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The ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 event unveiled ambitious advancements in AI-driven enterprise technology, with a focus on autonomous workflows, unified data platforms, and human-machine collaboration. Key announcements included the launch of the AI Control Tower for managing AI agents, the expansion of Workflow Data Fabric to unify disparate data sources, and the intent to acquire data.world to enhance data governance and cataloging capabilities. While the announcements were bold, they also raised questions about the practical challenges of implementation. But what do Forrester analysts think about these announcements? What challenges do we see? ServiceNow Offers A Refreshingly Unified Take On CRM — Yet Does Not Appeal To All Kate Leggett, VP and principal analyst ServiceNow’s platform-first focus addresses the real issues facing enterprises — siloed organizations, siloed processes and applications, and legacy architectures — that hinder productivity and negatively impact customer experiences. The CRM, which consists of Sales and Order Management, Customer Service Management, and Field Service Management, was launched earlier this year. ServiceNow is well rated in our latest evaluation, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management Software, Q1 2025, and enables organizations to work across multiple functions. It orchestrates and automates CRM workflows from product launch to selling, fulfilling, servicing, and renewals — workflows that are not just contained in the front office. It has special appeal to customers in asset- or product-centric industries such as communications, technology, manufacturing, and healthcare devices. Conversations with customers highlighted the real value in complex, workflow-driven scenarios such as financial dispute management. The product leadership of the new enterprise architecture product indicated that the new offering has substantially exceeded expectations for revenue, and mindshare (anecdotally) is excellent. Finance And A New Mega-Cycle Charlie Betz, VP and principal analyst According to briefings with the product team, ServiceNow’s enterprise architecture (EA) offering has exceeded expectations. This does not surprise me, as EA itself is transitioning into a more data-driven mode, moving away from a focus on siloed, ivory-tower modeling. Enterprise architects are now expected to have a comprehensive understanding of increasingly detailed data concerning all aspects of IT operations. Enterprise architecture on the same platform as the configuration management database (CMDB) and portfolio tooling, along with access to availability, IT service management, and portfolio data, all just makes sense. And the market is proving this out. AI is coming on quickly in this space. I saw a demo of a natural language conversation with the ServiceNow agent, reporting on and analyzing the application portfolio. Chatbots are no longer just for IT support. The Semantic Moment ServiceNow announced its acquisition of data.world during the conference. This merits a separate blog, but for now, I’ll just note that semantics and ontology (in the guise of intent) are having a moment now, so this acquisition makes a lot of sense. It also positions ServiceNow in the data management space in a new way. Will ServiceNow Take On IT Finance? We talked about this in last year’s blog about ServiceNow and Atlassian events. Notable this year was the absence of Apptio from the Knowledge show floor as a sponsor. Nicus and Proven Optics were both there again, continuing in their horse race to land the ServiceNow nod as the preferred partner (and potential acquisition target) for IT finance. Nicus representatives got up on stage with AT&T and talked about how the company is running AT&T’s internal IT finance; it has reimplemented the solution on the ServiceNow platform with some additional cloud processing support from Microsoft Azure. If ServiceNow takes on IT finance, it will finally be a complete “ERP for the CIO” solution, and would be a serious threat to Apptio. Trillion-Dollar Market Bill McDermott is, of course, known to be a salesman par excellence, but I don’t recall hearing him speak previously of multi-trillion-dollar market opportunities as he did this year with respect to generative AI (genAI). The funny thing is that I agree with him. I believe, after having done my own investigations, including ongoing proof-of-concept work, that genAI, agentic AI, and the learning feedback loops that they enable are a new economic trend on the order of a new Perez cycle (aka “zone” — previous zones being waterpower, rail transportation and coal power generation, steel and electric mass production, and the first generation of computing and information/communication technology starting in the 1950s). This commodification of knowledge is itself a significant and unique new economic era. We are seeing all the turbulence, boom-bust cycles, froth, hype, and uncertainty — just as in those earlier eras. ServiceNow is making some very sensible bets in this new world (e.g., the AI Control Tower) — but who knows how it will play out? Exciting times. The Age Of Platforms Christopher Condo, principal analyst In previous years, the prevailing belief favored the use of best-of-breed tools for delivering value to customers, with