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Digital Healthcare Growth Drivers In 2020

It has been an extraordinary time for digital medicine and the new year will bring continued growth. The key drivers are expanded patient engagement as well as institutional investment with the ultimate goal of reducing costs. Big pharma, payers and insurance companies have recognized the business benefits of patient empowerment. Digital applications are helping patients become better decision makers for their own health by providing personalized insights. As companies and legislators seek to reduce health costs, digital tools are ever more attractive options to drive efficiencies.

The year 2019 saw many exciting advances in digital health. Money poured into startups and billions of dollars of value were created with high-flying initial public offerings (IPOs). Novel products were approved such as Voluntis’ market authorization for a digital therapeutic in oncology. Leadership changes occurred at the FDA as outgoing Commissioner Scott Gottlieb brought in Flatiron’s Amy Abernathy to help speed up digital innovation. Industry groups expanded as Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) was formed to join existing Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTA) while prestigious journals such as Nature Digital Medicine and Lancet Digital Health were launched.

Looking forward, continued growth will be fueled by large institutions seeking partnerships, product development and better tools for clinical trials, further changes at the FDA to help demystify digital therapeutics, and steady flow of investor money from both venture capital and public markets.

Financing shift from private to public markets. Investors reward revenue growth, and the global market for telehealth, apps, health analytics, mHealth, and digital health systems has been projected to reach over $500 billion. Money has began to shift from private sources such as venture capital (VC) to public financing. VC funding leveled off to about $7 billion in 2019 after topping at $8 billion the prior year with over 350 companies were funded. By mid-year, investors began to validate the digital health sector by financing a burst of public offerings. Six companies had IPOs resulting in a combined market value of $17 Billion. Notables included Livongo (NASDAQ: LVGO), which develops solutions for people with chronic conditions; Change Healthcare (NASDAQ: CHNG), which sells software and tech-enabled services; Phreesia (NYSE: PHR), a maker of patient check-in software; and Health Catalyst (NASDAQ: HCAT), which develops population health management solutions. Other public companies such as cloud-computing Veeva (NYSE: VEEV), and Teledoc (NYSE: TDOC) have seen their stock soar. In the new year, One Medical, a tech-enabled primary care provider backed by Google’s Alphabet and the Carlyle Group, has already filed for IPO. With a liquidity overhang of over $30 billion, investors will be eager to see more public offerings for digital health companies.

Corporate partnerships and acquisitions. As digital health companies mature there will be continued interest from corporate partners to both acquire and create alliances. Over one hundred digital health companies were acquired in 2019. Several notable deals included Amazon’s acquisition of Health Navigator’s online symptom checker and Google’s purchase of FitBit for its wealth of personal health data. Additionally Optum bought patient monitoring company Vivify Health and and Best Buy aggressively grew its at-home health business though Tyto and Critcal Signal Technologies acquisitions. Large companies continue to work on alliances with smaller innovators. Pharma giant Novartis announced a digital innovation lab called the Novartis Biome with the specific intention of empowering health tech companies and to foster partnerships.  The first Novartis Biome opened in San Francisco with another in Paris and more planned. At the Digital Therapeutic East conference held on the Harvard Medical School campus, large companies set expectations for partnerships and at HLTH 2019 there was much discussion how strategic partnerships would allow big companies to take participate in the patient consumerism trend. For example Everlywell, an online diagnostic firm, announced its partnership with Target and Kroger while Pfizer pointed to its partnership with Aetion, a provider of real world analytics. Akili Interactive and Shinogi announced a Japan partnership for digital solutions for cognitive dysfunction.

Artificial Intelligence applications. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is a giant opportunity to help revolutionize patient outcomes and reduce costs. AI companies broke funding records last year with investment estimated to eventually reach over $6 billion and cost savings over $150 billion. In order to take advantage of such promises, health AI firms need to scale by creating meaningful use cases according to Jeff Elton, the CEO of Concerto HealthAI and Forbes technology council member.Elton recently said that AI health companies need appropriate applications that provide value to customers. Much health data is available but he compares it to “raw crude petroleum that will damage your car if poured directly into the engine.” AI is a powerful way to refine data and companies such as Concerto use an integrated approach to provide a profound understanding of cancer progression linked to genetics, environment and treatment. 

