The Year Ahead for Small Business: Experts Weigh In on What Small Biz Owners Should Expect

What lies ahead for small business owners and entrepreneurs? Many people I’ve talked to feel like they are living in a Dickens novel.

It’s the best of times: “The economy is going strong, driven by consumer spending,” says Sharon Miller, managing director, head of small business for Bank of America. She says according to bank data, “consumer spending is up 5.5% on $3 trillion worth of transactions, which will help drive momentum into 2020.”

It’s also the worst of times: Many small businesses are struggling to find qualified employees to fill jobs, are baffled by the rapidly changing world of digital marketing, and are facing numerous other challenges.

To get some answers I turned to business leaders, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to get their insights and perspectives on what 2020 (and the new decade) has in store for small businesses. Of course, there are no guarantees. But hopefully, as my friends at Fundbox say, these “trends bear a history and trajectory that demonstrate their value in guiding your company’s efforts—and ones you can “depend on to help gain a competitive advantage in 2020.”

SMB general outlook for 2020

Jon Fasoli, Vice President & Small Business Segment Leader, Intuit

Worldwide there are 800 million self-employed professionals and small businesses, which make up 98% of all businesses and employ 60% of the global workforce. Yet the odds of succeeding are stacked against them. Half of these self-starters and small businesses fail in the first five years, two out of three in the first ten years. Additionally, 59% of private sector economists expect a recession by 2020 and 71% of small businesses feel there will be an economic recession in the next two years.

In spite of this, small businesses around the world are maintaining a positive outlook. According to a recent study by Intuit QuickBooks and Wakefield Research, although SMBs are concerned about the economy, they feel confident in their businesses: 48% of small businesses think their revenues will increase in the next 12 months, anticipating an opportunity for more hiring and more work.

Meredith Schmidt, EVP & GM, Salesforce Essentials

Small business owners and leaders are feeling positive about the future as we head into 2020. Confidence is up, and they expect revenues to rise too (according to a WSJ/Vistage survey of small business CEOs). That sense of optimism and certainty is going to propel small businesses to new heights because they are comfortable taking risks, hiring more, and expanding their goals.

Impeachment

Charley Moore, CEO, Rocket Lawyer

Your business should be able to flourish no matter who the president is. And I think that’s especially true for small businesses. On the other hand, who’s in charge does matter, so you should really understand in your business what policies are opportunities and threats for your business.

If you’re a business that relies on immigration, like much of the tech sector, the tightening of H-1B work visas for skilled tech workers has been a real challenge for Silicon Valley companies. With all of these various policies, it’s important for small businesses to understand what policies are opportunities and what are threats to their businesses. From a business standpoint, owners should plan and participate accordingly.

The economy

Sharon Miller, Managing Director, Head of Small Business, Bank of America

On tariffs: Miller notes the Fall 2019 Small Business Owner Snapshot from Bank of America showed many small business owners were affected about tariffs. Going into 2020, the tariff situation is “uncertain” and that is concerning to small business owners. She says, “The concern about tariffs is up three points from the Spring 2019 Snapshot and nine points from Fall 2018.” The increased tariffs have led to a rise in the cost of goods, which “55% of the business owners are passing along to their customers.”

Charley Moore, Rocket Lawyer

On a potential recession: No one knows when a recession will happen, everyone knows that it will. You should always be ready for a recession, especially now that we’re in the late stages of an economic expansion. I think a business should aspire to have durability and manage prudently. There’s no better time to be in business than a time when all of your competitors are struggling and you’ve got resources.

Business owners should want to be the one hiring when everyone else is firing, and a great way to do that is to be aggressive and prudent at the same time. This can be done by planning, doing your work now by taking advantage of this great economy, and ultimately being ready for when the weather changes.”

Artificial intelligence

Kushagra Shrivastava, Managing Director, Yahoo Small Business 

AI coming of age will revolutionize small businesses: Everywhere we look, the buzz around artificial intelligence and machine learning is growing. While AI already provides opportunities for “smart” marketing and business practice recommendations, AI in 2020 will take a step forward and be able to recommend tactics, while also predicting the result and benefits of those recommendations. AI tools that SMBs adopt next year should not only give a recommendation, but should also be able to explain why a recommendation is being made.

This will help transform decision-making for small business owners and provide them with tools that go beyond experimenting with growth and instead focus on changes that are most likely to help a business succeed. Here are some specific use-cases that AI will impact in 2020:

• Generating micro-cohort of existing or new potential customers—Leveraging predictive algorithms and using AI to build micro-cohorts will make media buying more efficient, effective, and successful in engaging small businesses’ specific target audiences. With deeper AI integration, emerging technology and marketing automation will go beyond advising businesses on “what” they should do and will recommend both the “what” and the “why.”