integrated platforms such as ServiceNow often regarded as less capable due to their broader functionalities. The emergence of artificial intelligence has shifted this perspective, however. Now, a unified product suite, supported by a robust data model, can generate diverse value streams for its customers. AI integration throughout the platform captures and analyzes data from various phases of IT service delivery, thereby optimizing processes and enhancing the overall delivery of value while minimizing inefficiencies. Moreover, a cohesive user experience facilitated by AI allows teams to concentrate on innovation rather than being hindered by context switching. End users experience reduced cognitive load, which in turn increases productivity and lowers costs associated with value delivery. ServiceNow’s agentic AI capabilities further empower human workers by allowing them to automate routine tasks, such as research and task prioritization. This automation enables individuals to become orchestrators of their own processes, ultimately expanding their influence on the products and services they develop. AI Skepticism And Culture Must Be Addressed Enterprises are hesitant to fully adopt AI solutions, particularly when it involves their data, as they require assurances of security and reliability. While many are open to using AI for coding and generative tasks, the emergence of agentic

I passed a barefoot man strolling down a sidewalk on a chilly day in May. His hair was short. He was clean-shaven, wearing a multicolored blanket hoody. He exuded serenity as he grounded himself in the concrete beneath his feet, granting his chi permission to exchange greetings with the earth. Through that lens, every day, all 8 billion of us could be grounding (also known as “earthing” by believers — all I know is that it feels good in the summertime). There is little competition for grounding with the earth. But in the corporate world, grounding AI agents in reality rather than hallucinations is neither natural nor free. It will cost money and establish the foundations for your future. Already, the battle for grounding your AI agents in the proprietary knowledge that differentiates your business has begun. Every company that expects its AI agents to work must invest in its knowledge capacity — the knowledge infrastructure — to ground them. Just as you train employees, you will ground AI agents in your proprietary knowledge assets to represent and differentiate your business. That knowledge infrastructure consists of structured databases (systems of record, managed for rigorous quality and consistency), content stores (unstructured documents, wikis, emails — the world of knowledge management), vector databases storing unstructured doc “embeddings” (multidimensional fingerprints, essentially), and graph databases hosting interlinked information. All four are essential ingredients to ground agents in the reality of data rather than the musings and hallucinations of a language model. To build AI agents that work, companies must commit their knowledge assets to a vendor that can translate those assets into AI-ready language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent guardrails. Every AI agent platform vendor — hyperscalers such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft; software giants like Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday; automation anchors such as Appian, Pegasystems, and UiPath; model providers like NVIDIA and OpenAI; and many others — want you to host your knowledge assets (documents, conversations, audio, video) to ground agents that work. All want to host your knowledge infrastructure. And that means a battle is forming among vendors from every direction to host the knowledge that grounds your AI strategy. Three questions frame the hard choices you face in creating your AI grounding strategy: Where will you host your AI agents? Framework: Host your agents in platforms closest to your data and the systems that they interact with. For example, we would recommend that you host your B2B sales agents in your AI-ready CRM. Where will you put your knowledge assets? Framework: If latency or real-time performance matters, put your knowledge assets in the same cloud as your AI agents. If you care less about response times and more about costs, you can host your knowledge assets in a common infrastructure that feeds more than one AI agent platform. How do you optimize your knowledge infrastructure for performance and cost? Framework: Prepare to selectively replicate knowledge assets across clouds or runtimes so they can ground agents in different processes and systems. Be prepared to invest in storage governance, software, security, and synchronization to optimize agent performance. Thank you to Charlie Betz, Rowan Curran, and Leslie Joseph for their help with this post. source

