Predictions 2021

An explosive mix of innovative technology and

new business models

1
Introduction: 2020 sets the stage for a
decade of unprecedented change
2020 saw the speed of change increase by Globant’s top executives weigh in with their
factors no one could have expected back in predictions for the next 12 months and beyond,
January. Businesses pivoted literally from based on thousands of hours of work and
one day to the next. Organizations set aside constant discussions with our clients around
hesitations and made bold decisions focusing the world. We hope these predictions will
on innovative technologies and strategies to provide you with insights and ideas to build the
respond to the crisis. Having done it all year to foundation for long-term success.
ensure survival, we expect to see businesses
continue to move fast and implement decisions
at lightning speed.

Research by Gartner showed that IDC’s research says 65%

organizations are moving many IT automation
technologies from evaluation to deployment
of global GDP will be
as they prepare to respond to the rapid pace of digitalized by 2022, driving
digitalization. In 2020, 45% of all IT automation
technologies are in deployment with the
$6.8 trillion of IT spending
remaining 55% in pilot. from 2020 to 2023.
So what will 2021 have in store? In this report,

2
2021 Prediction:
There will be a surge in new, ingenious,
”
and transformative business models
The combination of people working remotely
and rapid technology experimentation will lead
to the fast emergence of new products and
services to meet people’s changing needs.
Of particular note, top talent, and that which
was most financially well-rewarded, used to
be congregated in just a few congested areas
around the world. This talent is now exploring
other ways of working, including from more
comfortable spaces and cheaper locations.
This will drive forward hyper-accessibility,
and not just for the younger generations that
are jumping online and need better support to
utilize apps and digital platforms.
Geo-accessibility will become crucial no
matter where you are in the world. People will
ask for the same speed and reliability of their
network and platforms everywhere.
As hyper-accessibility becomes commonplace,
it will spur the emergence of innovative new
products and services. By the end of 2023,
40% of organizations will have established
operations to enable a remote workforce to
deliver such offerings to customers in a wide
range of locations - that include both virtual
and physical experiences.
”
Linked to these changing dynamics, we
expect to see the rapid emergence of
Nelly Ortiz
Business Hacker, Globant
“This movement will bring different shopping
behaviors, technology demands, and
probably even different types of business and
innovation to unexpected places.”
3
Sabina Schneider
Chief Solution Officer, Globant
“We’re seeing different examples today
of data monetization - many to come will
adjust value propositions, services, and the
products that organizations are offering,
particularly with hyper-personalization and
dynamic offerings based on data.”
multi-modal business models, as examples
of many to come business disruptive models.
As organizations strive to deliver these new
products and services around the world,
they will also need to deliver unparalleled
customer and employee experiences where
data enriches them and is a very important
disruptor.
Consumer companies which are digital and
mobile-first will soon no longer just be able to
survive on selling advertising or
subscription-based services, as has been
the predominant revenue model in the US
and Europe. For example, in countries in Asia,
video advertisers are already using artificial
intelligence to identify the topic of the video,
identify the desires of consumers, and then
either offer highly targeted advertising or
product discounts or attractive offers.
2021 Prediction:
Creating a high-performance work
culture will require new skills and tools
The shift to long-term working from home models
that we are living as a result of Covid-19 is less
likely to be temporary in nature, such as after
9/11 or after the financial crisis in 2008. This will
have a fundamental impact on how organizations
create high performing work cultures. Such
cultures don’t happen by chance - yet many of
the techniques and methods that successful
businesses have used to create a unique culture,
will now need to be reinvented for this new era.
Forrester predicts there will be a 300% increase
in long-term remote work compared to pre-Covid
times. 37% of employees surveyed during the
71% of employees don’t
read or engage with
company emails or
content. Understand the
power of storytelling to
engage employees and
”
drive a better culture.
pandemic expect working from home to be more
commonplace and 48% of managers in North
America believe the number of full-time remote
workers will increase in 2021 and the coming
years. But despite this shift, after surveying
1,000 US professionals working remotely full-
time, we found out that 46% of managers find
4
it extremely challenging to provide emotional
support to their teams, and 87% believe it’s hard to
have visibility into what their team is working on.
This means organizations will have to
restructure their work spaces as the world
will be a combination of the digital and the
physical. Managing a remote workforce is a
challenge for organizations, which is why “Head
of remote work” is one new job title that we
expect to become crucial. This role would be the
person who helps people transition to partial or
permanent work from home, fostering a diverse
and inclusive workplace, handling issues related
to retention and benefits, and making sure
employees are comfortable.
In addition to such new roles, we also expect to
see a rapid rise in the use of cultural platforms,
such as StarMeUp OS. Managing a distributed
workforce effectively requires more than
just investing in additional licenses for video
conferencing. It means creating a digital culture,
and “digitalizing” behavior such as how people
are recognized and appreciated for the work
they do. Businesses will find new ways to use
such technology to create empathetic, long-term
relationships with their employees.
Emiliano Horcada
Global Head of Design and Digital
Transformation Partner, Globant
“Culture is no longer an afterthought. Organizations
that last are the ones that focus on designing
themselves from within, putting a conscious effort
into the crafting of their culture and behaviors which
make a healthy, productive and modern business.”
2021 Prediction:
Powerful, holistic experiences will
differentiate those businesses that
survive and thrive, and those that die
The use of chatbots in
banks can save costs up to
$7.3 billion globally by 2023
Customers have greater expectations around the
products and services that they use, enjoy, and
even love than ever before. However, with the
bar already set so high, businesses now need to
reconsider and reevaluate how to consistently
deliver these experiences.
Conversational interfaces (CIs) are coming into
play to provide holistic experiences, creating
engaging relationships with customers. The
technology they use, from natural language
processing (NLP) and speech generation, has
rapidly matured in recent years. For example,
the financial sector is already harnessing the
potential of CIs to create seamless payment
platforms and reduce costs. Estimates indicate
that the use of CIs can save banks up to $7.3
billion worldwide by 2023. Chatbots can provide
financial advice and recommendations in real
time, making it easier for customers to find and
purchase the products they want.

