13 Entrepreneurs Explain The Effects of Technology on the Future of Business

Mercy - CBNation Team

5 years ago

It's becoming increasingly important for businesses to leverage on technology especially in marketing. It becomes easier to target your audience and improve the speed of delivering your services and with the entry of IoT, things might just get better in the future. The cost of doing business is also likely to go down significantly, for example in the field of hiring when you hire virtual staffs.

We asked entrepreneurs their thoughts on the effect of technology on the future of their business.

#1- Two effects

Process Automation is going to be huge: As an online entrepreneur, I have seen massive growth in the automation in email marketing. The technology today allows you to collect email subscribers and segment the subscribers and send autoresponders which makes the entire process very easy and highly targeted. This photo helps in notching the readers and making more sales.2. Artificial intelligence will get more prominent: AI is going to be more prominent in the online business world. We also see chatbots becoming very common in areas such as collecting email ids or providing a basic level of support. As technology gets more evolved we will see more artificial intelligence in e-commerce sites where it can help you choose a specific product or give you recommendations.

Thanks to Sumit Bansal, CraftofBlogging.com!

#2- Several drastic changes

As an Accountant and Tax Preparer, Technology has drastically changed the way I run my business. Not only do I now do all my bookwork, tax preparation, and filings on a computer, thus using less paper, but I am also meeting less with my clients personally. In the future, I feel that all of my communication with my clients will be via email, text and video calls versus face to face meetings. My need for bookshelves will almost be eliminated with continuing online education and digital books. Trips to the post office will become a thing of the past as information shared between my clients and myself will be transmitted by encrypted portals, bank feeds and the like. Payments will be made and accepted electronically thus eliminating the need to go to the bank. In many ways, technology will have a positive effect on my business by making me more efficient, more accessible, and give me the ability to help more clients in the long run. But I have to admit that a big part of me is going to miss the one on one interaction with my clients, who in the past have become close friends due to the slower pace of life before the onslaught of modern technology.

Thanks to Candace Stevens, Number Cruncher LLC!

#3- Accessibility

One of the fabulous fringe benefits of the proliferation of technology is the ability for most users to be able to use their personal laptop or home computer to develop their technical skills! At Excel Exposure, we provide online interactive Microsoft Excel training and skill development. As technology improves, we've found that more and more of our users are able to access, view and absorb the information. With high-quality HD streaming being more and more prevalent, the ability to bring university-level quality education to the masses is now here!

Thanks to Ben Currier, ExcelExposure.com!

#4- Mass exodus to the cloud

We are in the technology field, namely in data centers. One huge trend is the mass exodus to the cloud. Instead of companies hosting their own data centers, many more are moving all of their servers out into the cloud. This includes many different flavors from bare metal servers to Software as a Service to serverless computing. We have migrated most of our services into SaaS but we still maintain some storage and file functions in-house. The effect is that we can run cheaper, leaner, and have more resiliency. We know exactly how much we are going to spend each year based on our licenses.

Thanks to Drew Farnsworth, Green Lane Design!

#5- Notifying people via social media platforms

Being a software company we’re constantly seeing our industry evolve and staying on top of those changes is something we take seriously. When we first started DialMyCalls around 10 years ago very few people used Mobile Apps or even visited websites on their phones; now a huge piece of our business is mobile-related. We’ve developed iOS / Android apps for our customers to use as well as completely redeveloped our entire website in order for customers to access their account on a mobile phone or tablet. Our company is a mass notification service which primarily notifies people via phone call or text message; we’re starting to see an evolution of also needing to notify people via social media platforms so that will be a big piece of our business going forward. It’s important to keep your ear to the ground and most importantly listen to your customers, keep a running tally of their requests and try to watch trends of people asking for features or options; from there you can plan out your next moves and offerings going forward.

Thanks to David Batchelor, DialMyCalls!

#6- Use of AI in hiring and recruitment

As a B2B SaaS consultant who works with dozens of SaaS companies per year, I already see major changes in hiring and recruiting in enterprise SaaS due to tech. Sifting through hundreds and thousands of resumes is a major pain point, so some companies are ditching the resume and using AI-powered skill testing with software such as Vervoe. Not only does ditching the resume save time but skill assessment tests are much better indicators of job performance. Resumes are also a pain point for potential candidates, I can't tell you how many of my friends have talked about how difficult it is to fill out job applications all day and also never hear back from anyone. I'm super excited to see how tech will continue to impact this process in the future.

Thanks to Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

#7- Better strategies from marketers

Technology is going to have (and is having) a huge impact on our ability to test all areas of marketing content. Machine learning is going to rapidly speed up the pinpointing of effective marketing content – from ad creatives to long-form content – and their impact on our search rankings. Technology is also going to put more pressure on our ability to be creative and strategize. For a long time, many marketers have confused tactics with strategies and this shift to leveraging technology to find data correlations is going to shine more light on those marketers who can strategize effectively.