B2B marketing leaders face a harsh reality: Buyers aren’t searching for information the way they used to, but most marketing teams are optimizing as if they are. Even as organic traffic declines, many teams continue to rely on outdated digital marketing playbooks to plan, publish, and measure content. These habits are hard to break. They’re reinforced by legacy KPIs, familiar workflows, and pressure to show immediate results. Marketers still chase keyword rankings, obsess about page views, and anchor reporting in click-based behaviors, even as generative AI (genAI) redefines how search works and how buyers discover and trust information. Your Buyers’ Search Behavior Has Changed Search used to be straightforward: A buyer typed in a query, scanned a results page, and clicked through to vendor content. But that linear search-to-click path is done. Today, buyers ask questions in natural language and get instant, AI-curated answers. According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, 89% of B2B buyers say they’re using genAI tools at every stage of the purchase process. They consult genAI tools such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, often on mobile devices or embedded in enterprise software, to accelerate how they learn and evaluate solutions. They gather insights from multiple self-guided sources, including genAI tools, vendor websites, social media platforms, user review websites, industry events, and industry or business association websites.   The Risks Of Sticking With An Outdated Content Strategy Holding on to yesterday’s content strategy doesn’t just slow you down. It actively undermines your visibility, credibility, and influence with modern B2B buyers because even high-quality content is getting filtered, summarized, or skipped entirely. Here’s what’s at stake: You’ll lose visibility where it matters most. Search is no longer about pages and rankings. Instead, it requires presence in AI-curated responses. If your content isn’t crawlable or structured in a way that AI systems can interpret, you’re not in the conversation. Outdated SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, backlink chasing, or producing thin “thought leadership” don’t work when large language models and AI search tools prioritize content that’s well structured, contextually relevant, and authoritative. You’ll miss the chance to demonstrate expertise. If your content lacks depth, nuance, or proof of expertise, it gets filtered out or flattened into generic responses. That means your unique point of view gets lost, a missed opportunity to educate buyers, differentiate your brand, and establish credibility. You’ll stay out of sync with buyer expectations. Today’s buyers are more informed and skeptical than ever. They expect content that helps them understand complex problems, compare solutions, and build internal consensus. A content strategy built only to support lead capture and gated assets is out of step with how modern buyers evaluate solutions. It creates friction in the buying process, costing you visibility, slowing pipeline, and putting revenue at risk. Content Visibility Has New Rules And Higher Stakes Today’s buyers are gathering insights in more places before they reach your site. To stay visible and credible, your content must meet them where they are, earn their trust quickly, and reflect the depth of expertise that they expect. This means moving beyond keywords and building content around buyer intent, clear answers, and proof of authority. Every asset should reinforce your relevance and readiness — because if your content isn’t built to be recognized by AI and respected by buyers, it won’t show up where decisions are made. Read more about how to do this in the report, Shifting Search Behaviors Demand Smarter Content Marketing Strategies (client access required). Contact us if you’d like to discuss how to evolve your content strategy to meet buyers’ expectations and be visible wherever they are. source

Reprioritizing customer retention lets B2B companies better weather economic uncertainty and volatile market conditions — a daunting task when executive leadership asks everyone to deal with the chaos by cutting costs. But cutting costs independently of business strategy — especially strategies that protect and grow revenue from current accounts — can hurt more than help. Postsale teams come out on top when they optimize costs by pivoting resources and communicating more consistently. They also provide easier access to the tools and information that existing customers use to gain more value from their current investments. Make A Customer-Led Pivot To Digital Experiences Forrester’s 2024 Buyer Insights research shows that 81% of business buyers expressed dissatisfaction in at least one area with the provider they chose at the end of a successful purchase. Becoming customer-led is a principal way to avoid this result — and is a pivotal step in any company’s journey to customer obsession. Customer-led organizations boast higher revenue growth, increased employee engagement, and (most importantly!) greater customer retention. A primary way to become more customer-led is to make postsale experiences more streamlined and self-directed — something that can be done using existing technology, business assets, and people and (if done creatively) without much additional investment. The key today is understanding how your best customers thrive and getting started on ways to help the rest follow their lead. Focus Digital Experiences On Five Areas To Boost Engagement By understanding how your best customers excel, top postsale teams can construct digital signposts and way stations that direct others along the right paths to value. Teams that make even the most basic investments in developing a postsale digital experience (DX) can see significant returns, as our Total Economic Impact™ models