An example of this would be where currently a small business owner might get a recommendation they should start advertising online to find new customers, and very soon that recommendation will include details on where, when and how they should advertise, as well as predicting how many new customers they should expect to earn and how much revenue those customers are likely to bring.

By recommending channels to most effectively reach audiences, engage new customers, and drive purchasing decisions, AI will enable small business owners and decision-makers to make smarter decisions. These decisions will span demographics, shopping habits, and all the factors that go into driving sales and increasing a customer base.

• Smarter mobile interfaces and user experiences—This strategic shift will also drive new advertising tactics, specifically focused on the power of mobile. Mobile AI interfaces will evolve and reach the always-on consumer wherever they are and whenever they’re online. Virtual assistants and bots will become increasingly important, engaging many audiences the way they want to engage with businesses.
• Robotics process optimizations (RPO) tools will come alive complemented by simple, unified dashboards—In addition, in 2020 we’ll see AI increasingly help small business owners with management of their key processes. The emergence of ecosystems such as single sign-on, single invoice, unified dashboards, and mobile-first solutions will interface with the tools and services small businesses need to run operations from a single platform.

By consolidating the selection, activation and use of essential services—such as development and maintenance of an online presence, point of sale system, set up of legal packages, and marketing—will simplify the development and running of a business. AI-based operations and increased automation of key business processes also will increase operational efficiencies and create time to prioritize business growth.

• AI will help navigate macro-economic climate including trade wars—AI integration will give entrepreneurs the edge they need to become competitive. Managing and growing a small business can be difficult with the constantly shifting business climate, including selling against the trade war and the new tariff backdrop. However, with deeper AI integration in business development, management, and sales strategies, small business owners can take their businesses to the next level—transcending issues that threaten to hold them back and overcoming difficulties in today’s complex business landscape.

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho

In AI, data cleansing and auto-tagging will become widely implemented. Smaller organizations will begin to expect AI functionality in things like spreadsheets, where they’ll be able to parse information out of addresses or clean up inconsistencies. With auto-tagging today, your smart phone can recognize and tag objects in your photos, making your personal photo library much more searchable, but in the future, we will start to see business applications auto-tag information to make it much more accessible.

Today you can find your top customers in a CRM by running a report and sorting by revenue. In the next five years, you’ll be able to search “top customers” and your CRM will know what you’re looking for.

Phil Grier, Commerce Engineer, Yahoo Small Business 

Small businesses will integrate AI into their overall business strategy, transforming business practices and modernizing marketing tactics: In 2020, artificial intelligence will help to close gaps in merchant capabilities that many small businesses with limited resources face. With AI, small businesses can manage their stores seamlessly and efficiently, both by automating work processes (such as employee management, IT service administration, or compliance regulation management) and enabling better inventory and delivery management. AI-based chatbots and virtual assistants further streamline business transactions and increase operational efficiencies, while also providing an optimal customer experience.

We also expect 2020 to bring an uptick in new services that make AI app development more accessible and affordable for small businesses. These services will be similar to those offered by large public cloud providers, but easier to implement and manage, more affordable, and scaled to meet a small business’s needs. Due to their smaller and often nimbler nature, small businesses are poised to more easily and quickly adopt and implement corresponding emerging technologies. While AI efforts in larger enterprises sometimes become isolated and neglected by the overall executive team, in small businesses we expect to see a significant return on investment for AI initiatives as they focus on business-wide alignment, investment, and integration.

In addition to transforming business practices, AI will also transform marketing strategies and tactics. For small businesses that may not have a specialized department or resources available to dedicate solely to marketing, the use of AI assistants can help track metrics, detect anomalies, analyze ads, create and publish content, optimize campaigns, generate reports, and more. Implementation of AI assistants will also be used as a marketing tactic, streamlining the customer experience and improving transactions. Video, images, and AI assistants also will become increasingly important and relevant to SEO. With this, solutions to help SMBs in these areas will grow in popularity.

Srivatsan Laxman, CEO, True Lark 

The days of chatbots killing customer love are numbered: The rise of conversational AI assistants will make chatbots irrelevant in many customer-facing use cases. While the big global technology companies will continue to invest in cracking the code of bringing AI assistants to the mass consumer market, companies (like us) that are laser-focused on solving the specific business problem of front desk customer engagement, efficiency, and productivity will win big. Conversational AI assistants that understand context, learn as they go, and are easily customizable will rapidly replace the limited linear chatbots that have failed to live up to their promise of improved customer engagement.