With the ability to deploy and train machine

learning models to user interfaces, we are More than a third of B2B
seeing interesting opportunities to craft
technology buyers will
rich experiences. Augmented reality (AR)
experiences can be developed and experienced consider chatbots as a top-10
on the mobile browser without the need for
specialized hardware and software on users’
engagement channel.
phones. Such AR-based experiences can

”
shorten the gap where it’s not possible to have
human contact.

Ritesh Menon
Studio Partner, UI Engineering,
Globant

“A combination of AI and AR will result in the

creation of highly immersive and natural user
experiences on devices enabling businesses
to reach massive new audiences.”

5
2021 Prediction: The rise of resilient, yet
adaptive, organizations
Companies that partner
with new sectors or
compete in new digital
ways will experience an
increase of 12% in ROI
The world is expecting results from the tech
”
industry. Perhaps the so-called “moonshot”
objectives are no longer feasible in our new world.
Businesses which face tightening budgets amid
an uncertain economic environment want to see
results from their experimentation investments.
Adapting to anticipate tomorrow’s business and
customer demands requires a different mental
model, where organizations embrace uncertainty
and complexity and are able to change their core
value proposition. Organizations in the automotive
industry are a good example of how industries
are “flexing their core” to adapt to new lifestyles
and customer expectations. Thus, instead of
selling cars, manufacturers are offering mobility
as a service where connectivity and embedded
”
technologies are key. The impact of these changes
in the core technology used to run organizations
Alvaro Pujals
Consulting Director, Globant
“If new technology cannot show impact, it
won’t last. The Amazon Go’s of the world
need to start showing results.”
6
is huge, but in many instances, these core
technologies become the blocker for much needed
change.
Companies that leverage technology
experimentation are growing at a pace 3-4x faster
than their industry average. These resilient and
highly adaptive organizations understand the need
to modernize their core while also experimenting
with emerging technologies. They also understand
the importance of playing in new sectors and
partnering with organizations in different
industries, leveraging the power of business and
digital ecosystems.
In this context, CIOs will play a crucial role, as they
Diego Maldonado
EVP and Regional Managing
Director, Globant
“Companies will increase investments in their core
systems as they seek flexible, elastic, AI-augmented
and data driven technologies. These investments in
emerging technologies will help large corporations
behave like massively scaled startups, ready to
adapt as market and business needs change.”
shift from managing their technology portfolio to
visualizing how to embrace emerging technologies.
CIOs, probably more than anyone in the c-suite,
will need to adapt quickly to this new world,
moving away from hands-on management and
motivating people and teams, to experimenting
and quickly implementing new technologies. For
example, leading CIOs will need to be ready to
provide the vision, remove impediments, and pave
the way for how artificial intelligence can drive
quick operational efficiencies, rather than micro-
managing its implementation.
2021 Prediction:
Businesses will shift to hyper automation
and adopt tools to dramatically