predict. Read on for five areas where pulling together even the most basic DX can have an outsized impact on customer health. Key Elements Of The B2B Digital Customer Experience   Let Customers Interact With Their Data, Plans, And Team Yes, we know: Customer data is a mess, and modifying back-end systems is expensive and time-consuming. But making customer data more robust — and getting customers to help manage their profile information — is a first step that B2B companies should commit to that can lend itself to further automation and enhancement with AI down the road. In the meantime, we see customer teams deploy uncomplicated capabilities that: Allow customers to access — and modify — joint success plans from a portal, content management hub, or other cloud-based destination. Give customers (at minimum read-only) access to account information so they can request specific changes from support agents or CSMs — or (at best) make those changes directly. Display benchmark data for progress metrics or achievement milestones (at minimum) — and allow individual accounts to compare their results to peers. Show account team contact information, bios, interests, and personal fun facts to build trust and relationships. Spruce Up Your Online Help And Support Ticketing Consolidating the access points to your support ticketing system, knowledge-base answers, and contact information (phone numbers, email, chatbot, etc.) in one interface/portal page can pay off in reduced customer frustration and streamlined interactions. You can also: Update your list of frequently asked questions and their answers. Clean up links to your latest product download pages, license key requests, password reset process, or other common activities. Build a nurture campaign that introduces new license holders to key support systems, explains service-level agreements and escalation steps, and handles other pitfalls that new users typically fall into. Highlight Your Most Used And Most Effective Training Striking the right balance between messaging and reminding can help (new) customers or users remember how useful your existing online education can be. You don’t need a full learning management system: Take the time to survey or interview customers about which courses or modules they find most useful and promote those. You could also: Use customer-friendly language to highlight how customers can access self-serve training and learning materials. Create short, YouTube-like videos that demonstrate a key feature or best practice. Generate and market a list of “must-do” educational sessions to support onboarding, focusing on the ones that successful customers find valuable. Encourage Customers To Form A Community Online community platforms are powerful but can require resources that you might not be ready or willing to commit. Look for creative ways to get your customers to engage, network, and share their experiences, advice, and knowledge. At a minimum: Introduce your best customers to each other, ask them to talk about their successes (on a webinar, for example), and capture/share the key insights they share. Design a basic community program, communicate its purpose, and market the benefits of participation. Promote your best customer stories to the community, making the storyteller a hero. Ask advocate customers to share a specific type of best practice and publish the top 10 results. Invite customers who “support” the community to participate in exclusive experiences. Promote Events That Connect Customers With You And Each Other Market digital and in-person events to your customers and focus on aspects that benefit them. Track attendance, gather feedback, and look for signals that indicate new purchase interest. Analyze these results to make the business case for further investment. You can: Offer customer-exclusive experiences during your currently planned events. Set up a Slack channel by account (or by cohorts of similar customers by ideal customer profile) to connect account team members with customer contacts and users. Start small with an all-digital user conference that leverages your webinar platform to plan and deliver topical, high-demand customer content. If you don’t have a user conference, now is the time to consider (re-)starting one. Set up a process for collaboratively soliciting and prioritizing customer-contributed feature requests or new-offering ideas. These five areas represent practical, straightforward DX changes that any B2B team can implement quickly as postsale teams explore further investment — particularly for using generative and predictive AI to enrich, personalize, and make each aspect of the DX more effective. For