The digital transformation of healthcare will gain momentum as drivers include better tools such as AI and virtual trials to empower patient outcomes, maturation of funding to public markets, regulatory innovation and technology adoption, and more alliances between entrepreneurs and large companies. 

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3 Top B2B Experience Marketing Trends for 2020

Experience marketing is fast becoming the rule, rather than the exception, for brands trying to connect with their B2C audiences. 

And they’re going all in: retailers are creating museum-like interactive play spaces, sports brands are developing AI-enabled virtual reality experiences, and game companies are creating live-action immersive versions of their video games. 

But it’s not just B2C companies that are embracing the power of experiences in creating lasting, enthusiastic customer relationships. B2B companies are jumping on this bandwagon too, as they’re realizing the importance of connecting with buyers in a more memorable, tactile, and impactful way. 

As experience marketing continues to grow and evolve, there are a few standout trends that every brand—whether B2C or B2B—should be paying attention to. 

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR)—everywhere

Brands know that CSR is important to consumers, and has been for years. Yet in 2019, a survey by Clutch found that social responsibility practices were more importantto consumers than price—and they’re living that out through the choices they make around which brands to support. 

Integrating your CSR into experience marketing offers a way to show customers that you’re truly living out the values you profess. 

Take Salesforce’s partnership with (RED), the global organization that aims to end the AIDS epidemic. The cloud services company has not only made major donations of time, resources, and money to the organization, but they’ve integrated that partnership into their biggest event of the year and the world’s largest software conference, Dreamforce. 

(RED) had a strong presence at their 2018 conference with the (RED) Experience, where customers could learn about the organization’s mission and buy (RED) and Salesforce products to help fund the group’s work in Africa. 

In 2020, integrating your CSR efforts into everything your brand does, including experience marketing, is going to be more important than ever. 

Getting serious about AI, augmented reality, and marketing automation

As AI, virtual and augmented reality, and martech become both more advanced and more accessible, brands looking to reach new audiences with their experience marketing will find these tools invaluable in 2020. 

The Now/Next report by George P. Johnson Experience Marketing calls this “depersonalized personalization”—in other words, highly personalized experiences that are not delivered by people. 

This could take the form of a chatbot or augmented reality guide that walks a user through a retail experience, or using marketing automation to deliver highly personalized content to a user based on their location within an event space. 

Two prominent examples of this are Magic Leap’s AR headset and Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed reality headset. Both companies are going after the B2B customer with new enterprise-friendly features, like virtual meetings that make it look as though the people you’re meeting with are in the room with you. 

In addition to opening up new and exciting options for experiential, these tech developments also allow brands to deliver experiences and content faster, more efficiently, and in a more targeted manner. 

Incorporating sensory elements to heighten brand experience

Since experience marketing is all about immersing a customer in your brand, it stands to reason that adding sensory elements, which can play an important role in activating the memory centers of the brain, can help make that experience even more impactful. 

Brands like the Museum of Ice Cream have played with these sensory elements to create unique, highly memorable—and highly shareable—experiences for visitors. 

GE’s Healthymagination initiative, which develops and deploys health technology in the developing world, is another example. They created realistic walk-through models of hospital  rooms and clinics throughout the countries they serve, showing how their technology makes a critical difference for patients in specific healthcare scenarios. 

While brands may be well-versed in engaging sight and sound, branching out into smell, taste, and touch can offer new ways for your customers to interact with your brand, as well as make those experiences much more memorable. 

Starbucks tapped into this with their partnership with Spotify, which gives customers the Starbucks audio experience anywhere through a curated Starbucks playlist—the same music customers hear in their favorite cafes. 

In 2020, I expect to see this trend take on greater importance, with smart brands looking at how they can use a certain visual cue, smell, or—yes—sound in order to put their brands top of mind for customers, even when those customers aren’t interacting with those brands. 

Experience marketing in 2020 is going to be even bigger and better than it was in 2019. By tapping into the senses, embracing what technology has to offer, and authentically committing to social responsibility, brands will be able to create long-term, meaningful relationships with their audiences—whether that’s a group of Gen Z urbanites, or a committee of B2B buyers.

