2030: A Window into the Future of Enterprise Service Delivery – Part 2

In Part One, we have talked about VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), AI hype, and four key elements of each prediction – Service Purpose, Debt, New Technology, and Cultural Change – applied across first three predictions – Hyperautomation, Fully Personalised Delivery, and Spatial Computing. 

In Part Two, let’s explore three more – Data Control and Protection, Experiential Learning, and Employee Benefits.  

Data Control and Protection 

Service Purpose: 

Data is the new oil. By 2030, this will be even truer than today. IT and other departments will be focused on automatically gathering, processing, and leveraging as much productivity and experience data as possible; using it proactively to prevent distractions from productivity, burnout, or systems unavailability. Even moreso, they will take this data and will have operational approaches to monetise it even quicker than we are today. This could be to drive revenue growth or unlock savings for more profitable business. 

Debt: 

Organisations and end users have already generated and stored excessive amounts of data. However, only a small percentage is adequately organised, processed and used for Service Delivery improvements. Over the next 5 years, the key will be to put the right technology and processes in place to identify ways to capture, sort, process, and continuously action our data outputs with minimal human intervention. AI Hallucination will still exist by 2030, but will reduce due to technological improvements and knowledge quality ratings. 

Image Source: Microsoft Copilot 

Prompt: “Create a Matrix-style green top-down flowing text with multiple lock icons inserted into the picture” 

New Tech: 

AI will help us make sense of our various data sources, organise them, and move them from unreliable storage points (such as people’s brains) to collective knowledge management databases.  

Cultural change: 

By 2030, AI will be so commonplace in our daily personal and work lives that we will not even mention it as a feature or a function. People will expect it to be present in every technological interaction, including Service Delivery. Aside from content generation and summarisation, they expect their workplace to provide immediate insights into their work, suggestions for improvements, and boost their productivity whenever and wherever they are. This will come at a cost of both access to AI and its support.  

Experiential upskilling 

Service Purpose: 

The cost of enabling a new agent on a service desk needs to be reduced alongside their time to be able to deliver high-quality interactions with end users. The existing methods are outdated and require a more personalised, efficient, interactive journey that reduces training fatigue and delivers higher knowledge retention rates and better end-user empathy.  

Debt: 

Over the years, humans have gone from the way they learn best and fastest—through experience—to learning through text and other visual aids. This means decreased dependency on the number of humans involved in the process (lecturers, teachers etc) and a minimal cost of access to knowledge. However, as the Pyramid of Learning suggests, Passive Learning has less than 30% knowledge retention efficiency. 

We have had a good reason for not creating more active learning content (Think Experiential Learning) due to the costs and expertise required. That is about to change. Fast.  

Image Source: Vecteezy  

New Tech: 

With advancements in spatial computing and AI-generated content, such as text, imagery, sound, or video, creating high-quality educational materials will be significantly faster and cheaper than before. The AI will be able to process millions of agent-customer interactions and replicate them into a structured course, with interactive training exercises, gamification, and immediate feedback, and a minimal need for humans to deliver the content, offered as the premium option. Taking it a step further by using AI avatars and voice cloning capabilities, we can automate the creation of enablement content whilst providing a more human touch. Even better, we can leverage AI translation and dubbing capabilities with AI avatars to reach wider teams and languages with minimal effort and cost. 

Our Head of the Office of the CTO, Kyle Davies covers some of that over on YouTube. 

Cultural change: 

The training industry will see a big shift from lecturing and facilitating to AI-generated content development, quality review, and delivery enablement. Active learning will be more personalised, engaging, efficient, and readily available. Service delivery agents will get used to the adaptive role-playing scenarios quickly and speed up their learning curve, reducing time to productivity and, therefore, the overall cost of recruiting a new agent. 

CDW delivers software-based Experiential Learning workshops on ITSM, DevOps, and Business Transformation to its customers. 

Contact us to get your teams engaged and quickly upskilled, experiencing what Service Delivery is about. 

Employee benefits 

Service Purpose: 

Talent retention and attraction will remain key challenges for organisations over the next 5 years. Retirement age will increase alongside the number of people in productive age. This will increase pressure among applicants and existing workers, shifting more towards the employer-led recruitment market. However, loyalty loss becomes a real threat since the job market is unlikely to fully solve the skills shortage (currently, AI skills and platform-specific skills, such as developers or architects). For example, more than 61% of Gen Z employees will quit for a job with better mental health support (SHRM, 2023). Therefore, to retain talent in 2030, employers will need to understand the needs of their employees, motivations, and drives, in order to set their employee benefits accordingly.  

Debt:  

Traditional employee benefits, such as life, medical, or dental insurance, are considered a standard in 2024, and employers differ in work-life balance benefits such as flexible working hours, remote work, and employee assistance programs. The 5-day working week, specific working hours, and place of work are to help employers get the value out of the workforce they are paying for. On the other hand, it is there to protect employees from burning out. Employment seekers are carefully choosing where they invest their time based on the work-life balance, as they often do not want to take a daily 2-hour round trip to work if they can be just as productive at home. For others, their workplace is where they can do the most work.  

New Technology: 

By 2030, an employer's service will need to be data-driven, intelligent, and personalised without putting any additional burden on existing staff. Background monitoring of workers’ productivity will enable analysis and employee self-policing of productivity, collaboration, and wellbeing. The output will enable automatic calendar planning, avoiding unnecessary travel, suggesting face-to-face meetings during times when everyone is in the office, or automatically adding administration time. This will further reduce value leakage and increase productivity. 

AI-powered employee benefit ‘consultants’ will save workers time and ensure they can use their benefits credits towards pension, professional development, well-being, or parental assistance. Career Development AI Assistants will help draw a career path and tasks required to achieve it, such as certification learning paths from multiple sources.  

Cultural change: 

Service delivery managers will experience an increased focus on proactive service improvement, leadership, and mentorship compared to traditional productivity and people management, which will require investment into the relevant skills over the next 5 years.  

The technological landscape will continue to become more complex until 2030. Someone still needs to support all this technology, so it will be key for service departments to prepare for the future and consider the skills required to police the data, its governance, and security. Reliance on vendors and external service suppliers will be an option, but, as always, at a cost (control and financial).  

First-line service agents’ tasks will shift from manual, repetitive work to heavily AI-assisted workload, encouraging more proactive, personalised service. In some instances, this may mean more time spent talking to end-users, and thus more mentally exhausting, forcing them to consider a career change. However, with 90% of the knowledge provided by the systems, service delivery may suddenly seem like a great, less intimidating career choice for others, driving further applicant variety (gender, background…). 

Summary 

You will likely have your vision of what the next five years will bring – and I cannot wait to hear it – feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn to discuss.

What assumptions need to change? What trends do you see play out differently? Is five years a realistic timeframe?  

After all, an unforeseen key global event could completely change the current landscape or even challenge the concepts of how our businesses are built. One thing is for sure – I look forward to returning to this article in 2030 and enjoying the contrast with reality, just like watching these sci-fi films from several decades ago. 

Timecop (1994) | Minority Report (2002) | The Fifth Element (1997) | Robocop (1987)