The gap between healthcare practitioners and health insurers jeopardizes patient care and outcomes, as we found in Forrester’s Healthcare Practitioners Survey, 2024. Most physicians we surveyed view health insurers as unsupportive and obstructive. By contrast, a successful partnership between healthcare practitioners and health insurers ensures that patients understand the healthcare services they will receive and the potential costs involved. Patients are also more likely to experience high-quality, timely care backed by clinical intelligence. Health insurers must reduce friction in the practitioner experience by leading with transparency and improving interoperability. By providing clear information about treatment options and costs and ensuring seamless data sharing with practitioners, health insurers will build trust and improve accountability. Forrester’s Healthcare Practitioners Survey: An Interactive Data Tool To Make Decisions Forrester’s new interactive data summary of the Healthcare Practitioners Survey, 2024, helps healthcare leaders and organizations make better data-driven decisions. Clients can filter data on topics such as employee experience and benefits, daily workload and burnout, patient engagement, collaboration, technology and AI adoption, and more. Key findings include: Practitioners overwhelmingly feel that insurers are a barrier to quality care. Over three-quarters of physicians agree that health insurers create additional hurdles to patients getting the care they need. They cite difficulties in working with insurers, communication issues, and challenges in patients finding providers. Less than one-fifth of clinicians find the claims submission and reimbursement process efficient and straightforward, underscoring the frustration with numerous barriers to productive collaboration. Personnel shortages, burnout, and administrative burdens are top hurdles. Practitioners report that these issues delay treatments and hinder delivering optimal care. Of greatest concern: Only one-tenth of practitioners feel that they can deliver the best possible care. Adequate support for interoperability and access to patient data is lacking. Less than one-quarter of healthcare practitioners agree that health insurers provide adequate support for interoperability and access to patient data. Those insurers that do so are half as likely to report delays in treatments due to administrative processes. Forrester clients can view our full interactive data summary to gain insights into the current state of the employee experience among US healthcare practitioners. Schedule time with us now to dig deeper into the data. source

Ecodesign is a continuous improvement process that aims at balancing trade-offs between minimizing environmental impact and optimizing value for customers. It’s an opportunity to rethink your value chain to reduce costs and innovate for increasingly demanding green consumers and regulators. Ecodesign is one of the six pillars of The B2C CMO’s Environmental Sustainability Framework.   More than 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage. A growing number of companies are starting to balance cost, process, and time-to-delivery optimization with the reduction of their negative environmental footprint before moving into mass production. Beyond regulation and the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, key forces are driving the uptake of ecodesign: Consumers want more brand transparency. According to Forrester data, only 10% of US and 12% of European consumers say that the environmental impact of a brand or a product is most important when making a purchase — but 43% of US and more than 50% of Spanish and Italian online consumers would like to understand more about how their purchases impact the environment. In addition, 62% of German and half of Australian online consumers report owning or regularly purchasing sustainable food products. Consumers are also increasingly aware of planned obsolescence of consumer electronics and demand more transparency. NGOs are increasingly scrutinizing companies’ green claims and use of resources. Leaders such as Decathlon, IKEA, and L’Oréal capitalize on sustainability as a differentiator. Sourcing more sustainable materials and producing more sustainable goods is often perceived as expensive, but it also represents a way to differentiate and justify a green premium for your products as well as an opportunity to reduce costs by limiting resource and energy consumption. According to Forrester’s Q1 2025 CMO Pulse Survey, 83% of B2C marketing and advertising decision-makers (at the VP level or higher) agree that their organization struggles to design greener offerings, products, and services. B2C marketers find it difficult to embrace ecodesign because they deal with many other priorities, pay attention to media and communication impacts (but neglect the rest), and overfocus on recycled packaging and forget about the lifecycle impact of products. They also miss a more holistic approach and struggle with cross-functional complexity. As Geraldine Hue, cofounder at MAOBI, a sustainable consultancy, sums it up: “Too few CMOs are involved in ecodesign, and that’s a pity because — whether they own the product or not — they play a key role in aligning teams to conceive more sustainable offerings.” Ecodesign demands strong involvement and enterprisewide collaboration. This new report shares best practices for maturing your ecodesign approach to help consumers embrace greener behaviors. If you are a Forrester client, you can access the full report here. Also, as a client, you can schedule time with me for an inquiry or guidance session, or you can talk to your account team about workshops and strategy days on how to integrate sustainability into your marketing and how to activate it in customer journeys. Go to my Forrester bio and click “Follow” to be notified about my latest research. You can also follow me on LinkedIn here. source

