automation

As companies strive to improve customer experience through better customer and employee engagement, they inevitably face the problem of scalability. How can we provide a seamless, convenient, and consistent experience to all our customers? And how can we best equip our employees to do so, as well? The technologies in our recently published “The Forrester […]

What will your humans do in an automated workplace? Principal Analyst Sam Stern explains three principles for seamless human-machine collaboration. Watch now and learn more at CX NYC June 11-12.

Forrester predicted in late 2018 that automation would become the tip of the digital transformation spear in 2019, impacting everything from infrastructure to customers to business models. Now that we’re four months in, we’ve evaluated whether our five specific predictions are on track. We first predicted that 40% of enterprises will have automation centers and […]

To help retailers and brands plan for 2019, Claudia Tajima and I are interviewing our Forrester peers to discover how their 2019 predictions will affect retail for our series: “Applying 2019 Predictions To Retail.” Recently, Claudia interviewed J. P. Gownder, VP and principal analyst on Forrester’s CIO team and an expert in automation technologies. Here’s what J. P. thinks retailers and brands should expect and focus on regarding […]

We’re just a month away from Forrester’s Digital Transformation & Innovation 2019 Forum, where my Forrester colleagues and leaders from a wide array of companies will be sharing our vision for how technology will drive the next wave of innovation. I hope you’ll join us in Chicago, May 14–15. This isn’t your grandfather’s outdated approach such […]

In the world of customer analytics, soaring solos only get you so far. Delivering harmonious customer experiences across the customer life cycle requires careful collaboration across different business functions.

Today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act. It accuses the tech giant of “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” by allowing advertisers to block real estate ads from race, religion, country of birth, and other protected characteristics. Advertisers could effectively red-line by […]

I have been noodling on the future of digital experience (DX) for the better part of six years. Today I want to run a hypothesis past you: Headless architecture and AI/machine-learning (ML) automation are competing for the future (and soul) of the DX tech stack. So let’s examine both sides of this equation: 1.) Headless, […]

My colleagues J. P. Gownder, Craig Le Clair, and I just published the results of a year-long study to answer the question “What happens when digital business systems and physical-world processes come together?” The answer: Atoms get their revenge. By that we mean that so much of our attention has been focused on digital business […]

Every company has a specific DNA. You may think DNA is the brand or values. But corporate DNA is what makes a company tick, not what the company is. Talent, operations, technology, and data make up your base pairs. How those combine will have a specific outcome for the business, and even the overall sequence […]

We’ve just released a major new report, “The Revenge Of The Atoms.” The report starts with an anecdote from MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. Once, when traveling through US customs, Negroponte declared the value of his laptop at $2 million, counting the value of the bits of information stored on the hard drive. But the customs […]

Are We Running Out Of Ideas? As the pace of disruption accelerates, there is an increasingly important focus being put on innovation. Now along comes some work published in the MIT Technology Review by economists from MIT, Harvard, and Boston University, “AI is reinventing the way we invent,” that highlights how the increasing amount of […]

At the dawn of big data, data scientists were the unicorn of the hour. Talk to any one of these rarities, and they would say there were only about 100 of them in the world. When executives woke up to the potential of big data, it was also at the same time we were dealing […]

It’s early February. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring this year, and there is hope (and warmth) in the air.[i] But it’s not always rosy for you as a data, analytics, and insights leader. You tirelessly toil to get value from your enterprise data and try to apply those insights at scale to impact business […]

If you were to ask me a year ago what I would point to as a best practice for data governance, my response would be to look at what financial services firms do to meet their regulatory requirements. Fast-forward to the age of GDPR and the new privacy mandates coming out of California (CCPA), and […]

Consumers really don’t like your chatbot. It’s not exactly a relationship built to last — a few clicks here, a few sentences there — but Forrester Analytics data shows us very clearly that, to consumers, your chatbot isn’t exactly “swipe right” material. That’s unfortunate, because using a chatbot for customer service can be incredibly effective when done […]

Did you know that artificial intelligence has infiltrated all parts of the advertising process? My guess is, probably not. But chances are, in an era of programmatic advertising when machines are making millions of decisions on billions of ad impressions every day, your advertising is being touched by AI. Awesome, right? But also risky — to your brand’s […]

Every company faces a central dilemma: how to resolve the standardization and differentiation of its business apps to win, serve, and retain customers. That’s why we are still getting a lot of questions about this report. We have been wondering how much the move to cloud, mobile, and embedded machine learning or artificial intelligence will […]

I spent this week in Las Vegas at CES to check out the latest and greatest technology wonders, ranging from 3D printing, AI, and cryptocurrency to drones, autonomous vehicles, dancing robots, and wearables. A lot of what I saw has broad CX implications for accessibility, healthcare, and more. My focus was on who will use […]