”
accelerate software development
Time to market for a product is, and has
always been, crucial. With the pandemic, the
focus on accelerating software development
and hyper automation intensified. More than
60% of B2B sellers will be enabled by AI and
automation - as businesses aim to dramatically
increase the speed at which they operate. Such
technologies include artificial intelligence IT
operations (AIOps) platforms, cloud application
discovery, cloud migration tools, and IT workload
automation.
More than 60% of B2B
sellers will be enabled by
AI and automation
Artificial intelligence is helping organizations
unlock their potential in the post-pandemic
era. However, implementing AI and automation
in an organization requires assessing the
different areas of your company to detect
where it can add value. We will see a rise in
AI-based tools that will help accelerate coding,
unit testing, quality analysis, and deployment.
Some programming languages are becoming
increasingly dominant in multi-platform
development. We have seen how JavaScript
Diego Tartara
CTO Studios, Globant
“We are now seeing humanity make a big
shift in habits, pushed by the pandemic.
This time companies are changing their
agendas to adapt, recover profitability and
efficiency. Technology is more than ever a
big ally, and will be part of every strategy.”
has graduated from being a traditional web
application development language to a
competent language in mobile application
development. It is now actively used in server-
side applications and is slated to grow in the
development of robotics and IOT applications.
AI-based tools that accelerate coding, will
have a transformative impact on software
development, enabling businesses to create
powerful software experiences faster and
more effectively than ever before. Augmented
Coding is one such example, and is already
helping organizations to dramatically improve
their software creation processes.

7
Conclusion
Unlocking potential in 2021 and beyond
The profound and systemic changes that
we have witnessed in 2020 will dramatically
change the business and technology
landscape over the next decade. The future
will belong to augmented organizations able
to scale-up a digital culture and foster both
innovation and productivity. Businesses
will implement AI throughout their entire
organization at a speed few thought
possible just a year ago - and will use these
new technologies in every aspect of their
organizations, from building a resilient culture,
to how they code and create software, to how
they serve and delight their customers.

We want to thank the following Globers for their insight and support into the writing of this report:

• Nelly Ortiz • Leonel Kohan • Agus Huerta • Diego Maldonado

• Federico Cayrol • Martin Wagmaister • Sabina Schneider • Brand Design POD
• Basia Coulter • Martin Szenig • Alejandra Rodriguez
• Alvaro Pujals • Ritesh Menon • Rebecca Reed

8
About Globant
We are a digitally native company where innovation, design and engineering meet
scale. We use the latest technologies in the digital and cognitive field to transform
organizations in every aspect.

• We’re over 14.300 enthusiastic & committed Globers, present in 16 countries

working for companies like Google, Rockwell Automation, Electronic Arts and
Santander, among others.

• We were named a Worldwide Leader in CX Improvement Services by IDC

MarketScape report.

• We were also featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

• We are a member of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

For more information, visit www.globant.com

9
10