A year of rapid change

Since the start of the internet era, we have lived in a period of rapid change. The AI era will exponentially accelerate change further. We founded Beyond in 2010 to meet this challenge, and our mission continues today — to help accelerate an organization’s ability to transform and drive value.

The challenge of adopting AI

While the adoption of AI is accelerating, many organizations are struggling to bridge the gap between experimentation and business impact, resulting in unrealized value.

The common challenges that hinder progress:

1. Data quality issues: As Forrester noted in June 2024, “Data quality is a significant hurdle for organizations seeking to unlock the transformative potential of AI. Issues such as inconsistency, incompleteness, or lack of standardization hinder progress.” Put simply: if you put bad data in, you get bad results out.
2. Operationalizing AI: While the ability to experiment with AI has grown, organizations often struggle to operationalize and scale these efforts. Forbes reported that “Approximately 90% of Proof of Concept (POC) pilots will not move into production in the near future.” 
3. Skills gaps: Acquiring new skills or upskilling is critical but keeping pace with rapid change is no easy feat. Deloitte found that 68% of executives face moderate to extreme skills gaps, with 25% rating this as a “major” or “extreme” challenge. 
4. Data lag: A Cloudera survey revealed that while 90% of enterprises are adopting AI, many struggle with outdated or inaccessible data. As one tech executive recently shared, “Our AI is mind-blowing, but our data is two years behind.”
5. Ethics and compliance: Organizations continue to navigate the complex ethical and regulatory landscape of AI to ensure their models are compliant, fair, and responsible.
6. Rising costs: The costs of acquiring datasets, hiring skilled professionals, and maintaining AI infrastructure remain prohibitive for many businesses, especially smaller ones.

A recent BCG report shared that just 4% of companies are at the forefront of AI innovation, while only 26% of companies have moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage to generate value.

There is a lot of work to do!

The risks of falling behind

As adoption accelerates, the value gap will widen between those that realize the value of AI and those that don’t. The risks are significant:

• Losing customers to competitors: Customer experiences will become more personalized, and customers will increasingly expect personalized experiences. Brands that fail to deliver risk losing market share to those that do.
• Friction and poorer experiences: AI will fuel a new era of adaptive UI and assistive intelligence that will simplify the user experience and improve discovery and wayfinding. Those that don't offer smart services risk falling behind.
• Reduced customer loyalty: Personalization fosters loyalty, making customers feel valued and more likely to make repeat purchases. Companies without this capability may struggle to retain customers.
• Missed revenue opportunities: AI can optimize conversion and drive sales through predictive features and targeted recommendations and offers. Ignoring AI means leaving money on the table.
• Reduced efficiency and productivity: AI can automate tasks, analyze data, and optimize processes, leading to significant productivity gains. Companies that fail to adopt AI may find themselves struggling to keep up with competitors who are leveraging AI to streamline their operations.
• Missed opportunities for innovation: AI can help identify new opportunities, predict market trends, and develop innovative products and services. Companies that lag in AI adoption may miss out on these opportunities, stifling growth and potentially losing market share.

Evolving to help organizations thrive

Beyond’s mission ‘to accelerate each organization’s ability to transform and drive value’ is central to how we think. Through our services, solutions, and engagement models, we help close the gap between the rate of change and our clients’ ability to deliver. 

Over the years, we’ve evolved Beyond to meet this challenge. In 2024, we doubled down on our mission by putting AI at the center of what we do and launching three connected practice areas, giving us specific focus around the value drivers of AI:

1. Cloud + AI: Helping organizations build scalable, modern technology and data solutions to enable them to deliver innovative AI solutions as a part of our 15-year partnership with Google Cloud.
2. Customer Platforms: Designing, building, and optimizing intelligent customer platforms that enhance the customer experience through hyper-personalization, assistive intelligence, and self-serve tools.
3. Workplace Solutions: Helping organizations leverage AI to optimize productivity, automate processes, and improve business operations. 

Delivering results

In 2024, we’ve helped our customers overcome AI adoption challenges and delivered measurable value. Here are some of the highlights:

• Accelerating model deployment: We helped a well-known travel platform accelerate model deployment time from eight weeks to one week by introducing new ML Ops processes. This freed their data scientists to focus on more innovation, enabling us to take 11 use cases to production.
• Price prediction: We helped unlock the power of dynamic pricing in travel. Our advanced AI-driven price prediction models optimize revenue management, generating competitive price points that align with market sentiment, processing 2.8bn data points from 10+ data sources delivering 3mm price recommendations daily.
• Enhancing customer platforms: With SEGA, we’ve redesigned their web experience to move them from a gaming company to an entertainment juggernaut — building a foundation to enhance their ecommerce experience, providing the groundwork to bring in-game data to their .com, and so much more.
• Platform modernization: We’ve helped a leading photo platform modernize its core product, leveraging assistants to increase productivity by 25%
• Realizing AI’s transformative value: We’ve partnered with one of the world’s largest tech companies, helping unlock the potential of Google’s Gemini AI—improving efficiency, automating processes, and ensuring compliance. 
• Precision medicine CX transformation: We’ve helped launch a first-of-its-kind service architecture, brand and digital platform for a revolutionary precision cancer treatment for a global medicines company with their CEO saying, “This should be the new standard.”.

The road ahead

As we look to 2025, we’ll continue to realise AI’s transformative potential as we scale and invest in our three practice areas. With the rapid pace of change, we expect to see more innovation in AI. 

The recent announcements about Google Gemini 2 — with its enhanced agentic capabilities, native multimodality, and improved reasoning and planning — represent more opportunities to deliver value and solve business challenges. As a trusted Google Cloud partner — and the Cloud partner that Google chooses from themselves — we look forward to bringing these groundbreaking features to more businesses, products, and customers in the coming year.

We’re grateful for the opportunity to support our customers through their biggest challenges in 2024 and excited to tackle what’s next as a partner that can turn data into valuable impactful customer experiences and improve business workflows using the latest advances in generative AI.

We look forward to making 2025 a year of action, impact, and innovation — together, with you.

Happy holidays from all of us at Beyond.