Forrester

AI’s promise of transforming underwriting, claims, and CX remains untapped, a fraction of insurers will harness its full potential by 2025. source

While we haven’t talked too much about Amazon Business over the years, it’s been a quiet giant that already generates over $35 billion in global sales after launching in 2015. That would make it the 300th largest company in the world with more than 10% of Amazon’s online retail business. It’s one of the “fastest-growing ventures in Amazon’s history,” and its size nearly doubles the company’s physical-store business. When we think about the next phase of Amazon retail, it’s really B2B. The company’s recent Reshape event in Dallas for users and partners answered a lot about this large and fast-growing part of the company. Here’s what I learned about this formidable part of Amazon. What Is Amazon Business, Really? It’s easy to think of Amazon Business as a better version of an office supply store like Staples, but that would be selling it short. Yes, it does sell a lot of pens and office supplies (BIC and Uniball were two of Reshape’s biggest sponsors). But just as Amazon.com is way more than books, Amazon Business is much more than a single category. It serves 6 million business accounts around the world with everything imaginable, from medical devices for hospitals and doctor’s offices to packaging and paper supplies for restaurant groups and toner cartridges for schools. The Amazon Business Superpower: Physically And Financially Large Shipments Of Supplies That Ride Amazon’s Fulfillment Network To Commercial Addresses Amazon Business is the polar opposite of Amazon.com, which was built on small one-off transactions to consumers everywhere in the US and much of the world, in turn helping to ingrain the brand in the minds of shoppers everywhere. By contrast, Amazon Business leverages: Large shipments. Amazon is often delivering pallets to enterprise customers such as Aramark. Amazon’s fulfillment network. Amazon already has a dense warehouse footprint, predictive shipping capabilities, and an offering to provide those services to marketplace sellers. Commercial addresses. Amazon is able to use large trucks that pull into loading docks, drop off those pallets, and get the “delivery density” critical for carrier efficiency. This is the dream of any carrier. It even restocks vending machines, which I would bet — with Amazon’s creativity — that the company may make even more efficient with Flex drivers. And that was the key message of the Reshape event: Amazon Business is targeting large enterprises and embedding itself in major procurement systems such as Coupa to bring its commerce flywheel to B2B purchases. As Amazon Business encroaches on enterprise customers with more business purchases, it will invariably need the sales leads and contacts from its AWS business, possibly selling overlapping products and services in the future. Internal channel conflict is a feature — not a bug — of Amazon’s org structure as it empowers small teams to move fast to build new businesses. Where To Next For Amazon Business — And B2B E-Commerce? Given the still-behind state of most other B2B e-commerce sites, Amazon Business may not even need enterprise companies for a while. Today, Amazon Business stands out as a juggernaut with an inherent competitive advantage just with small and medium enterprises. It reminds me of its position in the online advertising world with Amazon Ads. It wouldn’t be surprising if the attention it gets in the future is just as great. Going forward, brands selling to procurement leaders will have no choice but to develop their Amazon Business strategy. Other companies should think of the lessons of Amazon Business: how to leverage existing assets to effectively extend to new categories rapidly. To discuss Amazon Business and what it could mean for your business, please schedule time with Joe Cicman, Christina Schmitt, or me. source

Younger generations and the growing influence of artificial intelligence are reshaping the business buying landscape. According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, over two-thirds of buyers involved in large and complex transactions valued over $1 million are Millennials and Generation Z buyers. This generational shift, combined with the rapid rise of generative AI (genAI), is fundamentally altering the way that business buyers make their purchases, and we can expect rapid changes in 2025. Younger buyers not only know that they can get access to more information than ever without directly engaging with a provider, but they also see providers consistently missing the mark in the buying cycle. They are hungering for more: real insight into providers and solutions; better ways to collect and analyze the information they find and receive from others; and, ultimately, a better buyer experience. They’re neither afraid to take advantage of the latest technology to improve their buying experience nor are they afraid to walk away if they don’t get what they want. Three key predictions highlight the changes that we can expect in business purchasing in 2025: GenAI will drive buyers to consider five or more providers for large purchases. GenAI is revolutionizing the way business buyers approach their purchase decisions. AI tools not only expedite the buying process but also enhance overall business outcomes for organizations. Over 90% of buyers who used genAI to inform purchases of $1 million or more reported positive results. These tools enable buyers to conduct extensive research, reduce biases, and evaluate a wider range of providers. As buyers become more adept researchers, we expect them to continue to expand their consideration set and include more providers because they can analyze and assess them with greater ease. Dissatisfaction will drive two-thirds of business buyers to seek new solutions. Younger buyers are highly dissatisfied with their buying experience. From technical implementation issues to concerns about diversity and inclusion programs, these buyers are pushing providers to meet their technical requirements while engaging them as valued partners. Younger buyers know that they have alternatives and are willing to evaluate them if they can replace their current solution. Half of younger buyers will include 10 or more external influencers in their purchase. As the influence of Millennials and Generation Z buyers continues to grow, they increasingly rely on external sources, including their value network, to make decisions. Today, almost one-third of younger buyers bring in 10 or more individuals outside of their organization to the decision-making process. These include online community members and industry conference attendees. Social media platforms, which give access to a host of new influencers, already rank among the top three preferred interaction types among young buyers, and their influence continues to grow. Marketers And Sellers Must Take Control Where They Can Old ways of doing business are no longer sufficient — marketers and sellers need to meet this new generation of buyers where they are. Marketers should identify the digital signals that buyers give off so that they can best leverage the increasingly rare, direct, and personal interactions that buyers may have with them. They’ll also need to improve both their hard and soft skills to engage with customers who are dissatisfied and willing to go back on the market to seek out better options. Finally, marketers will need to extend their outreach to include influencers, especially those on social media, who are engaging with buyers and delivering insight. Read our full Predictions 2025: Business Buyers report to learn more about these predictions and two additional ones. Schedule a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions and learn how you can prepare your sales, marketing, and product teams to adapt their strategies. If you aren’t a client, you can download our complimentary B2B Predictions guide, which covers all of our top predictions for 2025. Additional resources, including webinars, are available on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Marketers have juggled many unknowns in the last year, including media chapters that were left unfinished. There is the looming ban on TikTok in the US (or is there?) and the mad dash to gain generative AI-based efficiencies. And let’s not forget Google’s third-party-cookie pivot and the ensuing question of whether it helps or hurts marketers. In 2025, we’ll see many of these chapters close and marketers gain confidence as a result. But don’t get too comfortable: Just as some stories wind down, others will ramp up (Google antitrust cases, anyone?). To help you prepare for the coming year, Forrester predicts that: Privacy Sandbox will erode as Google bulldozes the Topics API and Attribution Reporting API. Google faces pressure on multiple fronts: antitrust scrutiny, nonviable Privacy Sandbox tests, and marketers long believing that Google was bluffing on third-party cookie deprecation (only 13% of global B2C marketing decision-makers believed that Google would actually go ahead with it, Forrester survey data shows). These pressures will force the company to abandon the Topics API and Attribution Reporting API, two hallmarks of its Privacy Sandbox. Doubters don’t believe that a Google-built, -owned, and -self-measured solution will actually work. Despite the inevitable disintegration of Privacy Sandbox, marketers should still test alternative targeting and measurement methods. Marketers will shift 10% of their performance media budgets into social commerce. While social commerce is already established in APAC, other regions have been slower to adopt the behavior. 2025 will be the year when social commerce becomes a staple within media plans. This will be a sharp turn given that in 2021, 60% of online adults in the UK, 51% in the US, and 46% in France hadn’t even seen a shoppable ad on social media. TikTok Shop changed the narrative with a massively improved user experience. Integrated payment and retail systems such as Apple Pay and Shop have also made checkout and tracking experiences on social media platforms significantly more seamless. Consumers will embrace social media channels as viable shopping platforms, making these channels critical for marketers with goods to sell. TikTok will not get banned or divest in the US in 2025. Despite intense pressure from the US government to divest TikTok from Chinese-owned ByteDance, the immensely popular platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Aside from the fact that a ban would be a political land mine for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, TikTok’s enormous investment in lobbying and legal fees would push the appeals process beyond 2025. But should our prediction be wrong, Meta and YouTube stand to gain both consumers and media dollars. Forrester survey data indicates that if TikTok gets banned in the US, TikTok users would turn to Reels and Shorts instead — which is exactly what happened when India banned TikTok in 2020. Continue investing in this high-performing media channel and build a multidimensional creator strategy to support it. Although it might feel like things are settling down, don’t be fooled. Marketers should stay observant and adaptable in 2025. The new media chapter that we’re entering is bound to keep you on your toes. Read our full Predictions 2025: Media And Advertising report to get more detail about each of these predictions, plus two more bonus predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 media and communications strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions 2025 guide for B2C marketing and customer experience professionals, which includes more of our top predictions for 2024. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Our 2025 predictions for software development come on the heels of a year that saw nearly every software tooling vendor incorporate (or plan to incorporate) a generative (genAI) “copilot” capability into their tools. And there’s good reason for them to do so, as Forrester’s most recent Developer Survey indicates that 49% of developers are expecting to use or are already using a genAI assistant in the coding phase of software development. Forrester refers to genAI coding assistants as TuringBots, and we feel that genAI will become a pervasive force through all phases of software delivery, not just coding. But AI assistants are only the beginning of the genAI software development revolution. In our report, The Rise Of Application Generation Platforms, we explain how genAI will change the very definition of what software development is over the next 10 years. For the near term in 2025 we’ve kept our predictions real and as actionable as possible so that leaders can be prepared for the genAI reality that awaits them. In the area of software development for 2025, we predict that: At least one organization will try to replace 50% of its developers with AI and fail. In Forrester’s Developer Survey, 2024, developers indicated that they spend about 24% of their time coding; the remaining time is spent doing designs, writing tests, fixing bugs, and meeting with stakeholders. So even though we expect developer productivity to improve with the usage of genAI coding assistants, it’s easy to see that developers are doing a lot more than just writing code. That’s why leaders need to take a step back from the hype and consider what’s really going on at the developer’s desk to see how realistic the hype is. Even with copilots, developers are the human in the loop making sure that the coding suggestions are correct, that the code actually performs the intended operations, and that when bad suggestions come back (and they will), the developer is there to make sure they don’t get placed into production. Don’t let genAI reality bite you, and set expectations accordingly. Fifty percent of enterprises will abandon individual best-of-breed tools for DevOps platforms. Platforms continue to gain on best-of-breed tools. Platform engineering is all the rage with users, and selling platforms are all the rage with software tools vendors. In fact, you can look at any of the once-niche markets for software development tools and see that many of the vendors that were once best of breed have been merging and acquiring each other for years. And it’s not just continuous integration and continuous delivery; it’s application portfolio management all the way down the line to application performance management. No one is satisfied with a slice of the pie; they want the whole pie. Rust will enter the top 10 of the TIOBE Index while C and C++ drop in rank. This year, we believe (or perhaps, really hope) that organizations will finally factor risk into their choice of programming language. With talk of genAI, who has time for worrying about programming language selection? Yet security-minded software engineers realize that the selection of programming language is a relevant and core concern. Until recently, getting everyone on board with this concern has been difficult. That is, until the White House issued a memo on the importance of using memory-safe languages. Forrester views this as a necessary “kick in the pants” for software delivery leaders to wake up and get moving in the right direction. Read our full Predictions 2025: Software Development report to get more detail about each of these predictions and read additional predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 software development strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers more of our top technology and security predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Les perspectives économiques de la région ne laissent décidément pas indifférents les Européens. Et les raisons de s’inquiéter ne manquent pas : un conflit intense en Ukraine, l’escalade de la guerre au Moyen-Orient, une productivité de la main-d’œuvre européenne inférieure à celle des États-Unis ou de la Chine, la détérioration des perspectives économiques de l’Allemagne et de l’incertitude quant aux effets des nombreuses élections qui auront lieu en 2024 et qui seront lourdes de conséquences. Malgré tout, les perspectives économiques pour l’Europe en 2025 restent légèrement positives : l’inflation devrait tomber à 2,2 %, le PIB augmenter de 1,5 % et le chômage devrait rester proche de son niveau le plus bas depuis 20 ans, avec une prévision de 6,0 %. Les régulateurs de l’UE seront plus occupés que jamais en 2025 ; ils commenceront à appliquer les parties pertinentes de la loi européenne sur l’IA (EU AI Act), de la Directive relative à la publication d’informations en matière de durabilité par les entreprises (CSRD) et de la loi sur la résilience opérationnelle numérique (DORA). Pour aider les dirigeants européens à naviguer dans cet environnement complexe, voici quelques-unes des prévisions les plus importantes de Forrester pour l’année à venir : L’interférence des satellites par une puissance hostile entraînera des perturbations majeures. En 2024, la France, le Luxembourg, les Pays-Bas, la Suède et l’Ukraine se sont adressés à l’Union internationale des télécommunications pour se plaindre d’interférences dans les réseaux satellitaires. La technologie satellitaire est omniprésente ; les perturbations interfèrent avec les vols, les systèmes de navigation, les systèmes financiers, les réseaux de télévision, les dispositifs d’objets connectés (IoT), les systèmes autonomes et bien d’autres choses encore. L’UE a récemment créé un nouveau centre pour la sécurité spatiale, et l’OTAN accorde également la priorité à cette question. Évaluez vos risques pour comprendre vos dépendances – et celles de vos fournisseurs – ainsi que la continuité potentielle de vos activités. Les entreprises européennes s’appuieront sur les fonds de l’UE pour investir 100 millions d’euros dans le cloud souverain. En décembre 2023, la Commission européenne a approuvé un premier projet important d’intérêt européen commun (IPCEI) visant à créer une chaîne de valeur européenne pour les infrastructures et les services en nuage (CIS). Au total, le projet IPCEI Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) fournira 1,2 milliard d’euros de financement public, l’UE espérant débloquer 1,4 milliard d’euros supplémentaires d’investissements du secteur privé d’ici 2031. Les fournisseurs saisiront cette opportunité pour développer de nouveaux services modulaires, durables et sécurisés dès leur conception et les déployer dans des lieux plus proches des consommateurs de l’UE. En 2025, les fournisseurs de services ajouteront au moins 100 millions d’euros de nouveaux investissements privés nets aux aides d’État IPCEI-CIS qu’ils reçoivent. Les clients actuels du cloud souverain devraient s’y intéresser de près. Votre organisation devrait examiner les nouvelles possibilités offertes par l’IPCEI-CIS pour compléter les capacités de vos supercalculateurs existants ou pour répondre aux demandes non satisfaites de souveraineté numérique ou de durabilité de l’informatique en nuage. Un fournisseur de genAI se verra infliger la première amende prévue par la loi européenne sur l’IA. En février 2025, les parties privées (mais pas les régulateurs) pourront commencer à appliquer les dispositions de la loi européenne sur l’IA contre les cas d’usage interdits. En août 2025, les régulateurs, y compris l’Office européen de l’IA et les autorités chargées de la protection des données dans les États membres de l’UE, seront autorisés à prendre des mesures d’exécution à l’encontre des contrevenants aux exigences du modèle d’IA à usage général (GPAI). Nous ne pensons pas que les régulateurs attendront longtemps ; en effet, Forrester prévoit qu’un fournisseur de modèle GPAI recevra la première amende pour violation de la loi européenne sur l’IA entre août et décembre 2025. Bien que la loi vise les exigences GPAI (telles que l’obligation de divulguer les sources d’entraînement et de partager les résultats des évaluations de modèles, y compris les tests contradictoires) directement aux fournisseurs d’IA générative, elle lie les obligations de conformité à l’ensemble des acteurs de l’IA, y compris tous les fournisseurs de logiciels qui s’appuient sur ces modèles. Par conséquent, votre entreprise a besoin d’un processus d’approbation des fournisseurs de modèles d’IA générative pour s’assurer qu’ils recueillent les preuves nécessaires afin d’éviter de s’exposer (et potentiellement d’exposer votre entreprise) à des enquêtes et à des amendes. Consultez notre rapport complet Predictions 2025 : Europe (en anglais) pour obtenir plus de détails sur chacune de ces prévisions et en découvrir d’autres.  Planifiez une session d’accompagnement Forrester pour discuter de ces prévisions ou planifier votre stratégie pour 2025. Vous n’êtes pas encore client ? Téléchargez nos guides gratuits, qui abordent d’autres de nos prévisions pour 2025. Vous trouverez d’autres ressources gratuites, y compris des webinaires, sur le hub Prévisions 2025. Note: Cet article a été traduit. Langue originale : anglais. source