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Top 5 Leadership Development Trends For 2020

Seeing with 20/20 vision is a good thing. As we welcome 2020, and a new decade, it’s also a good idea for leadership development directors to have a vision for the future of their department. We’re in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, yet over the last decade or more, most of leadership development has remained stagnant. What is trained, how it is trained, and who is trained is much the same today as it was 10 or even 20 years ago. 

To be relevant for the next decade, directors of leadership development have to embrace transformations in every area of training and executive education. Once only talking points, these five areas hold significant promise as they become a reality in 2020.

TREND 1: A Focus on Applying and Sustaining Behaviors

For too long leadership development has been approached as a one-and-done experience. Many programs take new managers, push them through an organization’s “academy,” then send them out into the world. These leaders are checked on sporadically, perhaps with a 360 or engagement survey. But little attention is paid to sustaining knowledge in the long-term.

What a waste. Most estimates put the global investment in leadership development at over $300 billion. Further, according to CLO’s Business Intelligence Board data, 94% of learning organizations plan to increase or maintain their current investment in leadership development.

The “knowing-doing gap” and Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve point to the severity of the problem: We quickly forget most of what we learn unless we consistently apply it. If leaders aren’t doing it, they’re going to lose anywhere from 40 to 80% of what they encountered in learning and development programs. 

What a waste. Most estimates put the global investment in leadership development at over $300 billion. Further, according to CLO’s Business Intelligence Board data, 94% of learning organizations plan to increase or maintain their current investment in leadership development.

The “knowing-doing gap” and Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve point to the severity of the problem: We quickly forget most of what we learn unless we consistently apply it. If leaders aren’t doing it, they’re going to lose anywhere from 40 to 80% of what they encountered in learning and development programs. 

Leadership development professionals need to start spending as much time helping people sustain new knowledge and behaviors as they do helping those leaders acquire new knowledge and behaviors. Behavioral nudges are moving from the world of social psychology into everyday use by companies, governments, and other organizations. This might include nudges: 

Reminding new managers to review weekly task lists and delegate to team members.

Prompting middle managers to practice inclusion in their meetings. 

Encouraging senior executives to schedule time for strategic thinking.

Successful leadership development professionals will develop hyper-personalized nudge strategies to deliver the right reminder to the right person at the right time.

TREND 2: Mobile Learning for Millennial Managers

With the average age of the first-time manager being 30, we have entered the age of millennial management; nearly 30% of Millennials hold managerial-level roles. Surveys from a variety of sources show that millennial managers value learning and growth experiences more than previous generations. They are also three times more likely than Baby Boomers to take responsibility for their own re-skilling, according to Upwork’s Future Workforce Report. Yet, they want training and development delivered in a new way. They expect mobile access to learning opportunities, anytime, anywhere. Leadership development professionals need to tailor programs to this group of managers and offer more flexible online programs. According to the Korn Ferry Institute, research shows Millennials learn more through online development than time spent in the classroom.

TREND 3: Group Coaching & Democratization of Leadership Development

Traditionally, senior executives are given executive coaches and development via executive education programs at elite universities along with executive seminars and retreats. New managers are typically put through a leadership development academy or boot camp. Middle managers are largely forgotten. 

In this new decade, everyone needs to be a leader who actively engages their people. Awareness of this will see leadership development pushed down through the organization, and coaching will become a standard part of every manager’s experience. 

But how will organizations afford it? One way is to offer group coaching experiences, that utilize one human executive coach for every ten managers. By synchronizing monthly or quarterly topics, one coach can effectively support each manager’s needs on a weekly basis, and bring everyone together using video conferencing on a monthly basis. Additionally, companies can now leverage AI-powered coach bots and hyper-personalized nudges from companies like LEADx, Butterfly.ai, Qstream, and others.

TREND 4: Alignment to the Engagement Survey

Gallup research has shown that 70% of the variance in employee engagement ties back to the manager. People join a company, but they leave their boss. One reason? What is taught in leadership development academies and included in leadership competency models is often very different than what is measured in employee engagement surveys. Employee experience and employee engagement are hotter than ever before. While most of the emphasis has been on measurement, leadership development professionals must also now realize that changing managerial behaviors is the best way to move the needle on survey outcomes. 

