98% of leaders are consolidating their remote work tools

Coronavirus-triggered work from anywhere has fueled the demand for digital tools to facilitate effective collaboration and document management. The work from home is unlikely to dissipate soon as the global vaccine rollout is expected to be a long-drawn affair. Moreover, worldwide, business enterprises are adopting hybrid work policies, and this is likely to further drive demand for digital collaboration tools. Today, it’s clear: there is no in-office default anymore. Remote work, in some shape or form, is here to stay.

IT leaders have learned many valuable lessons on how to quickly move entire organizations to remote workforces, how to create a secure work environment and how to prioritize digital initiatives like never before. Now the work from anywhere is going to be Next generation. A survey says, by 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed using artificial intelligence and data analytics. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the AI- and data-science-equipped VC or PE investor will become commonplace. Increased advanced analytics capabilities are rapidly shifting the early-stage venture investing strategy away from gut feel and qualitative decision making to a more modern platform-based quantitative process. Information gathered from sources such as LinkedIn, PitchBook, Crunchbase and Owler, along with third-party data marketplaces, can be leveraged alongside diverse past and current investments.

This data is increasingly being used to build sophisticated models that can better determine the viability, strategy and potential outcome of an investment in a short amount of time. AI tools will be used to determine how likely a leadership team is to succeed based on employment history, field expertise and previous business success.

For the CIO and the whole IT organization, 2021 brings with it the imperative to generate more business value using innovative technologies and approaches to information. Current AI technology is already capable of providing insights into customer desires and predicting future behavior. Unique profiles can be built with little to no human input, which can be further developed via natural language processing AI that can determine qualities about an individual from real-time or audio recordings. While this technology is currently used primarily for marketing and sales purposes, by 2025, investment organizations will be leveraging it to determine which leadership teams are most likely to succeed.

To meet a broad spectrum of support needs, your remote support tool must be agile enough to provide support for any platform, via any channel or device, depending on the support staff and end-user preference. It should also, ideally, go beyond reactive support—responding to problems via phone, chat or remote-control sessions-to proactive support. This takes more sophisticated approaches, like using data mining to support advanced self-help capabilities. Features like unattended access and the ability to run multiple support sessions simultaneously can help ensure support staff have time to efficiently resolve issues for more users, including those “high need” ones.

Deepak Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA