The case for the collaborative enterprise: Findings from IDC

Collaboration becomes productivity when people, content and artificial intelligence (AI) intersect. At its essence, collaboration is people working together around common goals. While people do not scale, adding the right technologies, integrations and intelligence layers enables collaboration to generate new efficiencies at scale.

We are definitively in a new digital business era brought on in part by enduring hybrid work models and consumer expectations for digital engagement. Enterprises that move faster and more effectively are greatly rewarded. Moving to the cloud isn't enough to realize the rewards of being a truly digital-first enterprise.

The realization of benefits requires a repositioning of your UC&C stack to bridge silos and connect people with an integrated and intelligent collaboration platform: a collaboration stack. IDC research shows that 74% of businesses agree that an integrated collaboration platform helps retain talent, and a similar number say it makes it easier to hire talent (IDC 2022 Annual Collaboration Survey). To do their best work, people simply expect to be enabled with collaboration tools.

An intelligent, collaborative application stack enables greater customer responsiveness where the workforce feels more effective – because they are. Empowering your teams with real-time speech recognition, natural language processing/conversational AI, and sentiment analysis are now within reach of virtually every company.

The benefits are clear: 70% of organizations say having artificial intelligence capabilities is a top factor in making a team collaboration app purchase (IDC 2022 Annual Collaboration Survey). Furthermore, 81% of organizations plan to continue or increase their investment on AI-related solutions (Source: IDC Future of Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey Wave 11, Dec 2022).

Integrated applications enable a more natural flow of work, rather than a traditional workflow. Creating a natural flow of work benefits both the customer and the workforce. IDC research recognizes that 63% of businesses need to make improvements when it comes to collaborating with partners and customers (IDC Annual Collaboration Study, March 2022).

This is the conclusion despite respondent companies reporting a sharp increase in the number of companies requesting specifically to collaborate. Some companies may be waiting to see the dip in revenues before they recognize their customers’ requests for collaboration. Effectively collaborating with customers and partners creates an opportunity for those ready to meet evolving customer needs.

The move to a UC&C stack with integrations and intelligence helps resolve these challenges, but also opens the door for new and evolving ways of gauging success.

Metrics widely in use today are rooted in the actions of the assembly line era. Powerful AI now enables companies to access insights that did not exist even a few years ago. These insights are not just to improve customer engagements: they include predictive analytics that move us closer to connecting data from internal decisions and actions to real customer outcomes.

Collaboration, as it always was, is about people working together. Companies that develop a culture of equitable and inclusive collaboration will find significant opportunities as they leverage new voices across the enterprise. Paired with intelligent and integrated UC&C, access to collaboration tools makes your company more attractive to the hybrid workforce and new potential team members, improves efficiency and drives a much improved customer experience in a quickly evolving digital-first era.