In the book Knowing-Doing Gap, Pfeffer and Sutton use Intuit as an example of a firm that uses its engagement survey as more than a metric generator. "The measurement, nothing more than an employee survey, but one that is taken very seriously, affords a way of focusing managerial effort on those dimensions of the culture that most need attention at a given moment.”

To promote employee engagement, the first obvious step is training and coaching managers in how to apply behaviors that unlock emotional commitment. Each organization is different but, in general, managers need to learn specific behaviors such as: using a coach approach to develop team members, giving effective timely feedback, providing strategic recognition, building trust, and fostering belonging.

TREND 5: AI Becomes Invisible

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been hyped for the last several years. Vendors use the term to get attention and convince us there is some magic in their solutions. Yet in the new decade, AI will become the norm, an assumed part of leadership development experiences. We already mentioned the power of executive coach chatbots answering questions and providing guidance using natural language processing technology. At the same time, AI is going to be making an impact in personalization. With AI, leaders will be offered hyper-personalized content based on the manager’s personality, competencies, and objectives. As it does for Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, AI can present targeted information in a learning management or nudge system.

AI is also going to support leadership development directors in gaining the respect of other senior leaders. The cold hard truth is those with the seats at the table can talk in numbers. With AI technology, leadership development can increase its use of dashboards and correlation matrices. More telling than the number of workshop participants or the latest smile sheet survey ratings, metrics in 2020 will quantify: 

How many people are ready to move into leadership

How many people are ready to advance from front line to middle manager

Which training courses correlate to higher engagement scores

Which leadership development experiences correlate to faster promotions 

Performance review rankings

Leadership development cultivates the human capital of an organization. As we move into the 2020s, it’s an exciting time for top-to-bottom transformation of our departments. Shaped by these five trends, we can move forward with developing a clear vision for ongoing success in training and sustaining successful leaders.

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Top Ten 2020 Consultant Marketing Trend Predictions

If you are a consultant who wants to attract more-paying clients in 2020, what are the top ten trends you should have on your radar?

I posed the question to three marketing experts whose opinions I highly respect. All three are thought leaders who write and speak regularly on the subject of marketing for professionals and independent consultants.

In 2013 Minal Sampat launched her marketing company by breaking a Guinness World Record in technology. Based in the state of Washington, she is an in-demand marketing speaker and has a new book coming out in 2020 (that I helped her edit).

1. This Is Getting Personal. “The content for social media business and personal pages will now be blurred. People no longer want to connect with businesses that promote. Instead they want to connect with the owners, team and customers. What we used to share on our personal pages may soon become the content to share on our business pages.” Today In: Leadership

2. Finding Common Ground. “It is no longer about standing out and being different. Your business should not focus on how it can be different. It should instead focus on finding the common ground with the ideal target market. Connection built on common ground is the key to conversions in the future.”

3. From Selling To Storytelling. “There is so much marketing noise that the consumers want to connect with stories and not products. Businesses will have to change the tone of sales language from selling to storytelling.”

4. Speak Up To Move The Needle. “High content presentations will still rule. Decision makers insist speakers move the needle regarding performance, productivity, profits, and engagement.”

5. More Interaction And Less Yakking. “Interactive presentations are more in demand than ever. This will challenge some traditional keynote speakers to consider how to meet this request.”

6. Good News/Bad News For Being Paid To Speak. “The Meeting Industry Association reports inquiries up 5%. They consider this to be a sign of optimism. Competition among speakers vying for platforms will be as challenging as ever.”

Here's the world according to David Newman, the Philadelphia author of the bestseller Do It! Marketing and a new book to be released in 2020, Do It! Speaking. Here are three of his trend predictions:

7. Your Face And Voice Matter. “2020 is the year entrepreneurs and corporate executives fully step into their personal brand. Not only inside their company, but in the public eye. Look for more personal social media sharing, personal blogs and livestream videos from top corporate and entrepreneurial leaders.”