As the Forrester research team conducted its analysis for the top 10 emerging technologies this year, one trend became clear: The Asia Pacific (APAC) region is no longer following global tech trends — it is setting them. Once seen as a fast adopter, APAC is now a bold innovator, building new technologies from the ground up. For example, Japan and South Korea have taken the global lead in humanoid robotics, with lifelike service robots now deployed in hotels, hospitals, and retail. China is pioneering quantum communication networks, already operational in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. India is pushing the frontier of multilingual generative AI, with startups creating foundational language models tailored to all 22 of the country’s official languages. And Singapore is at the forefront of smart city technologies, including AI-led urban planning and edge-powered infrastructure. Across the region, governments and enterprises are not just embracing emerging technologies — they’re shaping the future of these technologies. Here’s a look at how some of the key emerging technologies are being developed, adopted, and scaled across the region. Generative AI: Beyond Language To Visual Mastery GenAI adoption is surging across APAC, especially in multilingual markets such as India and Southeast Asia. Businesses are using genAI not just for content generation but also for localization, visual asset creation, and code development. In Japan, AI-generated anime is gaining traction. In South Korea, genAI helps marketers craft hyperlocalized campaigns at scale. Various e-commerce platforms in China utilize genAI to create personalized product descriptions and dynamically generate images for different customer segments. Agentic AI: Enabling Autonomous Actions Unlike traditional automation, agentic AI systems proactively make decisions and adapt in real time. In Australia, financial services firms are experimenting with agentic AI for portfolio management. Logistics companies in Australia are piloting AI agents that can dynamically reroute delivery vehicles based on real-time traffic conditions and delivery schedules. In India, smart campus deployments use agentic systems to optimize energy usage and student services — transforming static systems into intelligent assistants. IoT Security: Fortifying The Connected World As IoT devices flood urban and industrial environments, security remains a top priority. Countries such as Singapore and South Korea are strengthening their cybersecurity frameworks to secure smart infrastructure. Industrial internet-of-things deployments in manufacturing hubs across Vietnam and Thailand are seeing increased investments in anomaly detection, Zero Trust architectures, and edge-based threat mitigation. Synthetic Data: Fueling AI Without Compromise With growing data privacy regulations and limited access to high-quality datasets, synthetic data is gaining momentum. In sectors such as finance and healthcare, synthetic datasets enable AI training without exposing sensitive information. Chinese and Indian firms are leading efforts in creating public-private sandboxes that use synthetic data to simulate real-world environments for safer AI testing. Healthcare institutions in Japan are exploring synthetic patient data to train AI diagnostic tools while adhering to strict privacy regulations. Learn More Want to hear more about the unique emerging technology use cases and adoption trends for APAC? Register for our June 4 webinar on the top 10 emerging technologies for 2025. The webinar will take place at 10:30 a.m. IST to be more convenient for APAC tech leaders. source

A significant international presence at RSAC 2025 signalled the continued importance of the U.S. as a global export platform for cybersecurity. Countries including The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the UK, Korea, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia showcased national pavilions and cybersecurity companies on the show floor.  Trade missions were organized by the UK, Netherlands & Belgium (jointly), and Canada, while Ireland hosted a dedicated ecosystem event. The UAE and Israel played a leading role in the International Cyber Drill, with the UAE also co-leading the Counter Ransomware Initiative (CRI)a testament to the growing spirit of global cyber collaboration. In addition to last week’s take and webinar of RSAC key themes and the innovation sandbox, in this blog, Madelein van der Hout and I provide our perspective as  international visitors to the event, and what mattered most to international CISOs we spoke to:   US and Israel firms dominate Innovation Sandbox and the expo floor. The U.S. start-up ecosystem remains exceptionally strong, with nine out of ten RSAC 2025 Innovation Sandbox finalists founded in the United States, in spite of founders sometimes originating from outside of the US. Knostic maintains close ties to Israel’s Unit 8200 cyber start-up ecosystem and operates an additional office there, CalypsoAI is co-headquartered in Dublin, while MIND was founded and headquartered in the United Kingdom. Despite nice warm words of their own governments’ support and political goodwill, international vendors continue to turn to the US because it provides the depth of capital, VC ecosystem and the risk-taking culture that is vital to their growth and success.  