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Predictions
2023
 Fortune Favors The
Bold And Focused
The past two years have necessitated big swings and quick thinking. In 2023, smart
business leaders will get focused — pruning efforts that aren’t bearing fruit and prioritizing
long-term growth. Economic and geopolitical turmoil will sow fear and disruption, yet
panic, short-sighted revenue grabs, and poorly planned returns to the office will only make
things worse.

Trust will be at the forefront of business priorities in 2023. Customers are increasingly
weary of organizations playing fast and loose with their personal data, and regulators aren’t
far behind. And it won’t stop there — fueled by the ire of fed-up customers and employees,
regulators will scrutinize greenwashing, misinformation, and employee surveillance.
The interlocking market dynamics of 2023 will require business leaders to stay true to a
long-term strategic vision while operating within unknown territory. A laser focus on their
organizations’ missions and strengths — and a willingness to shed distractions that don’t
move the needle — will be the defining factor of success in 2023.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2

Automation
D
espite the significant proven benefits of automation over

investment turns
the past several years, 2023 will see a slight dampening
of automation velocity. A more rational approach is
emerging, which is good. Economic uncertainty will tap the

toward the pragmatic.

brakes on transformation and focus on core business drivers:
resilience and efficiency.

Unable to reach consensus on transformative projects,

companies will settle on known issues and risks. For
example, some companies will redirect funds from machine-
The economy will shift 10% learning-based decision support for loan approvals to risk

of automation budgets
and resilience efforts that shore up supply chain gaps.
Others will invest in physical automation to ensure business

from transformation to continuity in the face of ongoing labor shortages. Efforts will
pay off for those with the mettle to adjust to 2023’s realities
resilience. while doubling down on automation to reap overwhelming
competitive advantage.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 3

B2B demand leaders
A
s demand teams face waning leads-based

deliver satisfying
contributions to revenue results, the number of these
teams reporting into sales organizations will spike to
20% by the end of 2023. Too many companies will make

experiences across
this move in a misguided attempt to improve alignment at
organizations with underperforming revenue engines. But
reconfigured reporting lines alone will not fix alignment

the customer lifecycle

issues — nor can they correct for demand organizations that
myopically prioritize the delivery of more tactics ahead of
generating meaningful value for prospects and customers.

… or struggle. Success, regardless of where demand marketing reports,

will depend on demand leaders fully embracing their role
in delivering satisfying experiences across the customer
lifecycle. That will require marketing and sales to evolve
their alignment and integration in order to support buyers
and customers. This cannot be achieved until both of their
internal operations are tuned to address buying groups and
multiple opportunity types.

The number of demand

teams reporting into
sales will jump to 20%.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 4

Some B2C CMOs fall
C
hasing short-term revenue growth in 2023 will come at

into the short-term

the cost of long-term brand building. CMOs with strategic
heft managed the pandemic crises, but the need for
quick wins in 2023 will induce CEOs to myopically favor CMOs

revenue growth trap.

from functional performance marketing backgrounds. Ignoring
strategic levers that fuel long-term growth and brand equity in
favor of quick-hit sales at this time is an especially bad idea —
data deprecation will keep ramping up the difficulty level on
targeting, and rising customer expectations will necessitate
an undivided focus on building relationships. This means
that CMOs should double down on improving the customer
experience, which ultimately affects the brand experience.

Half of new B2C

CMOs will come from
pure-play performance
marketing roles.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 5

Kubernetes investment
F
orrester’s Infrastructure Cloud Survey, 2022, reveals that

accelerates and
cloud decision-makers have implemented containerized
applications. They now account for half of the total
in decision-makers’ organizations; Kubernetes (K8s) is

proliferates.
orchestrating them at scale. Organizations must now regard
virtual machine-centered workloads as legacy.