8. Now Read This Says The CEO. “There's a flood of CEO books coming out right now and that trend will only increase. Executives will fully embrace their potential to change the conversation in their industry and move from leader to thought leader.”

9. Consultant Competition From Corporate Executives. “More corporate executives will take the stage at key industry conferences, trade shows, and professional meetings. Look for smart CEOs and senior leaders to start building standalone speaker websites, shoot speaker demo videos, and even build out a robust corporate speakers bureau featuring all their senior leaders, brand evangelists, and product spokespeople.”

10. To Attract Clients You Need to Be Heard. “Three marketing opportunities that will continue to explode in 2020 are podcasting, audio books and online course content. The book is still the ticket to play. But while millennials respect authors, I find they rather listen than read.”

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The 5 Biggest Smart Home Trends In 2020

Smart homes are the domestic face of the Internet of Things (IoT). In recent years we’ve become increasingly used to connecting everyday devices in our homes to the internet and to each other to make the places we live more comfortable, economical, entertaining, and safe.

This trend is certainly set to continue into the next decade – research states that the value of the smart home device market is set to grow from $55 billion in 2016 to $174 billion by 2025. In other words, what we see today in terms of connected, smart home appliances and applications is just the tip of the iceberg.

As the technology underpinning this revolution in how we live continues to get faster and more powerful, we can expect home automation and artificial intelligence to offer domestic help in new and innovative ways. Here are some of the highlights of what we can expect to see during 2020:

Increasing standardization

One of the headaches of putting together a smart home is undoubtedly the competing range of platforms and standards. Increasingly, manufacturers of smart home devices need to ensure their products and services will work on platforms provided by Amazon, Google, Samsung, and Apple to capture the broadest customer base. And consumers themselves face the danger of finding themselves "tied in" to a particular network provider – which can often limit the options available if a particular tool or device they need won't play nicely with their favorite platform. There’s also the annoyance of needing to use a whole load of different apps to set up and control all of the different devices from different manufacturers in your smart home.

Relying on a mish-mash of different solutions can also cause security vulnerabilities - so it's encouraging to see plans from Apple, Google, and Amazon to team up to create a set of standards designed to make smart homes simpler and, importantly, more secure. Moves like this one designed to make it easier to develop and sell solutions that will work with the many available smart home systems will become increasingly common in the next decade.

Smart homes actually become smart, thanks to machine learning

The term "smart" gets misused a fair amount when it comes to home technology. Lights that can be programmed from your phone, automated window blinds, and video doorbells are all very nice and can make our homes more comfortable or safe. But home appliances don't automatically become "smart" just because they are plugged into the internet - a better term for much of the technology we've seen so far is "connected home."

That's set to change over the next decade, as more and more devices begin to make use of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and other technologies that actually are capable of thinking, making decisions, and learning.

Sure, some devices do this already – smart thermostat systems from Nest and Honeywell use machine learning to adapt their behavior to the inhabitants of a house, based on observing and then replicating their habits. This year we can expect to see more AI-driven technology such as facial recognition becoming a feature of home security systems. We will also see more refrigerators that use computer vision to “see” what’s inside, and machine learning algorithms to predict what you need to order in – and then making the order themselves.

Robots in the home

This trend started with robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers. But thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, we can expect to see them becoming increasingly smart and capable of helping us with an expanding range of tasks.

From cooking and cleaning to providing companionship and healthcare, all manner of use cases are being explored for robots such as LG’s CLOi and Trifo’s Lucy.

Domestic robots promise a future where day-to-day tasks can be carried out by machines, freeing us to spend our valuable time on things other than chores and routine maintenance. For the elderly and disabled, they will also act as a reassuring pair of extra eyes, able to call for help if they sense that someone has fallen, or assist with mobility around the home.

While we probably won't see fully humanoid robotic butlers in most homes for some time, during 2020, autonomous, mobile robots will undoubtedly become more common, useful, and cheaper, as a number of manufacturers compete to develop the most helpful and marketable products. 

In-home healthcare gets smarter

In-home smart healthcare offers the potential to reduce some of the stress put on traditional healthcare channels – doctors and hospitals – that is inevitably caused by increasing life expectancy and a growing elderly population.

