Digital Lifescapes

For two decades, enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been the dominant force reshaping how organizations consume business applications. Yet as artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities accelerate, a critical question emerges. Will AI apps render the SaaS model obsolete? The answer, as with most paradigm shifts, is far more nuanced than a simple yes or no. Enterprise SaaS isn't dying, but it's growing much older. And maturity, while a testament to success, brings its own set of challenges. Enterprise SaaS Market Development The U.S. enterprise software market is now highly saturated, and the momentum that once seemed unstoppable has definitively slowed. And yes, AI is a contributing factor. The B2B SaaS expansion era that defined the last decade, characterized by rising customer counts and reliable growth within existing accounts, has reached its natural limits. What's particularly telling is the shift in CIO priorities. While SaaS vendors were racing to expand their...

Across the globe, more CEOs and their leadership team now say that business process automation has become a key driver of their organization's digital growth. Moreover, a survey of more than 2,000 Information Technology (IT) and Line of Business (LoB) decision-makers confirms that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing rapidly. Over a quarter of all AI initiatives are already in production and more than one third are in advanced development stages. Besides, organizations are reporting an increase in their AI technology investment this year, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Artificial Intelligence Market Development Delivering a better customer experience was identified as the leading driver for AI adoption by more than half the large companies surveyed. At the same time, a similar number of survey respondents indicated that the greatest impact of AI is helping employees to improve productivity. The stud...

Augmented analytics, continuous intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) are among the top trends in big data and analytics that have significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. "The size, complexity, distributed nature of data, speed of action and the continuous intelligence required by digital business means that rigid and centralized architectures and tools break down,” said Donald Feinberg, vice president at Gartner . “The continued survival of any business will depend upon an agile, data-centric architecture that responds to the constant rate of change." Gartner recommends that data and analytics leaders collaborate with senior business leaders about their critical business priorities and explore the ten top related trends. Augmented Analytics Augmented analytics is the next wave of disruption in the data and analytics market. It uses machine learning (ML) and AI t...

A relatively small group of savvy executives have strategies in place to harness new business process automation technologies and thereby advance their digital transformation agenda. Meanwhile, a much larger group is closely following the market leaders, to explore their lessons-learned from pilot projects. According to the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research, new survey results suggest most organizations are adopting or considering artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) due to its commercial growth benefits, rather than the potential to cut jobs. Despite being somewhat new, there's adoption momentum for the technology. Machine Learning Market Development Almost 50 percent of their survey respondents have deployed or plan to deploy machine learning in their organizations within the next 12 months. Therefore, this paints a more optimistic picture of machine learning adoption than is often portrayed by other industry analysts. "Out of man...