Forrester

It’s been quite a ride for payments in recent years: From 2020 through 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic flooded the market with tumult and innovation in equal measure. In 2023, we battened down the hatches after the groundswell of that innovation. 2024 was about setting our businesses apart from competitors after all that change by leveraging payments technology to wrap value around the payment itself. So what awaits us in 2025? More fits and starts, and significant disruptions to the status quo: Geopolitical tensions and wars will double the flow of payments through alternative rails. After Russia invaded Ukraine, both Visa and Mastercard booted all Russian transactions off their rails — so Russian banks and payment entities shifted domestic payments to the local Mir payments system. Large B2B transactions, such as oil trading, are already using alternative payment systems like China’s CIPS and Russia’s SPFS due to sanctions on major oil-exporting countries. With more geopolitical tensions and nationalism on the horizon, governments divert more payments volumes away from global rails and onto their local ones to reduce global dependencies and oversight. Global payment companies and banks must decide whether to support local payment rails and diversify offerings, potentially risking sanctions, or focus on core markets. Cash use globally will fall 40%, displaced by the successful globalization of UPI and Pix. 2025 will mark an inflection point for markets where cash has been sticky. In 2025, account-to-account and real-time payments will displace cash in Europe and Latin America, especially in countries with younger populations who are open to non-cash payment methods. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) launch in Peru will set off a domino effect in the region, plus a slew of innovation to follow. While the US is cashless in pockets, its broader inability to displace cash usage of the un- and underbanked will hinder its progress. B2B payments will be a hotbed of M&A activity, fueled by rate cuts and funding. We expect at least a dozen big companies to acquire smaller B2B payments companies in 2025. The upside: Business customers will benefit from more orchestrated and consolidated B2B payments solutions in the market. Competition in B2B payments will intensify: For example, think of how accounts payable invoice automation vendors like Basware, Coupa, and Esker are rapidly expanding into B2B payments and pursuing acquisitions. The upshot: If they move quickly, there are opportunities for bigger companies to find acquisition targets to complement their B2B payments capabilities. One-click checkout will backfire for one in five merchants, increasing their costs by 30%. Counterintuitively, we expect that consumers will experience more, not less, frustration with resurging one-click checkout (1CC) options. Why? 1CC options are varied and compete with many other systems vying to autopopulate data and automate checkout experiences. Consumers will not have their data up to date with all the many players they’ll encounter at checkout and will inadvertently place orders with the wrong information autofilled — or even complete orders before they intend to. The result: As they attempt to rectify these checkout-optimization efforts gone awry, merchants will incur higher costs for customer service and shipping and logistics. Read our full Predictions 2025: Payments report to get more detail about each of these predictions and read additional predictions. Set up a Forrester inquiry or guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guides, which cover more of our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Ces deux dernières années ont été pour le moins difficiles pour l’expérience client (CX). En 2024, la qualité de la CX a atteint un niveau historiquement bas. Une question se pose alors : pourquoi une telle médiocrité généralisée est-elle devenue la norme ? Une fois que les “gains faciles” de la CX ont été obtenus, parvenir à une différenciation sur la base du CX nécessitera un investissement stratégique important. Cependant, de nombreux dirigeants ont interprété (à tort) une forte performance boursière, alors même que la qualité CX était en baisse, comme un signal de maintien du statu quo. Ainsi, ils ont involontairement ouvert la voie à ceux qui s’engagent à offrir une bonne qualité CX. Sans vouloir être le messager de funestes nouvelles, il semble que 2025 sera à nouveau une année médiocre pour la plupart des marques en matière de CX. Mais il reste une lueur d’espoir ! Pour les leaders CX audacieux prêts à passer à la vitesse supérieure, cette année pourrait bien être la vôtre. Se démarquer du peloton exigera de la détermination, mais l’avantage stratégique dans un paysage où d’autres se maintiennent en retrait sera significatif. Voici trois de nos prévisions pour 2025 qui mettent en évidence les défis (et les opportunités) qui attendent les leaders CX : La GenAI remplacera 100 000 agents de première ligne des principaux sous-traitants mondiaux. Le marché de l’externalisation des call-centers est un mastodonte invisible, qui alimente discrètement 62 % des opérations des call-centers des marques. Ce marché a historiquement prospéré sur un modèle d’arbitrage de main-d’œuvre. Pourtant, cette dépendance à l’égard d’une main-d’œuvre toujours moins chère est exactement