Some of this will be achieved by preventative measures – such as wearables that help us to lead a healthier lifestyle by monitoring our activity levels, quality of sleep, and nutrition. Other devices will offer interventionist services, for example, allowing us to remotely connect with medical practitioners, alert carers when an elderly person falls in their home, or even diagnose illnesses using AI.

Apple’s current Watch can carry out an electrocardiogram (ECG) to monitor for patterns or irregularity in heartbeats that could be early warning signs of illness. This type of technology will become increasingly commonplace over the next year (and beyond), reducing the need for outpatient appointments. Data collected by smart home devices in the home will become increasingly useful in the medical field, due to the fact that it can offer 24/7 insights into the condition of patients in their "natural habitat," away from the stresses of clinics and hospitals. 

Faster networks mean smarter homes

With the global rollout of 5G as well as improved WiFi technology such as WiFi 6, smart home devices will be linked by faster, more powerful networks, meaning better access to data and processing resources in the cloud.

5G, in particular, promises to revolutionize the delivery of IoT services – including smart home technology – as it allows devices to work free of wires and cables while consuming a minimal amount of power. It also allows for far more devices to be connected simultaneously that was possible using older mobile network standards. This will be an essential factor as homes in densely populated areas continue to be filled with a growing number of devices, all hungry for data bandwidth. Similarly, WiFi 6 offers advantages over previous standards when it comes to enabling devices to handle competing requests for network access (an issue many of us will have experienced even if we only routinely connect a few smartphones, tablets, and laptops to our home networks at the same time.) 

Faster networks don't simply mean a quicker transfer of data between devices, or between devices and the cloud. It also means increasingly sophisticated applications, utilizing bigger, faster data streams, become a possibility. Devices such as smart thermostats and automated security systems will have access to more varied and up-to-date information with which to make the predictions their usefulness is built around. This will make them increasingly reliable and efficient during 2020.

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Top 12 Business Trends For 2020

Contrary to popular opinion, there will be news other than the presidential election this year. Below are a dozen trends that will impact businesses in 2020 and beyond trends:

1. Consumers Still Spending

While the U.S. economy will grow modestly (2.5%) in 2020, consumer sentiment is still strong. With consumer spending representing two-thirds of the U.S. economy, business-to-consumer companies are still performing well. According to CBRE, online sales will grow another 14% in 2020. Interest rates are at an all-time low, and home sales spiked at the end of the year. Because of this, I believe 2020 will be a strong year for consumerism.

2. Streaming Wars

What happens when four S&P 500 companies launch a product into a crowded sector at the same time? A streaming war.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the average consumer will subscribe to three to five streaming services. From my perspective, this could be bad news for Netflix, which had the first-mover advantage but is now subject to new competition from Disney+, Apple, Amazon and others.

3. Tech Under Attack

Once the darlings of Wall Street, tech stocks are under fire. In Europe, Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google are under attack by EU regulators over privacy, and here, we're seeing some politicians propose antitrust action. In 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act will come into play, which I believe could be a preview for what is to come at the federal level. Look for more breakup talk during the presidential election.

4. Tariffs To Be Continued?

So, what will happen with tariffs? It’s hard to say. However, even if any announcement is made around the time this post is published, I believe it's best to be highly skeptical. For example, even if a deal is made with China, any action to unwind business practices there would likely take years to implement. While the tap could be opened again for U.S. imports, remember that they will be at a higher cost than they were before.

5. AI Protects The Universe

Adversarial machine learning is being used to combat cybercrime. According to a Capgemeni Research Institute study, 61% of enterprises said they are unable to detect breaches without using AI. In 2020, AI’s most important application will be to protect us from hacks. Given its extremely high cost, I predict that AI as a service will emerge as a product used by smaller companies that can’t afford it.

6. Battle Of The Cloud Titans 

Silicon Valley is in a war for cloud computing supremacy. Cloud platforms, including software as a service (SaaS), data platforms as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), will be a $250 billion market in 2020, with top providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, duking it out. Prices could fall, especially as companies bundle applications.

