Welcome 2023!

Wishing a very happy new year to my LinkedIn network ! I wanted to share top three things that I look forward to in 2023:?

2023 to be the year of community

Having worked in marketing, finance and GTM data science teams for about a decade and seeing generally < 5% attribution numbers for marketing has made me wonder several times if the marketing dollars were actually making an impact. Few times in my previous organizations when someone had the audacity to make a hard decision to zero marketing budget for a quarter or so, nothing changed - the signups, the retention remained intact, yet year after year organizations continue to spend millions if not billions of dollars on marketing. Marketing is great for awareness and brand, but truly in B2B market space an end user buys a product if they find it useful for themselves by trying it or hearing about the product from their closed network. What we see deep diving into community data from our customers is roughly > 30% organizations that buy a product have community engagement. Community helps foster a human connection, enables people to actually help each other and solve problems, at the same time providing critical feedback to the product. As more and more organizations are beginning to realize this, we will see community teams playing alongside marketing and sales to help close deals with equal velocity and impact.

AI will be hotter than ever before

If 2022 was an AI summer, in 2023 we expect the sun to shine brighter as many companies will develop practical and useful applications for AI to bring us closer to artificial general intelligence. ChatGPT came out in December 2022, breaking records in the number of users of an application historically! In 2023, we look forward to end users building more useful applications using OpenAI, StableDiffusion and Hugging Face, and leaving the hype behind! AI summer of 2022 is aptly summarized by AI guru Andrew Ng here!

Year of Equity

The numbers for women in tech are still sobering, I look forward to seeing women getting back to work after the pandemic. As a mother of two girls, I hope there is equity at work where we see more women leading from the forefront, and equity at home where we see more equal distribution of household chores. A long term hope from the US government, especially as the Canadian government promises 10$ a day child care by 2026, is for more affordable childcare. As Elizabeth Warren stated in her NWLC speech, her Aunt Bee came to take care of her family and never left for 16 years, sadly most of us don’t have that aunt!

Looking forward to learning and growing together in 2023!

Cheers,

Neha