During the course of this year, business leaders are being put under extraordinary pressure. There is a highly volatile business environment owing to factors such as high interest rates, continuing unrest around the world, and other factors that all contribute to the current economic climate.

As a result, how do you survive in a challenging economic environment, and how do you keep your company innovative in the face of reduced budgets and fewer resources? Many of our customers and prospects are asking themselves those questions at this very moment.

As we look forward to 2023, we predict a focus on agility and focus on focus. Connect, communicate, and collaborate to rally your teams around common goals. Increasing market reach and providing premium experiences to existing customers will be the key to accelerating new revenue streams.

Predictions for the future of work

We wrote about the importance of innovations such as AI-based meeting translation and transcription, industry-wide innovation, and others last year in Zoom’s Office of the CIO. Among the things we discussed were total experience, upskilling, and AI-based meeting translation and transcription. Today, in a world where flexible work environments are becoming more prevalent, much of that is still valid:

• An organization will put more effort in aligning the experience of the employees and customers for a total customer experience. Customer satisfaction is a direct result of happy employees, after all.

• We’ll continue to invest in skillsets to ensure our employees have the tools they need to succeed in every working style, regardless of where they are in their career.

• As more work will be done digitally and as these tools become more and more ingrained in our daily lives, artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a more prominent role in the future.

• Across a wide range of industries, including health care, government, finance, academia, and so many more, technology is being adopted for the purpose of reinventing the way people are served.

The focus as we move forward will be to provide more ways for people to work together better, regardless of where they are located, and provide them with more tools to help do so. To achieve this, it is essential to have an efficient connection.

1. Organizations will embrace a truly hybrid experience

The buzzword is hybrid. In the past few years, organizations have been experimenting with hybrid events, hybrid work environments, and hybrid everything.

Creating a hybrid event requires closer alignment of virtual and in-person experiences. The two must communicate and collaborate seamlessly.

How can hybrid become more than just a buzzword?

Building a truly hybrid experience starts with company leadership buying in. Creating a reason for people to visit offices starts here. Furthermore, it means that people can work from anywhere and thrive in their roles – regardless of where they are.

Additionally, proximity bias must be recognized and eliminated. ‘2023’. Growth opportunities must be equal for on-site, remote, and hybrid employees.

2. Workspaces for digital natives will become the norm

There will always be a need for businesses to hire the best talent, but what are they doing in order to attract the right candidates to their organization? There is quite a big difference between the characteristics we look for in candidates today, and what we would look for even just a few years ago in candidates. However, the problem with this is that we haven’t yet created work environments that are appropriate for digital natives.

It has only been in the last few years that many in the workforce have developed the skills to work in an environment where there is a hybrid model. There are a lot of young millennials and Gen Zers that grew up in this environment. With little instruction, they are able to conquer remote and hybrid environments and thrive in them with relative ease. It’s true that we’re having a hard time attracting Gen Z talent because they have completely different expectations when it comes to technology.

What is the best way to provide technology to meet the needs of those who are digital natives? The standard practice of waving a badge to unlock a door or gain access to a workstation isn’t going to cut it anymore. The daily practice is to streamline workflows, recognize voice commands, work together instantly, and operate without touching anything.

Organizations will also have to continue upskilling people who are not digital natives in order to enable a more inclusive collaboration environment and, perhaps most importantly, to enable their ability to do their jobs more effectively.

3. Meeting intelligence will provide more actionable insights

What are some ways in which technology can take care of some of your menial tasks for you? There is no doubt that artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to improve each year, and it is finally time to develop these solutions in a meaningful way. Throughout the world, smart businesses are making AI a part of their everyday lives and many more will follow suit in the near future.

It’s not just about automatically centereding the camera on the speaker. That’s not what we’re talking about either. The conversational intelligence we are talking about provides meaningful and actionable insights on customer interactions, assisting with note-taking, efficiency, productivity, and much more. If you can get rid of a lot of minutiae from the average person’s daily tasks then you’ll be surprised how much more productive they’ll be and how much more efficient they’ll be. I challenge you to ask yourself this question: How can you develop new products or provide better customer support if your company has extra time or resources to dedicate to more meaningful tasks?

4. The workspace of your dreams will come to life 

It seems like we file this under “something has to change” every year, but this year seems different! For modern teams, we need better rooms. We are moving away from traditional conference rooms. We are in the era of next-generation meeting spaces.

Consider, for example, the possibility that you don’t enter a room with walls of glass only to sit for a while around a table and stare at a single screen, fix your gaze on a single camera, and then lean forward to speak into a microphone, whose location is still a mystery to you.

In order to remain competitive, organizations need to be able to offer their employees a different experience when they walk into a space, enabling them to collaborate without having to worry about whether the technology works or not. The next step would be to integrate modern and smart technology that allows remote participants to benefit from the best view of the meeting regardless of where they are in the world, as well as include intelligent camera systems that automatically give remote participants the best view. Taking out the assigned seating would be a great result.

Other areas ripe for disruption

Our customers are also paying attention to a few other trends that are on their minds right now:

Recreating watercooler moments

Having virtual meetings in our daily lives has become such an integral part of our lives. How can we recreate serendipitous moments or impromptu communications if we don’t have the mental capacity to do so? There was a time when Steve Jobs thought that serendipity was a very important phenomenon and that it could be engineered. It is clear that a lot of corporate leaders are embracing this idea as they seek out new sources of innovation in an increasingly hybrid economy. It is our intention to introduce Zoom Spots, an extension of the Zoom Desk, to help with this exact idea in 2023, which is a sort of virtual coworking space. As a result of Zoom Spots, you have an opportunity to work with your colleagues and engage in free-form video chats outside of your scheduled meetings.

Thrive in every economic environment

In order to be a great leader, especially a great CIO, you need to put your plans in place for tomorrow; you need to take action today in order to create long-term value for your organization, no matter what the economic climate is.

A recent session we held featured operational tips, technology best practices, and insights from the front lines that you can use to drive growth with fewer resources. In this on-demand video, you’ll get a chance to learn how several key industry leaders are using technology to assist them in navigating uncertainty in the workplace, and you’ll be able to get insights into better supporting your own workforce and customers.

Metaverse

The metaverse, ah yes, what a wonderful thing. As virtual reality is invading a greater and greater proportion of our lives, the concept of a metaverse – or a digital world that exists parallel to our physical world – has not yet come to fruition. The time is not yet ripe for it, but it’s coming soon. As humans interact more with each other and the world around them, expect to see more metaverse innovation from leading tech organizations.

In addition to job training, there are some interesting areas where I believe there would be more use cases for immersive digital spaces, such as dating apps and social media. Adding your voice or personality to your digital profiles could enhance these experiences and provide you with a more personalized experience.

Hardware

There is pretty much nothing new in the hardware we use today that we did not use three years ago, when we left the office. For more than 25 years, monitors, laptops, and keyboards have been basically the same in terms of their functionality. It would be nice if monitors had built-in cameras and teleprompter capabilities built right into their cores, in addition to the cameras in the center.

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