I recently read the 2019 Euroscape from Accel Partners about the SaaS Industry. Philippe Botteri, Managing Partner and Author of the Post, sees two profound trends emerging and reshaping the Future Of Work over the next 5 to 10-years.
1. The rise of the bots: “I want a robot for every person,” Dines told Forbes during his interview. While Robotic Process Automation and process mining are leading the adoption curve, delivering unprecedented ROI to the enterprise, the rate of AI adoption is still very much on the cusp of explosion. With more than 50% of companies across sectors at the evaluation stage and less than one third considering AI as a mature practice, we think we are about to see a fast pace of adoption. And yes, we agree with Daniel that there will be a lot more bots in the enterprise in the near future, as AI comes of age.
2. Ubiquitous APIs: with Amazon Web Services reaching a $34 billion revenue run rate, Stripe and Twilio valued close to or above $20 billion and the next generation of companies emerging, APIs are now foundational to the development of cloud computing and their adoption will only accelerate. We will see a new generation of API companies emerging from Europe, with companies like MessageBird and Algolia already showing great promise.
At AptivIO, we see the same trends emerge in the space of Autonomous Sales Development, a $5 Billion White Space. By applying our proprietary Intelligent Automation Platform across thousands of Market Data and Sales Engagement APIs, we auto-generate sales-ready leads and mitigate sales pipeline risk. By contrast, Today’s incumbents in Marketing Automation, Sales Intelligence, and Sales Acceleration deliver siloed insights and workflows, that then require a lot of manual effort to bring together into a coherent, orchestrated, and systematic sales development process and narrative.
These emerging "Self-Driving Enterprise" technologies will undoubtedly redefine work as we now it. The main impact we are seeing is the shift from low-value to high-value tasks in the same person, freeing them from tedious repetitive tasks. It sounds "cliche" but it is a profound statement. In Sales Prospecting for example, you need to be a very good Salesperson, with lots of experience in driving opportunities to close to truly and deeply understand your market. You can then immediately assess if an incoming lead will yield results. Intelligent automation is able to mimic, not replace that sales intuition, freeing that sales expert of manual research, outreach. Building trusted relationships, closing a deal remain a very human-only activity in its level of empathy and interpersonal skills requirement.