ce qui le rend mûr pour une perturbation par l’IA générative (genAI). À mesure que l’IA générative réussira à automatiser les problèmes peu complexes, la demande d’agents humains diminuera. De nombreux sous-traitants réduiront leurs effectifs en conséquence, frappant le plus durement les marchés où les coûts sont les plus bas. Dans ce paysage en évolution, le choix des responsables CX est clair : s’associer à des sous-traitants qui considèrent les technologies émergentes comme une voie d’évolution et non d’extinction. Les partenaires les plus solides adopteront des modèles outcome-based qui s’alignent directement sur la réussite des clients, marquant ainsi un tournant décisif vers la valeur plutôt que le volume. La moitié des efforts en matière d’accessibilité n’auront qu’un impact négligeable sur la CX. La mise en lumière de l’accessibilité numérique s’intensifie à l’approche de l’échéance de juin 2025 fixée par l‘Acte législatif européen sur l’accessibilité. Bien que 59 % des professionnels du design fassent état d’un engagement soutenu par les dirigeants en faveur de l’accessibilité numérique, un fossé important entre l’intention et l’action subsiste. Les prévisions de Forrester soulignent ce fossé : seule la moitié de ces entreprises devraient entreprendre des efforts significatifs pour améliorer l’accessibilité. Les autres auront recours à des mesures plus superficielles : des produits quick-fix ou des programmes “recherche-et-résolution”, qui ne suffiront pas à rendre les espaces numériques véritablement accessibles. La clé pour combler ce fossé réside dans l’intégration des principes d’accessibilité dans le processus de conception dès le départ, en veillant à ce que les efforts se traduisent par des avantages tangibles allant au-delà de la simple conformité. Une équipe CX sur quatre va abandonner les outils sous-utilisés au profit de suites d’entreprise « convenables ». En moyenne, les équipes CX utilisent quatre technologies et ne font souvent qu’effleurer la surface de leurs capacités – des capacités souvent dupliquées dans les suites d’entreprise que leurs organisations utilisent déjà. Ce chevauchement a attiré l’attention des services informatiques désireux de réduire les redondances logicielles et les dépenses. Les leaders CX avant-gardistes prendront une longueur d’avance, en choisissant eux-mêmes de réduire les coûts en adoptant des stratégies d’approvisionnement dites “function-first”. Ils se contenteront de solutions d’entreprise « suffisantes » pour des fonctions banalisées, mais nécessaires telles que les enquêtes post-interaction et l’analyse des conversations. Cela permettra de libérer des ressources pour investir dans la technologie afin de relever les défis les plus urgents : relier les améliorations CX directement aux résultats commerciaux et agir efficacement sur les connaissances-clients. Les clients de Forrester peuvent consulter notre rapport complet Predictions 2025 : Customer Experience (en anglais) pour obtenir plus de détails sur ces prévisions ainsi que deux autres prévisions bonus. Planifiez une session d’accompagnement Forrester pour discuter de ces prévisions et planifier votre stratégie CX 2025. Vous n’êtes pas encore client ? Téléchargez gratuitement notre guide des prévisions (en anglais) pour les leaders du marketing B2C et du CX, qui couvre d’autres de nos principales 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

B2B leaders have spent much of the past year scrambling to take advantage of generative AI (genAI) technology and find new ways to differentiate themselves. In 2025, the true power of genAI as a growth driver will be tested. Marketing, sales, and product executives’ accountability will intensify as companies turn to these functions to steer their organization’s most impactful genAI initiatives. Forrester’s 2025 predictions for B2B marketing, sales, and product teams prepare organizations for the good, bad, and even ugly outcomes of trying to generate value from this emerging technology. Here’s what you need to know heading into the new year: The good: AI coworkers will emerge as valued team members in two out of five organizations. As AI assistants get smarter, B2B organizations should continue to leverage their growing automation capabilities to help employees do their jobs better. Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, shows that investment in B2B conversation automation solutions will continue to grow, with 64% of global B2B marketing leaders planning to increase spending on the technology in the next year. It’s time for employees to lose the narrative — and the fear — that AI assistants will replace their job, at least for now. Enhanced predictive, conversational, and generative capabilities will evolve AI coworkers into autonomous and adaptable agents. Embrace the good and start leaning on AI to boost productivity. The bad: Active selling time will decrease by 10% as genAI productivity initiatives backfire. Organizations will continue to increase their investments in AI in the pursuit of positive ROI. The investments will not all be financial: Adopting genAI technology and adapting to new methods that drive value will initially create more internal work. Sales leaders have pushed sellers to log interactions, a requirement for genAI value, yet pipeline analysis from our activity studies shows that this effort has often failed. The expectation of in-year productivity will lead organizations to restrict hiring, forcing sales teams to work harder. Be prepared to take one step back and focus on getting your data organized. This will enable you to take two steps forward with genAI. The ugly: CMOs and CSOs will aim to reorganize, but half will fail to fix what ails them. Organizations are compelled to use transformation projects, change management demands, and AI-driven disruptions to drive growth. With only 12% of marketing leaders in Forrester’s Q4 2023 Demand Marketing Organizational Design And Process Survey believing that their teams’ current organizational design will help them effectively meet revenue targets over the next year, many will attempt a restructure to try to address this lack of competency. But simply moving roles under different titles is a superficial change that does more harm than good. Focus instead on long-overdue shifts: Reset strategy and planning to orient around the customer, fix broken revenue processes, improve operational effectiveness, build stakeholder trust, and enhance talent to blend human and machine skills. Successful companies will shift the skills and competencies required of a role, not just the title. In 2025, B2B organizations will finally harness the AI advantage. Successful companies will tackle infrastructure challenges and realign resources while also resisting the urge to lay off headcount to satisfy the pressure for financial returns. Read our full Predictions 2025: B2B Marketing, Sales, And Product 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 B2B strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary B2B Predictions guide, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Find additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Enterprise application giants facing macroeconomic pressures, heightened customer expectations, and concerns about trust in the wake of the CrowdStrike disruption and CDK outage are leaning into their data assets and AI strategies to drive greater security and value for the enterprise. Yet they are continually challenged from all directions. Best-in-class point solutions are eroding wallet share of the big players, as they have always done; small and midsize vendors are moving upmarket and into their competitive space; service providers experiencing an erosion of their traditional revenue streams are moving up the stack with business services and industry apps that infringe on the remit of software giants; and of course, hyperscalers with best-in-class AI are now offering business capabilities that pose new threats. With all of these pressures impacting the enterprise application market, we predict that in 2025 the two dominant themes will be trust and value, especially as AI becomes more firmly embedded within more applications. According to a recent Forrester survey, 79% of technology decision-makers in US organizations reported an increase in their software costs over the past year. One strategy that we see emerging as a result of this is application vendors leaning into strategies like small language models, as they are less expensive and at the same time generate more accurate and trustworthy responses. With these market trends as a backdrop, here are three of our enterprise software predictions for 2025: A major software vendor will publicly expose the software supply chain. Given ongoing concerns about outages and security, vendors will face more pressure to clearly state software and ecosystem interdependencies, including details about outages and performance degradation, to increase customer trust. In 2025, we predict that several major enterprise application vendors will go further and disclose the details about their software supply chain in contractual agreements and publish details on their websites, especially their trust sites, as well as the admin dashboards. Consumption-based pricing will become 10% of the price of enterprise software. In 2025, we expect a sharp rise in true consumption-based pricing models, especially to account for AI usage. Case in point is Salesforce’s Einstein 1 suite, which combines suite-based functionality with consumption credits. While this will map closer to real product usage than seat-based pricing, this model doesn’t necessarily map to realized value. While a lot of today’s pricing models are bundles or proxies for consumption, we expect more true pay-as-you-go because of the uncertainties in consumption for the new models. Even though software vendors rush to embrace consumption pricing, we expect further experimentation with pricing, especially when rationalizing — and simplifying pricing for products that are a mix of seat- and consumption-based pricing. Enterprise software vendors will use new data valuation for pricing and investments. By 2025, Forrester predicts that at least three large vendors will reevaluate how they value their applications’ data assets. While historically, enterprise software vendors have focused on applications metrics such as seats or usage, the shift to AI and the rise of data will cause them to rethink the role of data as a monetization engine and as a barometer of value. Vendors will likely adopt a hybrid approach, bridging financial reporting standards and historical ways of measuring with the evolving role of data as an asset to be monetized. Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2025: Enterprise Software 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 enterprise software strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide for technology and security leaders, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Every week, I get inquiries about technical debt, whether from enterprise architects, CIOs, CTOs, offices of the CIO, or strategic portfolio managers. It’s a broad concern in IT and digital management, as well as in the minds and operating models of Forrester clients, that has expanded well beyond the original Ward Cunningham definition. Forrester’s current definition, based on our client conversations and survey data, is as follows: Deferred IT investment to address tech sprawl, aging hardware, obsolete technology, security vulnerabilities, disparate data, hastily written software, legacy processes, and other IT concerns that increase costs, reduce resilience, and blunt business outcomes Purists holding to the original definition will disagree, yet in Forrester’s Modern Technology Operations Survey, 2024, we asked respondents, including developers with exposure to day-two concerns, what the concept means to them. The leading responses included: Out-of-date skills. Obsolete hardware and software. Redundant IT systems. “Poorly or hastily written code,” over the last two years, was the least frequently chosen response, meanwhile. We examine this data, along with various industry cases, and present guidance in the new report, The Forrester Guide To Technical Debt. There’s little question that technical debt can reach crisis proportions in the modern digital enterprise. This year, I hear a new phrase on the lips of Forrester clients: technical bankruptcy. At this point, business outcomes are impacted — new system initiatives encounter constant schedule and cost overruns, existing systems are redundant and poorly resilient, and security risks escalate past an acceptable level. How do enterprises get to this point? This year, I did some economic modeling of the question with a large client, and what became clear is that technical debt is “death by a thousand cuts.” Just like an out-of-control credit card, it happens one Starbucks purchase at a time; any individual decision seems marginal and defensible, but the aggregate impact is ultimately dire. Digging further in, one scenario we hear too often is “We know that we have huge technical debt, but we can’t make the business case to remediate it, as it doesn’t have the necessary ROI.” I’ve heard this both from clients and from the executives of global systems integrators trying to help customers make the business case for such programs (as a GSI offering). This makes me crazy. Think about it. Technical debt is a function of already-acquired digital/IT assets. To equate it to another well-known kind of debt: Do you ask “What’s the ROI?” on your monthly car payment? Do you ask “What’s the ROI?” on your car’s necessary maintenance? Do you ask “What’s the ROI?” when your poor old car is broken down, parked in front of your house, and you need to pay to have it junked ASAP? (Yeah, there’s no salvage value in many old IT systems.) Of course you don’t. You think about ROI up front and accept all of these costs and prepare for them if you are a responsible acquirer of an asset. And as an IT leader, you are not managing one personal vehicle. You are managing a fleet. Do you think Hertz is surprised by maintenance or disposal costs and nickeling-and-diming every last car? Part of the problem here is the ongoing legacy of the old waterfall model — as an industry, we are still struggling with its assumptions. A continuously evolving product requiring ongoing refactoring of tech debt is like having a monthly car payment. But in the waterfall model, we assumed that the vehicle was completely “paid” on project conclusion and threw it over the wall into operational mode, where the assumption was that it needed minimal further investment — just “run” support from shared IT services. While some (mainly packaged) SW still fits this model, digital organizations have long since moved past it (via “project to product”) for their most critical systems. The big gap to get the modern IT organization to a more rational, mature model for managing technical debt is operationalization. Big-batch programs are expensive, run into the ROI issue, and (too often) lose steam and don’t deliver on their expectations. You need to understand and calculate your technical debt (and unfortunately, there is no standard industry metric because of the breadth of the concept.) You need to have an architecture in place to track and report on technical debt that is ongoing. Technical debt needs to be understood as being made up of actionable cases, and those cases need to be routed to your project, product, and/or capability teams on equal standing with the shiny new features that your stakeholders want (hat tip to Mik Kersten’s Flow Framework.) This understanding and financial approach means that you need to dedicate a percentage of portfolio funding to debt reduction. Forrester recommends (in agreement with Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group) that this number start at 20% of your portfolio spend. “Peanut butter” opex under constant pressure to cut, cut, cut will not get you there. Have a look at our report and/or ping me on LinkedIn. *(As yet unpublished — Forrester clients, I can share sanitized, high-level model findings on inquiry.) source

Social media plays a pivotal role in shaping brand strategies and reaching target audiences for B2B companies. Forrester’s 2024 B2B Brand And Communications Survey sheds light on the preferences and strategies of over 100 marketing leaders from B2B companies with revenues exceeding $100 million. Our research reveals a clear leader in the realm of social media marketing: LinkedIn. LinkedIn — The Unrivaled Leader LinkedIn, designed specifically for professional networking, stands out as the top choice for B2B marketers. The platform provides unique access to B2B buyers, making it the preferred social media channel by a significant margin over other platforms. This dominance is reflected in the survey results, where almost all respondents reported that their companies maintain an official branded handle on LinkedIn. LinkedIn far outranks other platforms, with 87% indicating they have a paid relationship with the platform. While LinkedIn leads the pack, other long-standing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are also part of the B2B marketing mix — more than 50% of respondents reported having official branded handles on these platforms. When it comes to paid relationships, LinkedIn far outranks other platforms, with 87% of survey respondents indicating they have a paid relationship with the platform. This is more than twice the number of those who have paid relationships with the second-ranked platform, Facebook, and an even greater disparity shows with YouTube and Instagram. While these platforms are valuable for organic content, LinkedIn is the go-to for paid B2B marketing efforts. The Decline Of X And The Rise Of Emerging Platforms X (formerly Twitter) has seen a decline in priority among B2B marketers, largely due to concerns around brand safety, content moderation policies, and controversies under Elon Musk’s leadership. Despite this, 59% of marketers still keep X on their radar and maintain an official branded handle for their company. Emerging platforms like TikTok and Meta’s Threads, as well as forums such as Reddit, are gaining traction, particularly among companies targeting Gen Zers and Millennials. These platforms remain experimental options for most B2B companies, however. The presence of branded handles on these platforms is limited, and paid relationships are even rarer, reflecting their current status as niche channels rather than mainstream B2B marketing tools.   Being Social Means Being On Multiple Platforms Maintaining a branded handle on social media platforms involves significant investment in creative content, strategy, operations, and governance. Nevertheless, nearly three-quarters of companies manage branded handles on four or more platforms, highlighting the importance of a multiplatform presence. For B2B marketing leaders, the insights from Forrester’s 2024 survey underscore the importance that LinkedIn plays in their social media strategies. While other platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram play supportive roles, LinkedIn’s unique access to B2B buyers and its professional networking capabilities make it the unrivaled leader in B2B social media marketing. Forrester clients can find the full results in our report, The State Of B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy And Preferences, 2024. View additional research by Karen Tran or schedule a call with us today. source

Companies experimented boldly with generative AI and other emerging technologies in 2024. Now, the focus is shifting. 2025 will be about the pursuit of near-term, bottom-line gains while competing for declining consumer loyalty and digital-first business buyers. Some leaders will pursue that goal strategically, in ways that set up their organizations for long-term success. Others won’t — and will come up against the limits of quick fixes. Savvy leaders will use expected budget increases to shore up fundamentals, bolstering infrastructure, streamlining operations, and upskilling employees. As they look to operationalize lessons learned through experimentation, they will deliver short-term wins and successfully play the genAI — and other emerging tech — long game. Strengthening foundations will serve companies well as they navigate looming unknowns, from the outcome of the US presidential election to early enforcement of the EU AI Act. Our Predictions 2025 reports, which publish this week, delve into the forces that will define the business landscape next year. (Clients can access the reports and other Predictions resources here.) The reports shed light on how genAI will evolve and what to expect from a tighter regulatory climate. They explore what’s ahead for private cloud, customer experience, and shifting business buying dynamics (and much more). They explain how trust will be won and lost across global regions. They will help you navigate 2025’s unique dynamics to come out ahead. If you’re not yet a Forrester client, you can access our Predictions hub with complimentary resources, including guides for technology and security, B2B marketing and sales, and B2C marketing and customer experience leaders. You can also register for our companion webinars, which will include live Q&As with the analysts behind our predictions. The year ahead will be pivotal in positioning your company to win in a future increasingly shaped by AI. Use our predictions to help light the way. source

As 2025 approaches, technology leaders face a pressing question: “Where’s the return on investment for our existing IT spend?” Over recent years, companies have heavily invested in cloud, SaaS, and AI solutions, yet many are still struggling to capture their full potential. This challenge is fueling a more cautious approach to budgeting, with a focus on cost efficiency and maximizing the value of past investments. Despite this caution, optimism persists: According to a Forrester survey, 91% of global technology decision-makers plan to increase IT spending, with over half expecting growth to surpass 5% — outpacing inflation. Forrester forecasts that the digital economy will grow at a 6.9% CAGR from 2023 to 2028, and AI enthusiasm remains strong, albeit tempered by a shift to pragmatic delivery. Naturally, these increases come with high expectations for enhanced operational value. The emphasis should be made now to make existing technologies work harder through improved adoption, integration, and optimization. This climate underscores the urgent need for high-performance IT — a strategy that focuses on continuously improving business results though technology and advocates for a balanced approach to investments, divestments, and innovations. To help tech leaders navigate these challenges, here is a look at three of the predictions that we think show what is in store for technology leaders in 2025: Only one in five tech execs on the hook for digital transformation will succeed. Many companies are committing to large-scale transformations, but delivery is painfully slow. Financial results from service giants like Accenture and Capgemini show that bookings for large deals are up, yet many digital transformations stall due to the complexity of coordinating with business, operations, HR, and IT leaders. Successful tech leaders will need to align closely with business peers, adapt quickly to changing market dynamics, and consider switching to co-innovation partners for better value orchestration. Seventy percent of IT organizations will incorrectly turn their back on early career development. The demand for highly specialized software developers with AI experience has surged, creating a split in the workforce. Entry-level positions have dwindled, reducing opportunities for early-career developers and midlevel managers. Over time, this is a recipe for disaster, as this trend threatens the talent pipeline critical for building a high-performing delivery organization. Tech executives need to focus more on building an organization with continuous skills and career development, rather than relying on the market to have readily available talent. In the wake of generative AI disappointments, 25% of tech execs will make employee experience the killer app. Generative AI will improve labor productivity only after firms redefine workflows and drive near-universal adoption. Successful tech execs will prioritize tools that make employees’ lives easier, starting with those under their control, like GitHub Copilot and chatbot IT helpdesks. They will expand to include Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments, ensuring that new tools fit seamlessly into employees’ work processes through human-centered design practices. Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2025: Tech Leadership 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 technology strategy. If you aren’t yet a Forrester client, you can learn how to put these predictions into action during our live webinar. You can also download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top technology and security predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

Two sides of the same coin; the yin and the yang; two sides of the equation — 2025 will be a year of consumer contradictions. Consumers will behave in opposing ways. But the two behaviors aren’t created equal: One will mask the other, predominant one. As a result, brands will be befuddled about what to believe. Consumers will become more disloyal to brands yet join more loyalty programs. Cancel culture will boil over, but consumers will start to tune out. Those that succeed in 2025 will be able to distinguish noise from reality. As you navigate the influx of consumer contradictions in 2025, keep in mind Forrester’s consumer predictions for the new calendar year: Brand loyalty will decline 25%, but usage of loyalty programs will increase. Price sensitivity and high prices cloud consumers’ views as food costs peak, brands resort to uncharacteristic discounts, and retailers such as SHEIN and Temu demonstrate the power of undercutting competitors. Consumers are not only feeling it, but they’re also going to do something about it, because price sensitivity breeds brand-switching behaviors. But while brand loyalty falters, loyalty program usage will rise as customers look to grab value (and personalized value) wherever they can. Negative social media sentiment will dominate headlines, but usage will grow. The odds don’t seem to favor this prediction, as new laws are introduced to curb usage, the US surgeon general calls for a warning label on social platforms, and studies link social media to poorer mental health outcomes. Despite these concerns, we predict that consumers will spend more time with social media next year