Technology provides businesses of all shapes and sizes with the tools they need to drive growth and innovation. And that’s never more important than in times of turmoil and economic uncertainty.
Whatever the broader economic outlook, businesses that can quickly identify and react reactively or proactively to changing customer demands, needs, and priorities will always thrive.
The technology landscape is constantly evolving. This means taking a high-level, strategic approach to deploying the right skills across your workforce is essential. By doing this, business leaders ensure their organizations are ready to take advantage of the tools, platforms, and trends that help them address their priorities without being sidetracked by potential distractions. You can check
So here are five areas I feel companies need to focus on when it comes to developing critical skills. Whether it’s his one-man show providing professional or freelance services, or being part of a global company with thousands of employees, skills in these areas will make your business more efficient, safer and more secure. and profitably.
1. Artificial Intelligence
Arguably, AI is the hot topic of the day when it comes to business technology. Developing AI skills doesn’t necessarily have to be about learning advanced computer science or how to create machine learning algorithms from scratch. More practically, it’s about figuring out how to fit the plethora of tools and platforms that are becoming increasingly available, affordable, and usable every day to your business needs.
By now, most of you reading this have probably heard of or used ChatGPT, or the new AI-powered version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. You may have tried tools like Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion to see what the fuss is about AI-generated art.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Literally hundreds of AIs designed to automate and accelerate leisure and business activities, from bookkeeping to social media management, lead generation, text, video and soundtrack creation, to managing all kinds of projects. The tools and platforms you have adopted are ready to use.
Incorporating today’s AI capabilities into your organization requires not only developing advanced programming, math, and statistics skills, but also identifying what kinds of tasks would benefit from being automated and delegated to AI. , you need to find the right applications and tools to do it. It is also important to be able to understand and predict how AI will affect business units in the future. So you can leverage and benefit from more advanced and powerful tools as they inevitably become available.
2. Data analysis
Most companies don’t know how to use even the fraction of the data they generate or have access to from external sources. Companies that do so can use it to increase efficiency, better understand their markets and competition, and develop products and services that better meet customer needs.
As with AI, this is especially true for smaller organizations, but these days it doesn’t necessarily mean developing the hardcore technical skills you needed if you wanted to perform analytics 20 years ago. is not necesary to.
Today, you can find countless tools with easy-to-use user interfaces to help you analyze your data. All you need is access to the data you already understand. For example, what demographics a product or service is popular with, what price points customers are satisfied with, how customer service performance affects customer churn, how disruption affects customer churn, and so on. , breakage and waste affect the bottom line.
3. Cyber security
It’s a sad but inevitable fact that while technology has enabled us to do amazing new things, it also leaves us vulnerable to new threats. The cost of cybercrime to businesses is expected to reach $8 trillion in 2023 and rise to £10.5 trillion by 2025. Much of this is due to the costs incurred when data is stolen. Estimated at about $500 per record stolen, the most damaging cyberattack is theft, which sees fraudsters steal millions of records.
Again, there is a common misconception. Implementing your cybersecurity skills means hiring an elite expert who sits in a dark room and scans your monitor for thieves trying to breach your firewall. In fact, his most important cybersecurity skill is one that can be taught relatively cheaply to anyone. These include safe password management practices, malware avoidance, and awareness of phishing and social engineering attacks designed to trick employees into giving up access or letting in attackers.
For smaller organizations, this increased level of awareness and the broader capabilities of existing off-the-shelf security solutions are key elements of a basic cybersecurity strategy. Larger organizations should consider implementing policies throughout the organization from top to bottom. You should also consider implementing policies to keep devices secure when employees are in remote locations or accessing company assets through their devices.
4. User and customer experience
We know that customers increasingly value the experience of choosing, buying and using products and services, and that what they buy is more important than price or quality. After all, more and more of what we buy is subscription-based. If you’re not satisfied or feel you’re not getting enough value, you can cancel and reconsider your choice. But every time you interact with a business or use your purchase, experience matters. Therefore, good things are precious.
Customer experience agents are playing an increasingly important role in many types of businesses. Their job is to think about the entire customer journey across all touchpoints. Where are the frictions and small, slight drops in quality of experience that can ultimately lead to customer loss? And how can technological solutions help overcome these problems? Huh? It covers specific technical areas of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design to ensure that the products and services your customers use are designed to be as friendly and intuitive as possible.
5. Cloud Platform
Most of the skills mentioned earlier in this article can be delivered directly to the enterprise via an on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud platform. A cloud platform can also host the tools and applications you need internally to run your business processes (think collaboration platforms like Teams and Slack).
It can also be used to provide services directly to customers. For most businesses that cannot afford to spend millions of dollars on infrastructure and the ability to attract unlimited amounts of world-class talent, the cloud is the gateway to harnessing AI and machine learning, and the Combining services is an important skill.
This means cloud platforms, infrastructure, architecture and engineering expertise will continue to be of great value to companies of all sizes in 2023. It redefines what new paradigms and models of cloud computing, such as hybrid cloud, multicloud, and supercloud, can continue to emerge while making them more user-friendly and accessible to more enterprises.