Sustained interest and experimentation in AI will support learning and steady progress in 2025. Generative AI (genAI) and edge intelligence will drive robotics projects that will combine cognitive and physical automation, for example. Citizen developers will start to build genAI-infused automation apps, leveraging their domain expertise. All promising, but challenges remain that will hinder progress in 2025. We are just beginning to understand how to manage a diverse and growing number of AI models and are faced with new questions. What level of autonomy achieves the right balance of risk and efficiency? How and when do we put humans in the loop? How do we reliably extract and provide enterprise data for AI? Despite obvious benefits and enthusiasm, these implementation challenges will hinder 2025 gains. Out of all the AI agent discussion, businesses will find only moderate success, mostly in less critical employee support applications. GenAI’s ability to create autonomous, unstructured workflow patterns and adapt to the dynamic nature of real-world processes will have to wait. Here’s what this means: The key to automation success in 2025 will be balancing AI innovation with the scale and reliability of traditional automation tools and methods. To help you strike that balance, here’s a look at three of Forrester’s top automation predictions for 2025: GenAI will orchestrate less than 1% of core business processes. GenAI will affect process design, development, and data integration, reducing design and development time as well as the need for desktop and mobile interfaces. Yet this genAI efficiency still leaves current digital and robotic process automation platforms orchestrating the core process, subject to their deterministic and rule-driven models. For 2025, decision-makers can balance AI innovation with the scale and reliability of traditional automation tools and methods by recognizing that deterministic automation will remain in control of the core, long-running process while AI models will support bursts of insight and efficiency. One-quarter of robotics projects will work to combine cognitive and physical automation. GenAI innovations, edge intelligence, and advancing communication services are encouraging developers of physical robotics to take a fresh look at embodied AI. This will enable robots to sense and respond to their environment instead of following preprogrammed rules and workflows, exposing them to more complex and unpredictable situations. Decision-makers in asset-intensive industries will begin to see value in the combination and invest in physical automation projects to enhance their operational efficiencies. Citizen developers will deliver 30% of genAI-infused automation apps. The citizen developer train continues to roll and now includes genAI-infused automation apps. They have the necessary domain expertise to envision and develop these solutions. A significant portion of genAI-infused automation apps will be delivered by citizen developers in 2025. Automation centers of excellence and line-of-business management will be challenged to train and safely provision their use and control proliferation of AI models and copilot platforms. The coming year promises to be a dynamic period for automation, characterized by growing enthusiasm and activity surrounding agentic and AI-driven operations. 2025 will serve as a crucial stepping stone to prepare for integration of physical robots, digital systems, and human endpoints. The enterprises that make the most of these automation trends will be those that learn to balance the risk and reward of automation and target the right use cases for their organization. Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2025: Automation report to get more detail about each of these predictions and read additional predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 automation strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers more of our top technology and security predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

On top of their already burdened workloads, CMOs in 2024 hustled to decipher fact from fiction in the endless barrage of generative AI (genAI)-related headlines that saturated the marketing trades. But as marketing rings in yet another new year, 2025 will be one that’s less sensationalized and more operationalized. Martech consolidation, consumer privacy laws, data hygiene, and, yes, AI automation will tip CMOs to tidy up their marketing functions. As a result, we expect marketing operations to take center stage. But to ensure that CMOs don’t lose sight of opportunistic growth drivers in 2025, they’ll rely more on their trusted direct reports for the day-to-day management of the marketing function. This will allow CMOs to step up and into the broader business to lead amid a heightened