as it evolves beyond social connections. The major platforms are now just as much about entertainment and shopping as they are about keeping up with friends and family. Technology for social commerce has finally improved, integrating Shopify, Amazon, and Apple Pay seamlessly, at a time when creators look for more ways to demonstrate their ROI to brands. As social media moves beyond just being social, these venues will become ideal platforms for brands to build relationships across the entire customer lifecycle. Consumers will find it less convenient to stay offline. Cancel culture reaches a tipping point, but 60% of consumers will tune out. Cancel culture — boycotting or shaming companies or people who have acted objectionably — is on the upswing. Forrester data shows that online adults globally take actions such as posting on social media or telling a family member or friend to avoid a company in response to perceived misdeeds. For our 2024 predictions, we foresaw that brands’ inaction (playing it safe) would cause consumer tension. But in 2025, it will be consumers’ turn to be less active as we enter an era of desensitization: They will tune out as media hysteria around cancel culture reaches new heights and social media algorithms amplify hot takes. The writing is on the wall: Our survey data finds that the share of online adults who often think about a company’s social, environmental, or political values when purchasing is down 10 percentage points in Italy, while the belief that companies have a responsibility to participate in debates about current issues fell 4 percentage points in the US. Read Forrester’s full Predictions 2025: Consumers report to get more detail about each of these predictions and others. Then, set up a Forrester guidance session with me to discuss how to apply these predictions and best practices to stay ahead in the coming year. If you aren’t yet a Forrester client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide on B2C marketing and customer experience, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Find additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

When it comes to public cloud in 2024, there’s no denying that AI has dominated the conversation, providing cloud customers with a variety of new options. In fact, a year ago, we predicted that AI would rattle some of the biggest cloud players this year, and it certainly did (we’ll do a deep dive on our 2024 predictions’ accuracy in a separate blog early next year). In 2025, public cloud AI offerings will continue to expand and mature, but private cloud will also thrive in the year ahead due to some complex industry dynamics that started in 2024 and will play out in 2025. Some persistent challenges will impact the public cloud market, such as supply shortages, quality concerns, and data security, pushing new behaviors for vendors and users alike. Hyperscalers will invest in AI model quality and increased GPU firepower to drive the new AI services, but at the cost of some sustainability goals. More users will seek out AI capabilities in the private cloud domain. For the cloud market in 2025, we predict that: Integrated RAG services will become the hottest new cloud services. In the past year, cloud players sought differentiation through AI infrastructure and foundation models. But FMs bring their own issues, including hallucinations and accuracy concerns. In 2025, we predict that cloud players will shift their focus to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) services as a form of differentiation. In fact, in the year ahead, every major hyperscaler will launch RAG-related solutions to build accuracy into their generative AI services. Private cloud will gain momentum with VMware alternatives. On-premises computing (by any name) is on the rise again as companies solve sovereignty, cost, and data ownership/security challenges, but newcomers and private cloud expanders likely won’t look to expand business with dominant private cloud player VMware given the bundling and pricing changes announced in the first half of 2024. As a result, Forrester predicts that in 2025 most major public cloud providers will increase investments in private cloud, and offerings like Nutanix and open-source projects like OpenStack will see increased user interest. Platform specialists will squeeze out native cloud platforms’ security capabilities. Vendors such as Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Wiz have made significant investment into their cloud security solutions with cloud security posture management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, infrastructure-as-code scanning, and container security functionality sets, as well as centralized and generative AI-supported policy management, detection, response, and reporting. In 2025, hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google will continue to build their native cloud workload security (CWS) capabilities, but the competition from standalone solutions will be a formidable threat. By the end of 2025, 60% or fewer cloud customers will prefer the hyperscaler platform’s native CWS capabilities, while the remaining 40% will use a platform specialist CWS vendor. Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2025: Cloud Computing 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 cloud 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