In 2023, organizations will accelerate investment in K8s as a

distributed compute backbone for both current applications
and new workloads that can be run more efficiently in
K8s’ environments. These workloads will span a range of
technology domains, including AI/ML, data management, IoT,
5G, edge computing, and blockchain. K8s will also propel
application modernization with DevOps automation, low-code
capabilities, and site reliability engineering. Cloud leaders
should accelerate the shift to containers and Kubernetes.
40% of firms will take
a cloud-native-first
strategy.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 6

Consumers are
T
he relief of a pandemic brought under control has quickly

cautious but don’t pull

been subsumed by a fog of economic gloom. According
to Forrester’s July 2022 Consumer Energy Index And
Retail Pulse Survey, the majority of online adults in the US

back on spending.
(64%), the UK (59%), and France (55%) are anxious about the
possibility of a recession.

But the economic preamble to this downturn is unique.

Consumers have banked significant savings during the
pandemic — as much as three to six times compared to pre-
recessionary periods going back to the 1960s. Household cash
flow will reverse its declining trend and is expected to rise by
6%-plus by the second half of 2023. While consumers will still
signal caution, money in the bank will spur them on to greater
spending — we predict that 2023 will see a 5% average
increase across categories.

Despite economic
gloom, spending will
increase by 5%.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 7

A skills shortage
A
lready, a majority of customer experience (CX) teams

challenges CX teams’
lack crucial skills including design thinking, inclusive
experience design, survey design, journey mapping,
and data literacy and storytelling. CX teams without these

ability to thrive.
skills will remain stuck on basic find-and-fix work, unable to
help their organizations innovate to thrive in a challenging
business environment.

The skills shortage will contribute to an erosion of CX

differentiation in three-fourths of industries. The range
between the best and worst CX in these industries will
narrow — 25% of below-average brands will improve,
Four in five CX teams while 50% of above-average brands will either decline or

will lack critical design,

stagnate. To stand out from this tightening pack, embrace
customer obsession and pursue CX innovations that

data, and journey skills. differentiate the brand, rather than relying on CX strategies
that consumers perceive as similar. Smaller teams can help
current employees build vital design skills and highlight the
opportunities for entrepreneurialism that a small team offers.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 8

Monitoring
W
ith anywhere work, some employers have turned to

technology riles the

electronic monitoring to track employee productivity.
Methods range from keystroke recording and desktop
snapshots to more invasive surveillance via webcam. These

ire of employees.
efforts can violate data protection laws such as the GDPR.

In 2023, expect more lawmaker attention on workplace

surveillance. Also expect more employee backlash, strikes, and
labor organizing in response to surveillance. Whistleblowers
may also demand access to monitoring data to support
allegations of labor law violations.

Smart security and risk teams will prioritize privacy rights

and employee experience if implementing any monitoring

A C-level executive technology, whether it’s for productivity, return-to-office

strategies, or insider risk management.
will be fired for their
firm’s use of employee
monitoring.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 9

Greenwashing
I
n the past 18 months, firms like BNY Mellon, Eni, Keurig,

becomes a serious
and Walmart were fined between $1.5 million and $5.6
million. In 2021, the European Commission found that half
of green claims lacked evidence. Scrutiny from distrustful

business risk.
consumers and empowered watchdogs willing to enforce
consumer law — such as the UK’s CMA and the FTC in the US
— will increase significantly, pushing regulators to crack down
on greenwashing.

The fines are just a harbinger of more critical business risks,

however, including significant market valuation loss and
employee and customer disengagement. The 2022 German
police raid on Deutsche Bank’s DWS proved that there are
potentially millions more to be lost. To avoid greenwashing,
At least 10 companies CMOs must actively create sustainability communications

will incur $5 million or

messages with integrity.

more in greenwashing
fines.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 10

Leaders try to force
F
orrester’s Future Of Work Survey, 2022, shows that 68%

employees back
of employees who can work remotely say they hope to
work from home more often than they did pre-pandemic.
But not all leaders are convinced. Some firms, including

into the office, with

Goldman Sachs, are forcing a return to the office. In 2023,
we predict acute confrontations within companies that don’t
listen to and collaborate with employees in shaping hybrid-

disastrous results.
work policies. Adherence to in-office policies is already
sketchy at best, and the threat of attrition looms large.

