January 9, 2025
The past 5 years have been a bumpy ride. Cloud tools that made it possible for companies to work smarter had been around, and larger companies had already started to see their value. But the pandemic forced the issue for small to midsized businesses very quickly, which strained budgets and frayed nerves.
For those who have kept up, 2025 might offer a bit of a comparative breather. But in this blog, we’ll offer some insight into where some businesses are starting to build on their previous tech investments. That is to say, if you know you need to up your game in 2025, here’s what your competitors might be plotting.
5 Key Technological Advancements To Consider in 2025
Not a bells and whistles person? Neither are we. Because we don’t make any of these products, our success is tied to recommending and supporting solutions that deliver clear ROI. No single tech is the best solution for every business, but here are upgrades we think most organizations should at least consider in 2025 — if they don’t have them already.
1. Secure Generative AI
Like most giant leaps forward in technology, when generative AI first arrived, it was already impressive. But it took some time to start figuring out what it could really do.
Helping you stay on top of emails or take notes is nice. But we’re starting to get a better glimpse of how it can be incorporated into other cloud computing solutions that cater to specialized industries like manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and law.
No surprise here, but when it comes to security and integrations, Microsoft Copilot is currently the AI to beat. Not only is it exceptionally secure when configured correctly, but it also integrates with other specialized Microsoft 365 tools like Dynamics 365 Quality Management.
It also works well with other popular cloud computing solutions like these:
- Salesforce
- ServiceNow
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- GitHub
- Workday
AI-augmented cybersecurity is also helping cybersecurity tools provide lightning-fast proactive threat detection and response.
2. Solutions That Make Sustainability More Cost-Effective
For many industries, organizations that showcase their sustainability gain a competitive advantage. For higher education, it can help them boost recruitment efforts, and for legal firms, it can help them attract clients and investors.
If printing is important to your daily workflows, a managed print provider that’s kept pace will help you not only cut print costs but also help you right-size your print fleet, which can lower energy costs. That may not seem like much, but unless they’re carefully managed, print costs are often an organization’s third highest expense after payroll and rent.
If you’d rather keep managing your print environment internally, you can also access some of the same print software providers use to achieve some of these goals, plus a few others.
And that leads us neatly into…
3. Business Process Automation
Automation can be a scary word, regardless of the other words that come in front of it. But although business process automation (BPA) can indeed help organizations accomplish more without having to hire more staff, perhaps the best thing about it is how it can transform the employee experience for the better.
BPA tools can automate all sorts of boring, repetitive tasks that people tend not to like and give them more time to focus on more engaging work. So businesses get the productivity boost they want with fewer human errors, and employees can spend more time on the parts of their roles that they tend to enjoy.
And, by the way, when paired with print management software, your multifunction printer can help you streamline admin tasks even more.
4. Tech That Upgrades Your Customer’s Experience
Not every business needs to be able to provide customer service at scale. But if you do, and you have long hold times and frustrated customers are normal, you’ll probably pay a heavier price for it in 2025.
These stats indicate that consumers are starting to lose patience with it:
- Customers are 73% more likely to switch to a competitor after multiple negative experiences
- 65% of customers say they expect instant responses when they contact a brand
- 76% of customers say they get frustrated when they don’t receive personalized support
- 62% of CX agents say that systems that give them easier access to customer data allow them to provide more personalized interactions
Modern Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) tools can eliminate the most common frustrations customers have when they call a company, including long hold times, having to repeat themselves or make repeated calls, and reaching reps that don’t have enough information to solve the problem.
5. Smarter Collaboration Tools
Like most of these trends, some smarter collaboration tools aren’t entirely new. But the thinking around them and how they should be used is.
Before the pandemic, most technology companies only recommended unified communications (UC) tools for very large companies or those with special collaboration needs. Well, the numbers are in, and these tools are turning in some serious stats about how they can help companies accomplish more with less.
But curiously enough, the “magic” of UC isn’t necessarily what it offers. It’s how.
Sure, you can separately purchase an instant messaging tool, email, calling, video conferencing, file-sharing platform, and the like. Yes, you’ll probably pay more that way, but it’s certainly possible.
However, because UC is an all-in-one solution, it helps employees cross off tasks faster all day long. With UC, you can find any file or conversation you need, schedule meetings, see who’s available, and the like, and it’s all there — all in one place. It shaves off precious minutes here and there, and doing that all day, every day really adds up. How much? Well, an organization with 100 employees that adds UC will get the equivalent productivity boost of 9.28 salaried employees.
Plus, if you’re currently using a lot of different communication tools, switching to one all-encompassing one might save you money while giving your IT folks less to manage. That said, they actually don’t have to manage it at all. UCaaS (unified communications as a service) gives you all of the benefits without any of the setup, support, and management hassle.
It’s a known issue amongst tech providers that small businesses are still bearing the brunt of cybersecurity attacks and technology budget hits, and upgrading their communications tools has taken a back seat. So if that describes your organization, this next section is for you.
How To Identify Which Small Business Technology You Should Prioritize
In a perfect world, every business would be able to access the technology it needs to thrive. But we don’t live in that world. If your business has had to make some hard choices over the past few years, and that meant the bulk of your resources had to go into upgrading your cybersecurity, that was probably the best choice you could have made. But what now?
Small Business Technology Consultants
For enterprise-scale businesses, a CIO (chief information officer) would be tasked with identifying which tech upgrades would bring the most value based on their organization’s individual goals for the year. But having this type of expertise in-house is expensive. In fact, these salaries have been skyrocketing because having the right tech is now such an enormous competitive advantage. The average base salary for a CIO in the US is around $214,000, but don’t let that fool you. With stock options and bonuses, that number often floats above $2M.
So what’s a smaller organization with a limited budget to do? The last thing we wanted to touch on today is the rise of fractional CIOs and CISOs (chief information security officers), where smaller businesses get a “share” of these experts’ time. IT consulting services like these make it affordable for smaller organizations to directly access the strategic tech expertise they need when they need it. Click the link below to learn more about fractional (or “virtual”) CIOs and CISOs.