International vendors foresee cybersecurity trade benefits. Fourteen percent of expo stands were sponsored by international trade pavilions, with RSAC continuing to be seen as a prime stage for international vendors to present their solutions to a global audience. For example, the governments of the Netherlands and Canada held trade missions, where 35-organization and 10 Ontario-based companies showcased Dutch and Canadian cybersecurity innovation, supported trade promotion and innovation. Clearly, the US still represents significant export potential for international vendors in spite of recent volatility.  This is largely because the US has not (yet) imposed tariffs for software, and there is a sentiment by international cybersecurity vendors and CISOs that these vendors can potentially model the benefits of continued trade.    International regulations yield global impact. Our discussions revealed that operational resilience regulations such as DORA, with their focus on operational resilience, and direct link to enabling the business to operate meant that many global organizations adopt elements of those regulations, even if they are not required to comply.  This signals that when well crafted, and underpinned by concepts with clear business benefits, cybersecurity regulations can still be a force for good beyond those it is directly applicable to.   Critical infrastructure, geopolitics and cyber warfare take centre stage, and deeply matter to the international audience. Beyond the neon lights and noisy booths, which is unlike any international security event, RSAC 2025 had some serious undercurrents —ones that resonated deeply with the international security leaders we spoke with. The global cybersecurity landscape is shifting fast, and critical infrastructure is squarely in the crosshairs. More than 100 sessions were dedicated to protecting critical infrastructure, underscoring its rising importance amid escalating geopolitical tensions and increasing threats. At the broader conference there were twenty-one sessions covering cyber warfare as a topic. Dmitri Alperovich keynote highlighted that the intersection of cybersecurity and geopolitics is shaping the most serious threats we face today and the need for urgent, coordinated action to strengthen cyber defences.  Forrester clients who wish to dive deeper into our perspectives on RSAC can book a guidance session with either of us. Readers should also check out Forrester’s Security & Risk team’s wider take on the conference overall here, and the 2025 Innovation Sandbox contest here.   source

Your B2B buyer’s network is driving organizations to reimagine their messaging. Gone are the days when targeting a single decision-maker with a one-size-fits-all message would suffice. Even the days of building messaging for the buying group alone are now numbered. Welcome to the era of the buying network — a complex web of external influencers, customers, partners, providers (that’s us!), and even buyer AI such as ChatGPT, all of which are engaging with our buyers in the buying process. This new era is characterized by: Buyers who have grown up using technology and are accustomed to self-service interactions and options. Increasingly large internal buying groups that contribute to buying complexity. Growing reliance on external influencers for third-party insights and validation. Unparalleled adoption and dependence on generative AI for support throughout the entire purchasing process. Connected Messaging Provides The Link Between Audiences As marketers, we must rethink our approach to building and deploying messaging. We’re dealing with participants that demand a lot of insight from us, and we can’t just shout into the void hoping that our message sticks. Instead, messaging in the era of the buying network requires a more thoughtful approach, one that prioritizes building connected messaging that engages not only our buyers but all of the stakeholders and AI tools that they are increasingly turning to in order to help them buy better. This ensures that our message is not only heard but resonates everywhere. Navigate The New Frontier By Building Messaging That Resonates Across Audiences But how do we achieve this? It’s not just about crafting a great message; it’s about understanding the dynamics of the buying network and how each participant interacts with and influences the buying process. Here are five pointers to get you started: Know your audience (all of them). Dive deep into identifying and mapping your buyer’s buying network. Who are they? What motivates them? How do they prefer to receive information? The better you understand each participant, the more tailored and effective your messaging will be. Consistency is key. Your message needs to be consistent across all touchpoints and channels. This doesn’t mean being repetitive or boring; it means ensuring that the core message is clear, whether it’s being communicated through an email, a blog post, or even an AI chatbot. Leverage technology. Your buyers are using it, and so should you! Technology, and especially AI, is your ally in the quest for connected messaging. Use analytics to gain insights into how messages are received and shared within the buying network. While nascent, AI may eventually help personalize the message at scale, ensuring relevance for every member of the network. Foster collaboration. Encourage and facilitate dialogue within the buying network. When influencers, customers, and partners talk to each