If you’re like me, you’ve wished you could hit Ctrl-F in real life to find your glasses or keys. Thanks to new tools in retail tech, we’re not too far off! We just released our 2024 predictions for digital commerce, which include:AR brings business scenarios to life. Imagine enabling warehouse workers to find items on physical shelves instantly or alerting an employee to an issue on the retail floor.
In broader digital commerce applications, tech buying also will see a shift in 2024. We anticipate that digital businesses will apply surgical precision, rather than sweeping change, to their technology decisions. After the tech buying spree of the past few years, digital businesses will change their tech adoption behaviors in two ways:Legacy systems — and the services that support them — are a huge portion of digital budgets.
68% of digital business leaders tell us that they plan to increase budgets for tech maintenance and updates. We predict that new tech implementations and strategies will lure about 25% of this budget away from enabling the legacy solutions that no longer serve businesses’ ongoing ambitions for more modern, flexible technology.We expect to see many more projects that introduce standalone, modular, or augmentative commerce tech solutions over the next year.
We do see opportunities in some specific use cases , but business outcomes for this new tech are still unclear. We also expect more challenges to surface as privacy concerns continue to limit how well businesses can leverage AI to target messaging and products to customers.