As economic uncertainty enters the anywhere-work calculus,

we predict that 40% of hybrid-working companies will try to
undo their anywhere-work policies, telling employees to come
into the office more frequently. Expect headlines that a major
bank is firing employees who don’t comply. Leaders: Don’t be
40% of hybrid-working one of the 50% of companies that will battle their employees

companies will try to

and suffer a loss of productivity due to labor unrest.

undo anywhere work

and fail.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 11

Metaverse experiments
A
ugmented reality (AR) was invented in 1968, but it

fall short of capturing

didn’t hit the global mainstream until 48 years later with
Niantic’s 2016 launch of Pokémon GO, which made
AR accessible and approachable with a smartphone game.

the public’s imagination.

Few consumers see this kind of value yet in the metaverse.
According to Forrester’s Media And Marketing Benchmark
Recontact Survey, 2022, the majority of online adults in the US
(65%), the UK (73%), France (67%), and Germany (65%) prefer
to have social experiences in person.

In 2023, we’ll see lots of “metaverse washing,” but smart

brands will bypass simple repackagings of old immersive
media experiences and do new things. This will involve
The metaverse needs reimagining hybrid experiences to seek new sources of

a “Pokémon GO” revenue, insights, and customer engagement.

moment — and we
won’t see it in 2023.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 12

The talent crunch
T
he technology talent needed to transform businesses,

pushes tech executives

amp up the hybrid cloud, and build new applications that
drive growth and differentiation remains in short supply.
At any time, there’s an average of 200,000 open tech jobs that

to seek new sources of

cannot be filled due to a lack of suitable candidates. To plug
the gaps and improve capacity and skills in 2023, one in three
tech executives will go beyond their traditional tech service

candidates.
provider partners to source talent more broadly and with an
eye on better pipelines.

First, in the Forrester Analytics Business Technographics®

Business And Technology Services Survey, 2021, 31% of
services decision-makers said they expect to increase their
use of freelance talent marketplaces — such as Catalant,
Topcoder, Toptal, and Upwork — to support a healthier on-
One in three tech demand talent strategy. Second, they’ll do deals with computer

execs will tackle

science schools. And finally, they’ll tap the learning resources
of providers like Infosys Springboard and Salesforce Trailhead

talent challenges with to upskill teams and build new pipelines for the future.
Technology executives will find value in pursuing a mix of all
alternative partners. these paths while closely collaborating with hiring managers.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 13

Scandals at tech
M
ore than 50% of online adults around the world trust

companies burn
consumer tech companies, according to Forrester’s
Consumer Trust Imperative Survey, 2022. During the
pandemic, technology firms reached an unprecedented level

through consumer
of popularity. But the honeymoon is coming to an end.

In May 2022, the software stock market recorded a dramatic

trust.
decline in value. Meta reported its first-ever revenue drop.
Post-pandemic, reduced tech dependency will combine
with trust and privacy issues — including an inability to
protect users from emerging risks and a lack of effective
ethical measures in digital environments — to progressively
erode consumers’ trust. We predict that by the end of 2023,
consumers’ trust in tech companies will shrink 15%.

But the reduction in consumer trust will reach far beyond the
consumer tech category. It’s already happening: In 2022,

Trust in consumer consumer trust in banks fell for the first time in several
years. Reduced trust carries a negative impact for the entire
technology value chain, so organizations that partner with consumer tech
firms will benefit from prioritizing third-party risk assessments
companies will and management.

shrink by 15%.

© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 14

 The uncertainty of 2023 requires a
steady approach.
In 2023, successful companies will ensure that all actions flow from their core
mission. Eschewing tempting but potentially destructive short-term gains won’t
be easy in a shaky economy. Moments like these have the power to accelerate
the performance of companies that manage to weather the storm.

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© 2022 Forrester Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 15