As we go through a major economic reshuffling, the question that keeps coming to mind is: What won’t change in a decade? We are still on the early side of a major capital, demographic and geopolitical reorientation that will take a better part of a decade to sort out. During this period, companies will be constrained by capital and workers. The Cloud, APIs, and Automation will be a major part of the equation.
As baby boomers retire in significant numbers starting this quarter, we are experiencing a lot of things all at once. The first is that we no longer have workers sufficient enough to replace the retiring baby boomer population, as GenZ is the smallest generation we have. The second is as baby boomers retire and sell their small businesses there is immense room for automation to take foot which has not happened yet. Many SMBs still use on-premise tools that haven’t been updated to take advantage of the current generation of Cloud powered tooling.
As baby boomers retire and move their $79 trillion dollars of wealth to safer asset classes the capital structure is going to change. We are entering an era of expensive capital where interest rates will be significantly high for years. The result of this is there just won’t be enough capital to do any meaningful R&D through VC-based companies. So companies will be driven to efficiency and to make do with less. Automation and APIs will take on major roles at companies. This does not mean additional SaaS tooling but tooling that does work on behalf of companies. In the words of Clayton Christensen, a Job to Be Done.
So what won’t change in a tremulous decade ahead? The Cloud. If anything, the Cloud is still in the early adoption phase and has significantly further to go.