers, being as human led in their approach to operationalizing AI as possible will be critical. Much of human decision-making is based on emotion and cognitive bias, not logic. Feelings inform thoughts, not the inverse, despite what conventional wisdom has told us to date. At BRANDthrō, we are using data science to understand more about employee/customer emotions and decisioning in a way that can be built into a company’s systems and processes at the day-to-day operational level. Using both math and direct human feedback, allows us to put guardrails around AI alone. Why? Because, AI alone does not provide the contextualization required to accommodate for social and cultural cues which can often lead to misinterpretation and misinformation.

For enterprises to succeed with AI they will need to address the gap between the technology and the business outcomes it hopes to achieve. This requires close measurement and evaluation as AI gets scaled across different environments within the enterprise. To do this, in 2024 expect to see more large organizations using AI enabled decision intelligence. Decision intelligence helps augment and automate business decisions by linking data with decisions and outcomes. It uses a combination of technologies like AI and ML to improve the way decisions are made.

What’s great about decision intelligence is that it leverages the power of AI and other technologies yet does so in ways that augment not replace human intelligence—a trend that will hopefully emerge more pervasively in the year ahead and help drive the market correction that’s required as a result of brands over indexing on AI and its wrongfully presumed omnipotent power in 2023.