confluence of operation and opportunity — to reduce redundancy, increase effectiveness, and cultivate creativity. As for genAI? It gets real in 2025: CMOs will begin to demonstrate tangible efficiencies but not enough to affect marketing headcount (just yet). As we look ahead to the B2C marketing landscape in 2025, Forrester predicts that: GenAI will push one in four CMOs to codify their marketing operations function. The hyped-up potential of genAI in creative development and marketing insights will be a catalyst in 2025 to force marketing ops’ evolution beyond a stopgap to mask poor planning, resource misalignment, and inefficient processes. To get there, marketing teams will need to proactively identify stakeholders, define process interlocks, formalize responsibilities, and measure success across six B2C marketing ops disciplines. In 2024, marketers focused on genAI as an efficiency play, but in 2025, mature marketing ops functions will add marketing effectiveness to their genAI playbook. Investment to unify data for the loyalty and marketing tech stacks will triple. Factors including economic pressure to increase efficiency and consumers’ demand for continuity across customer experiences will converge in 2025 — pushing loyalty and martech together. While eliminating redundant channel execution across marketing and loyalty is low-hanging fruit, the most impactful and pragmatic opportunity lies with synchronizing data. The data gap between marketing and loyalty practices is wide today: Eight in 10 US B2C marketing executives utilize separate data assets for loyalty and martech. 2025 calls for a unified data strategy that delivers consistent and expanded data access. First-time enforcement of new privacy laws will fracture marketing-legal relationships. By the end of 2024, eight new US state laws and regulations in Quebec (Canada), Indonesia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere will be in effect. As countries around the world enforce these new privacy laws for the first time in 2025, CMOs will get mired in navigating different requirements and jurisdictions. In the US, frustrated companies will push for progress on a federal privacy law to simplify when, where, and how they can process customer data. In the meantime, marketers should brace themselves for complicated (and, in some cases, conflicting) directions on how to comply with new laws. As you turn the page into the new year, be sure to read our full report, Predictions 2025: B2C Marketing (client access only). There, you will see all five of our predictions, as well as more details behind each of them. Forrester clients can also attend our live webinar on Wednesday, November 13, then chat more about it via a Forrester guidance session. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide for B2C marketing, customer experience, and digital leaders, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Find additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Consumer and business buyers globally are more comfortable in the digital realm than ever before. They’re increasingly exposed to cutting-edge tech and accustomed to interacting digitally with brands and suppliers. They’re having what once were considered deeply “nerdy” AI-focused discussions with colleagues — and they’re using digital touchpoints in commerce for work and at home. Indications are that they’re ready to go even more digital — but they may have to wait. Forrester’s digital commerce predictions for 2025 anticipate a disconnect between what shoppers and business buyers want and are willing to do — and how digital businesses will respond. Among our predictions for the coming year, we expect that: Very few major retailers in NA and EMEA will evolve store experiences to bring them closer to digital. Some retailers will “omni-fy” their store systems, but one-third of global digital business strategy decision-makers in retail and wholesale tell us that they are focused on small tech changes as a top priority for customer-facing tech. Because of financial pressures and lower consumer sentiment, we predict that just 10% of major North American and EMEA retailers in 2025 will commit to broader overhauls that tie their store systems more closely to digital. Although shoppers are more willing to engage in conversational commerce, most brands just won’t bite. Per Forrester’s Consumer Benchmark Survey, 2024, over one-third of online adults in France, Germany, the UK, and the US — and over two-thirds in metro China and metro India — already use instant message, chat, or direct message monthly or more often to communicate with companies or brands when they research products or services to purchase. These consumers are also interested in using brand and retailer websites and apps that let them type questions or speak conversationally via chat or verbal prompts. We anticipate that fewer than one-fifth of global brands will add this type of functionality in 2025, however. Digital leaders want to feel confident that they can add successful, stable interfaces that generate trustworthy and reliable content for customers. Digital talent will shop themselves around, but few will find the “greener