Thanks to Bernard May, National Positions!

#8- Key differentiator

In this day and age, business owners and entrepreneurs must know the ins and outs of all aspects of business and must be significantly educated on technology, such as social media, mobile technology, innovations like the cloud, along with hardware such as security and backup systems. As many businesses today are expanding online and onto mobile platforms, it is crucial to be educated in these fields in order to stay ahead of competition. In this vein, the effect that technology will have on business, in general, is that it will differentiate those who are paying attention to it and those who are not. Specifically, however, technology has played a vital role in our company. The transfer of medical records between providers in the healthcare industry has always been a problematic process causing physicians to spend months and vital physician and staff time when switching EHRs. With the advent of today's technology, we were able to create our proprietary technology to help providers move and integrate their patient records safely, seamlessly and pain-free, which was not possible just 5 years ago. In the future, we will be able to not only transfer data, but pull discrete data from typed and even handwritten documents.

Thanks to Ilya Aronovich, MedaDoc!

#9- Increase in the technologies in the market

I started a global branding and marketing firm 17 years ago before there was social media so technology has already had a big impact on business since I started my company I predict the pace of new technologies coming onto the market will only increase going forward and since the pace of business today is faster than ever with technology on 24/7 I think the only way to survive is to create pockets of calm in the storm. The winners in the future will leverage the convenience, efficiency and speed of technology and still find ways to connect on a personal level with their customers. There will be an even bigger role in the future for the businesses that can connect the dots, humanize their brands and curate the wisdom from all the noise out there which is only going to be a bigger distraction down the road. There will always be a market for businesses that make things simple, fun and/or easy. Technology can only get you so far.

Thanks to Paige Arnof-Fenn, Mavens & Moguls!

#10- Building websites that are voice search ready

The technology that is going to have the biggest impact on our business in the coming years in undoubtedly voice technology. We’re all aware of how rapidly voice technology has been growing over recent years and the point has come where we need to start preparing our websites to be voice search ready. Whether it be personal assistants such as the Amazon Echo, or one of the numerous phones which have a built-in voice assistant, most tech savvy people now have regular access to a voice search device and these people are beginning to learn how to use this technology as part of their everyday lives. We’ve been aware of how voice search is going to impact SEO for a while and we’ve already began thinking about how we can optimise pages for voice search in the near future. However, the rapid growth of the technology means we’ve also got to begin thinking beyond this. People don’t just want to use voice search to find websites on the internet, they want to use it to interact with websites. In the future, I can see us having to build websites that can understand voice commands, such as “what are the best deals for holidays to Florida” and then displaying the deals a website has available. That’s definitely something I see us doing in the future, which is both challenging and exciting.

Thanks to Clare Watson, Zolv!

#11- Big change via RankBrain

In terms of advancing technology, I anticipate artificial intelligence will have the biggest impact on my business. Right now, I predict a big change via RankBrain – Google's machine learning artificial intelligence system. In case you don't already know, machine learning refers to computers that can teach themselves how to do a task, without following guidelines set by humans. In terms of advancing technology, I anticipate artificial intelligence will have the biggest impact on my business. Right now, I predict a big change via RankBrain – Google's machine learning artificial intelligence system. In case you don't already know, machine learning refers to computers that can teach themselves how to do a task, without following guidelines set by humans.RankBrain will change the way small businesses, like mine, create content for SEO-purposes. By enabling Google to filter and process billions of search results in real time, with the goal of providing the most relevant results, we won't only have to target keywords, but also identify what Google thinks is the search intent and create content around that.

Thanks to Jonathan Prichard, MattressInsider.com!

#12- Improving the quality of data

Technology is constantly changing, often faster than our imaginations. We're just beginning to witness the possibilities that Internet of Things (IoT) technology can bring to the workplace, for example, by harnessing valuable information from people, equipment, machines and the environment. Over the next several years, the quantity, types and quality of data collected will grow, helping to replace assumptions and anecdotes with objective data to make more informed, timely decisions. The possibilities of what we can do with – and learn from – this groundswell of data will only be limited by our imaginations.

Thanks to Pete Schermerhorn, Triax Technologies!

#13- Confirmation of higher percentage ROI

Technology will enable my online discount coupon business to deliver specific discount coupons to specific online audience at pinpoint precision. AI driven searching tools will help me to identify and categorize different types of audience according to their buying habits. For example a jeans-lover customer will always be notified for garment stores’ coupons, never for grocery coupons. This will ensure us to generate more business and my customers to save money every-time while shopping international brands online.

Thanks to Andrei Vasilescu, DontPayFull!