As the latest advanced technologies are now fully developed and widely used, we are entering a period of experimentation and innovation. This moment could be a big opportunity for smaller companies and government agencies to gain an advantage over their larger competitors. With so much changing in a short period of time, the time is right for smaller companies to capitalize on the competitive advantage that comes from being small, agile and diverse. This flexibility allows them to react quickly and gain new insights to identify new opportunities.

Let’s take a look at the key factors influencing this change:

• Core technology is moving to the cloud. The debate over whether or not to move key business applications – such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM) and finance – to the cloud has largely been settled. Most companies understand that moving to the cloud is essential now, in the 21st century^e Century to be able to trade. It frees up resources, but more importantly, it lays the foundation for rapid adaptability.
• Innovation around the Clean Core. Migrating to the cloud encourages companies to rethink their business processes, creating a new, streamlined discipline in the search for standard processes. Most importantly, it drives data integration. This “clean core” enables innovation to obtain a consistent, accurate view of business information and combine it with external sources to add a touch of sophistication and speed to the decision-making process.
• There are instruments for decentralizing innovation. The low-code models and tools, containers and open source enable more dynamic development of business processes. And above all, they place control in the hands of all companies that want to develop new innovations. These tools mean that users do not need extensive programming knowledge to create a new feature, and if the IT team has the right policies and procedures in place, any new features can be efficiently integrated into the core.
• AI and automation are facing a new turning point. Accenture believes we are entering a phase of more human-centric technology. In the ERP space, AI will undoubtedly reduce the amount of mundane tasks users need to perform and empower them by acting quickly and predicting demand. There are ways to improve the user experience and that is why we are looking for chatbots that use AI. However, the long-term vision is to understand how AI can reduce the cost of predictions and speed up decision-making processes.

In the past, only larger companies had access to this technology, but as OpenAI has shown, large language models (LLM) will be much more accessible. This will drive more innovation at the edge, where smaller companies can leverage AI tools to create tools and insights targeted at specific industry niches.

We find that technological innovations offer many opportunities for medium-sized companies, especially in business services and non-profit organizations.

Business service providers are used to having on-site teams, but post-pandemic, telecommuting and virtual working have reached new levels. It is important for these teams to have a single source of truth to efficiently manage billable hours and their usage. AI and automation tools add a touch of sophistication to customer collaboration. Using LLMs to analyze historical financial and human resources data can potentially reduce the costs of predicting when customer demand would reach critical levels. AI tools could also help local teams monitor market and competitive data to make decisions about how to advise clients on their strategy.

Even for nonprofit organizations, every crisis is different. Although standardizing business processes is useful to increase efficiency within an organization, it is still important to have sufficient flexibility to adapt the organization to individual scenarios. Here, a clean core combined with access to low-code tools offers companies the opportunity to decentralize innovation. For example, if a nonprofit organization is delivering medical supplies to multiple disaster areas, the ability to collect and analyze local data to predict potential fires is invaluable. What if the nonprofit could use AI to analyze anonymized health records to determine if the number of patients with a particular condition is surging? Teams at the local level could use Clean Core with a single view of information across the organization to determine what medical care is available, but they could also develop capabilities to better predict demand.

Today’s technologies make innovation more accessible and dynamic. Lowcode reduces the need for specialized technology skills to develop innovations, while supporting a cloud-based ERP core makes all aspects of IT more affordable and scalable. By adding generative AI, innovations can be implemented more quickly and in a more targeted manner.

The combined value of cloud, low code, AI and automation lies in their ability to enable collaboration and flexibility. This is not always easy for larger organizations and the motto “small is beautiful” often applies here.

When a team adopts a mindset and structure similar to adopting agile development models, it becomes possible to experiment with technology, create new business capabilities, and evaluate their value to the organization. If the new feature works, it can be used as a service across the company, and if not, a smaller team can quickly move on to the next opportunity. Those organizations that are willing to adopt a much more collaborative and service-oriented mindset will be more successful in the next phase of the global economy. While volatility remains the norm, those who know how to adapt have a greater chance of success.

This is a post by Claus Jepsen, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Unit 4