Business
Forrester’s 2024 Planning Guides: Economic Uncertainty Tempers 2024 Budget Expectations
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2024 Planning Guides, more realistic budget expectations will serve leaders well as they
About this update from Forrester Research, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":" LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nAccording to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2024 Planning Guides, more realistic budget expectations will serve leaders well as they enter 2024, but now is not the time to hunker down, as stakeholder expectations for growth remain steadfast. Additionally, to accelerate growth and keep pace with the evolving expectations of empowered digital customers, leaders should invest in AI and in their own digital capabilities instead of relying on service providers. In the next year, European digital leaders expect their firms to spend a whopping average of 28% of their organisation’s digital budget on services. A versatile AI approach can deliver a broad range of solutions across operations that create customer value, cut inefficient complexity, and drive innovation.\n\n\nForrester’s Planning Guides help leaders across technology, marketing, digital, and customer experience (CX) functions during annual budgeting and prioritisation cycles. They provide relevant benchmark operational data and recommendations for areas to experiment, deepen, or divest budget allocations for the coming year. Key insights from Forrester’s 2024 Planning Guides include the following.\n\n\nAreas to increase investment in 2024:\n\n\n\nAI strategies and tools that deliver customer value. To deliver greater customer value, leaders must leverage AI for efficiency and effectiveness. This includes using synthetic data for training and refining AI models and AI-powered TuringBots to build and deliver higher-quality customer software faster and cheaper.\n\n\n\n\nDigital B2B buyer interactions and self-serve routes to market. B2B buyer composition and practices have changed. As such, go-to-market strategies must change, as well. In 2024, businesses should create seamless digital experiences that enable buyers to make product purchases independently through websites, marketplaces, and app stores. They should also consider hiring a revenue operations leader to drive tighter alignment across organisational functions to maximise customer value.\n\n\n\nAreas to decrease investment in 2024:\n\n\n\nRedundant cloud environments and tools across functions. While cloud remains the primary focus of advancements in development and AI, leaders should gauge whether adding new cloud environments will shift workloads seamlessly and help their broader IT design.\n...