grass” employment they want. The job market is facing waning comforts for workers — think the “EX winter.” The US is at a five-year low for rates of white-collar promotions, and tussles over return-to-office policies wear on. Fully 15% of global information workers in retail, wholesale, and financial services tell us that they’d most appreciate not returning to the office, per Forrester’s Digital Workplace And Employee Technology Survey, 2024. We expect enough improvement to the employee experience in 2025 — and enough competition for the most desirable positions — that some employees will find new opportunities, but most digital workers will stay put. 2025 is the year that we project digital commerce to be mired in disconnects. Avoid these pitfalls by adopting an agile mindset that encourages constant review of initiatives to ensure that they continue to align with market expectations. As always, we will watch the market and help our clients navigate the year to find the equilibrium they need to operate their business effectively — and meet their customers’ needs. Read our full Predictions 2025: Digital Commerce report to get more detail about each of these predictions. Want to discuss our predictions for digital commerce in more depth? Book a Forrester guidance session or inquiry with me or my team. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guidemore of our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

The last 24 months have been challenging for the agency marketplace, with depressed tech spending in the US and global dragging of agency performance. In particular, the start-stop nature of existing or newly awarded brand assignments was a source of financial frustration. Yet 2025 shows signs of optimism, including a strong US economy, agency M&A activity, a resurgence of brand spending, and a growing independent agency market. Combine these factors with the marketing agency industry’s continued efforts to unwind legacy systems and structures — redefining the holding company role, redeploying digital capabilities, combining commerce and media, and separating creative ideation from creative production — and 2025 promises to bring new agency offerings and types to address marketers’ continued remit to do more with less. Forrester predicts that, in 2025: AI-powered content production will decelerate marketing in-housing. The growth of in-house agencies will slow (or the project load will shift) as marketers turn to more cost-effective, AI-powered content production solutions developed by external partners to leverage generative AI (genAI) cost and time efficiencies. Sixty-one percent of agencies currently use genAI in marketing efforts, compared to 17% of in-house agencies. Outsourced content production agencies will deliver low-cost marketing at scale while customizing models to produce bespoke, on-brand marketing for brands. One-third of digital media specialists will evolve into full-funnel agencies. The division between performance and brand media assignments collided, and digital media agencies will bridge the gap with full-funnel media capabilities. Barely half of US CMOs plan to integrate performance and brand media assignments, and over a third plan to integrate creative and media assignments in the next 12 months. In 2025, CMOs and agency executives will reconcile full-funnel, full-service capabilities with deep expertise in various disciplines and channels. CRM agencies will transform into data-backed CX agencies. To circumvent growing concerns surrounding third-party data compliance and acknowledge that data is attached to execution, data management agencies will reinvent themselves as customer experience (CX) agencies. Breaking away from the constraints of traditional data brokers, these agencies will redefine their previous focus on data sourcing and management into foundational elements of a wide range of activation services including media planning and buying, as well as loyalty and CRM execution. Modernize Your Agency Model With Contemporary Agency Types The adage “What got you here won’t get you there” rings true. Next year’s marketing agency landscape will be characterized by new models and offerings, designed to meet the performance/brand meld, scale content to the number of media impressions, match media impressions to sales transactions, and integrate the vital components of marketing ideation with execution. Many current partner structures will lend themselves well to adapt to new needs with slight changes in remit and capabilities. Where possible, give your partners the opportunity to show their expanded offerings. Other partnerships will require you to modernize your model to one that combines the necessary scale/quality; brand/performance; media/creative; and data/CX combinations. Start Planning Today For What’s Coming Tomorrow Forrester clients can access our full Predictions 2025: Marketing Agencies report. If you would like to further discuss implications, please schedule a guidance session with me. Be on the lookout for my upcoming Forrester Wave™ evaluation of media management services. If you aren’t yet a Forrester client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source