In a recent keynote presentation at the MarTech conference in October, Scott Brinker identified five trends that he says will define the rest of this decade. 

Brinker, the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, said that organizational change has finally caught up with technological change, due in no small part to the COVID-19 pandemic. A study from Twillo found that 97% of the study respondents said the pandemic had moved up their digital transformation by as much as six years.

The defining trends as seen by Brinker are:

• Citizen creators – no coding skills required. Non-developers will be able to create their own apps without coding knowledge.
• Platforms, networks and marketplaces. Brinker sees these overlapping concepts as:
  • Solutions, workflows and campaigns being built on common software foundations
  • Facilitating communication, collaboration and sharing assets among users
  • Bringing consumers and producers together in spaces, such as Etsy and Fiverr.
• App explosion. Estimates from IDC show that more than 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and available by 2023, using cloud approaches.
• From big data to big ops. We’ve been talking about “big data” for at least a decade, but Brinker sees this decade as the one where we’ll move to processes triggered by all that data. The data will be extracted into information and insights that can be used by marketers for analysis.
• Humanizing human and machine. The use and application of AI will continue to grow but the need for human touch and insight will continue as well. An understanding of business and domain enterprise will require human input.