7. #MeToo Circa 2020

According to Equal Rights, there was an 80% increase in the number of sexual harassment bills introduced in state legislatures this year. Many of those will go into effect in 2020. With them comes new awareness from employers who are implementing equal pay strategies, improved maternity leave, flexible work arrangements and childcare options.

8. Man In Space

According to Space.com, in 2020, SpaceX is planning a Demo-2 mission that will carry NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station. Private space travel is to follow. 2020 will also mark the beginning of a litany of military and commercial drone flights by unmanned spacecrafts, which are nimbler than satellites.

9. Here Come The IPOs

Saudi Aramco’s record IPO caught the attention of investors, with a valuation well over $1.5 trillion. Companies expected to go public this year include Airbnb, GitLab and Neptune Energy, among many others.

10. Businesses’ Role In Social Change

Perhaps at no time in history have businesses been more in tune with their responsibility to protect the environment, ensure equality and advocate for social issues. While many startups and social enterprises have long sought out double and triple bottom-line results, there is a sea change underfoot where more traditional businesses are seeking out their purpose beyond making a profit.

11. Changes In Latin America

According to CNBC, Venezuela's hyperinflation rate has increased to 10 million percent. The U.S. imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina earlier this year, but their economies are expected to grow this year. 2020 could bring a renegotiation of NAFTA and, hopefully, new ambitions for U.S. companies that would like to bring production to Mexico.

12. European Woes

Strikes in France, slowing production in Germany and Brexit make for a slumping European economy. Should interest rates go below zero (yes, that is a thing), the global economy could be sparked into a recession. Business leaders should be proactive in identifying predictive indicators that correlate with demand in their industry sector (such as various purchasing indices or durable goods orders).

At the least, it will be an interesting time to be running a business. Make sure your team is in a position to capitalize on the changes in the year ahead.

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Tech Trends To Watch For In 2020

Over the past year, this column has celebrated female technologists of all disciplines and from across a wide range of industries. Nearly all of them have mentioned the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence or machine learning to their work. Importantly, those same women all reinforced the need to engage more females in positions relative to AI – both to aid in its unbiased application and to optimize its use in business and society. 

So, as we look ahead to the trends and technologies that will likely dominate this next year and decade, it makes sense to begin by unpacking how AI might continue its march forward and the opportunities it will create for female entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, and others. 

AI and Machine Learning Dominate 

From email marketing to financial services, women tech leaders expect AI and machine learning to continue augmenting businesses’ abilities to improve scale, efficiency, and – in some cases – impact.

Mailchimp VP of Global Product Marketing Darcy Kurtz told me that the company remains focused on harnessing the power of data science and machine learning to help businesses better understand their strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, she expects that in 2020 email marketer Mailchimp will “continue exploring the power of data and refining how we can use it to personalize and optimize the consumer experience without additional work or budget.” Today In: Leadership 

Superhuman is another company that deals in email. But rather than using it for marketing purposes, they are focused on reimagining the inbox to better suit the needs of modern users. AI is an instrumental part of this as it tracks habits and helps inject speed and automation into a normally time intensive task. 

Emuye Reynolds, the company’s Head of Mobile and Delight, believes that AI will enable email inboxes to triage themselves and handle basic tasks on their own. “Imagine waking up to [email] drafts that are ready to send, [helping you] become an order of magnitude more productive,” she proclaimed to me…via email of course. 

Of course, AI and machine learning are also applicable to a wide range of other industries beyond email and email marketing. Mindy Ferguson, Managing Vice President, Commercial Digital Channels at Capital One, predicts that both will be a major focus for her team in 2020. Specifically, machine learning can be used to better customize the user experience, change how Capital One engages with customers, and even point to better business decisions. 

Human resources can benefit from AI too. Executive search and leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder is exploring how it can be used to better inspire and motivate a company’s workforce. Lindsay Trout, leader of the company’s Global Digital Segment said the use of “machine learning, behavioral science, and advanced analytics to measure culture and other previously unmeasurable ‘touchy-feely’ aspects of a business” will be a major tech trend for the HR industry. 

The Shift to Mobile and 5G 

While it may dominate the headlines, AI is far from the only technology that will prosper in the coming decade. There are numerous other exciting trends and emerging technologies on the radar for female technologists in 2020 and beyond.

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