At the turn of the new year, many organizations publish trends and perspectives that they anticipate will be significant in the coming year. Individually, these outlooks can have value. However, even greater insight can be gained from collecting and analyzing these trends together. This is especially true to see patterns that are relevant to platform professionals.
Collecting and Organizing 2023 Trends
A couple of hours of work scanning for 2023 trends and adding them to a database yielded 33 sources, which together issued 315 trends. While this is not a full accounting of every outlook publically available, it does cover many well-known organizations, such as a16z, Accenture, Deloitte, Gartner, Goldman Sachs, IBM and Shopify.
The number of trends put forward by each organization varies from as high as 25 in the case of a16z to as few as five or fewer, in the case of Accenture and Gartner. On average, the 33 sources issued 8 trends.
The trends can be clustered. The chart below shows how the trends fall across 15 topic areas. The most common trends are retail, eCommerce, macro, tech and Web3. There are also trends covering b2b marketing and sales, AI, mobile aps, APIs and ESG.
9 Trends for Platform Professionals
From these 315 trends, nine trends are particularly relevant to platform professionals.
These 9 trends and a link to the source that they come from are presented below:
1. Goldman Sachs- Goldman Sachs 2023 US Economics Outlook
Trend: In 2023, we expect GDP growth of about 1%, below potential but well above consensus expectations
2. Gartner - Chief Sales Officer Leadership Vision 2023
Trend: Greater focus will be placed on delivering valuable customer engagements in variable environments. Successful companies will map how uncertainty impacts customers and shift to a buyer-centric operating model.
3. Shopify - Commerce Trends 2023
Trend: Cookies are out. Data privacy regulations have raised customer acquisition costs. First-party customer data is in Instead of looking to big data, brands are using first-party data to engage their audiences.
4. Deloitte - Tech Trends 2023
Trend: With AI tools increasingly standardized and commoditized, what will likely differentiate the truly AI-fueled enterprise from its competition will be how robustly it uses AI throughout its processes.
5. a16z crypto - Big Ideas in Tech for 2023
Trend: Major industries are facing unprecedented labor shortages. A new wave of labor marketplaces will help employees build identity and reputation, connect directly with hiring managers, and get training and resources.
6. Kroll - 10 Trends to Watch Heading Into 2023
Trend: The evolving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulatory landscape and incorporation of ESG factors into companies’ monitoring and reporting frameworks continue to build in 2023.
7. Forrester - The Top 5 Healthcare Trends In 2023
Trend: The amount of healthcare business conducted via retail outlets, such as Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS, will double during 2023
8. Nordic APIs - 11 Trends to Watch in the API Economy in 2023
Trend: More platforms will be built API-first, providing developers the chance to design a scalable and consistent platform from the start, which is a standard API design that can be implemented across the entire organization.
9. LinkedIn - 10 Innovation Trends for Marketers in 2023 by Michael Litman
Trend: Loyalty will continue to forge ahead in web3, creating new value exchange to the consumer, rewarding them for their ongoing engagement, and delighting them in new ways.
Conclusion
The need for platform professionals to keep pace with industry and global trends has grown as billions and billions of dollars worth of goods, services and data now flow through platforms and marketplaces.
While 9 trends do not cover all that is important to follow, they do provide a basis for thinking about the risks and opportunities that lie ahead in the coming year. They are also not just relevant to 2023. Some represent longer-term trends.
As I have written previously, trends can be organized into three dimensions of time: what we are Seeing Now, Beginning to See, and, finally, what is On the Horizon. Organizing trends by their time horizon of impact can add further value for strategy and planning purposes. For more on how time horizons shape the significance of trends see: Platform Foresight 2022 - by Peter C. Evans (substack.com).
I hope you find this analysis helpful in thinking about your strategy for 2023. It would be great to hear what trends you are following.
Happy New Year!