other, they reinforce your message and add their unique perspectives, making the narrative around your product or service even more compelling. Be human. Last but certainly not least, remember that at the heart of every B2B transaction, there are people. Your messaging should not only be clear and concise but also authentic. Buyers are looking for trust and relationships, so show empathy, understand their frustrations and challenges, and offer solutions that resonate on a human level. Leverage The Buying Network To Deliver Your Message The rise of the buying network represents both a challenge but, more importantly, an opportunity for B2B marketers. It’s a call to elevate our game by being more thoughtful, strategic, and connected in our messaging. By doing so, we can engage more deeply with our audiences, build lasting relationships, and ultimately drive higher buyer satisfaction. Remember, in the end, it’s not about shouting louder than everyone else; it’s about understanding and speaking directly to the needs and wants of our buyers by engaging with the buying network in a language that resonates with every member of it. Schedule a guidance session to learn more about how you can build messaging for the buying network and tell me more about how you’re planning to approach this new paradigm. source

“The future won’t be designed by accident.” That was the optimistic message Figma CEO Dylan Field delivered during the opening keynote at Config 2025, emphasizing the pivotal role designers will play in an era when AI is making it easier to create software than ever before. Field reassured the audience of professional designers that, as AI accelerates, design will be the differentiator. Why? As Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto aptly put it during our conversation, “Design helps you decide what you should make, and with AI accelerating everything, you better be the one making the right thing.” As for Figma’s product announcements, I left the event feeling a mix of excitement and trepidation. Here’s my take after attending the event and speaking with several Figma leaders. New Products Accelerate The Path From Idea To Shipped Experience Figma unveiled four new products this year: Figma Sites, Figma Make, Figma Buzz, and Figma Draw. Each is designed to help teams go from idea to launch as quickly as possible. These releases also signal Figma’s push to bring even more user types into its ecosystem. Here are my key takeaways: Prototyping gets supercharged. Figma Make (currently in beta) enables designers to turn Figma design files or written prompts into working prototypes, using natural language prompts to refine the output. Creating high-fidelity working prototypes is a great use case for generative AI because prototypes help teams validate ideas with users, iterate faster, and communicate design ideas to stakeholders. Figma brings marketers into its ecosystem. Figma Buzz (currently in beta) targets brand and marketing teams, bringing new users into Figma’s collaboration-focused ecosystem. With Figma Buzz, teams can collaborate on social media, event, and other brand content using customizable templates and editing tools. Figma’s move to bridge the gap between product design and marketing teams is reminiscent of its efforts to do the same with the designer/developer workflow when it launched Dev Mode in 2023. The product is clearly a move to compete with Canva. Buzz is a product to watch for companies with a design system that want to drive consistency across marketing, design, and development. Enhanced tools support everyday design tasks. Grid (currently in beta), a new auto layout feature, helps designers easily create flexible and responsive layouts, eliminating the workarounds that Figma has observed designers applying today. It also launched Figma Draw (now in general availability), a set of tools focused on visual design with enhanced vector editing and illustration features. While less flashy, designers I spoke with at the event value these upgrades for streamlining everyday tasks. The Figma Sites Debacle Shows That Accessibility Can’t Be An Afterthought Inclusive design is more crucial now than ever — but it clearly wasn’t a requirement for Figma Sites. Figma Sites (currently in beta), which turns designs into live websites, was swiftly criticized (here’s an example) by designers, developers, and accessibility experts for generating inaccessible code. The feedback echoes what I’ve observed in my work with clients who increasingly think that if a product doesn’t meet accessibility standards, then it’s not ready to release to customers. Should Figma have done better? Absolutely. It’s troubling for a company whose mission is to “make design accessible to everyone” to launch a product that creates inaccessible outputs. As the go-to tool for product design, Figma has a responsibility to set the standard for quality. On the bright side, Figma has always had a strong connection with its community, and I have confidence that it will address this feedback quickly. Until it does, I advise that organizations hold off on using Figma Sites. Get In Touch If you’re a Forrester client and would like to dive deeper into any of the topics discussed above, or just chat more about what I learned at the event, set up a conversation with me. You can also follow or connect with me on LinkedIn. source