$75 billion business dilemma will find a friend in conversational AI assistants: Franchises and location-based businesses will increase investments in front desk optimization and automation. These organizations will increasingly invest in conversational AI assistants for their front desk operations in order to help counter the estimated $75 billion in lost revenue caused by poor customer services such as missed calls, slow response to leads, and front desk attrition.

AI assistants will help businesses manage the shift to a deskless workforce and gig economy: Some 80% of the global workforce (3 billion people) work in a deskless environment, while ~1% of the world’s software is designed with this workforce in mind. Technology tools such as conversational AI assistants that create consistency, connect the dots, and help provide centralized intelligence and analysis will be key. Similarly, as more employees work on a contract or project basis, the knowledge they gain around an organization’s process and customer engagement simply dissipates when they move to their next gig. In the case of front desk teams, conversational AI assistants will play a critical role in capturing the intelligence of customer engagement patterns and maintaining consistency—thus operational efficiency—in front desk processes.

Jon Stross, President & Co-founder, Greenhouse 

AI will play a larger role for HR teams: Machine learning is helping to make HR tools smarter. Next year, we’ll see the technology become more useful in previously unexpected ways, such as customizing job board options for candidates and streamlining the scheduling of interviews. We’ll also see AI/machine learning integrated into other aspects of the hiring process.

AI can help with mitigation of unconscious bias among hiring managers to increase qualified diversity hires. Also important is the candidate experience. AI and machine learning can support HR teams in offering applicants a more informed and personal candidate experience from start to finish.

Cybersecurity

Sydney Ivey, General Manager of Small Business, Bank of America Merchant Services

What scams should small businesses look out for in 2020? Our data security and cybersecurity experts recommend that merchants be more vigilant against phishing attempts and ransomware attacks in the coming year. According to our research, data compromises can be traced back to a credential compromise where the client was phished. It also has been found that most small business owners and operators do not deploy multifactor authentication.

One of the most important things small business owners and operators can do is to ensure they—and their employees—are aware of the ways to protect against phishing attempts. Some important tips to remember are never sharing personal information for any unsolicited email or text, or clicking on any links provided in emails if the sender cannot be authenticated.

Do you expect more cybercrime vs small businesses in 2020? Our data security and cybersecurity experts expect to see more attacks on small businesses—especially those that have not deployed any secure technology such as EMV capable terminals, point-to-point encryption (P2PE) along with tokenization. But it’s not just small businesses with brick-and-mortar locations that need to take precautions—small businesses that have an e-commerce site will continue to be targeted as well.

To keep their own and their customers’ data secure both online and in-store, small business owners and operators must ensure they are deploying multilayer security protections such as CAPTCHA, fraud detection software, and enhanced ASV (approved scanning vendor). While keeping data secure is important, it’s also about keeping customers coming back. Based on our 2019 Small Business Payments Spotlight, the number of consumers who will never return to a small business that has had a data breach reached close to 30% in 2019—that’s up from almost 20% in 2017. Small business owners can work with their merchant services provider to help guarantee their payment systems are secure.

Growth

Dan Biewener, Senior Content Strategist, Fundbox

Going fast is better and inevitable: Speed has always been important for business, but 2020 will make it imperative. Digital transformation has already swept through large enterprises. Slow movers in adopting such technologies as AI, cloud computing, and digital marketing have failed to remain competitive—or even failed completely.

Although small businesses can’t be expected to match the pace of large organizations in making a digital shift, they can still take immediate advantage of such capabilities through third-party applications and service providers. For example:

• Real-time social media monitoring enables continuous tracking of multiple streams of social media data. A Sprout Social survey said that 41% of people would use their social networks to share a bad customer service experience, and about half of consumers would boycott a brand if they received a slow or poor response to a complaint on social.
• Credit at the moment of need is another valuable service now available to small businesses.
• Banks and other traditional lenders can take more than a month to approve a small business for a loan, plus another three months on average to actually get funding. Online lenders can use AI-enabled underwriting technology provide approvals for small business lines of credit up to $100,000 in just hours, not weeks, with funds available in days, not months.
• Immediate payment of receipts and the ability to offer longer net terms (up to 180 days) for your B2B customers will also become more popular in 2020. By eliminating the delays caused by paper checks and extended terms, fintech companies can reduce the cash flow disruptions and foster your business’s growth.

Robotic process automation: Robotic process automation (RPA) applications or services also promise to become more prevalent in 2020, even for small businesses. By automating many repetitive, routine, back-office tasks, RPA can help free up employees time and enable small businesses to focus on more strategic functions or valuable support for their customers.

Nellie Akalp, Chief Executive Officer, CorpNet

Flatter organizations and more seamless technology: A consequence of those faster decisions is the need for less management. Organizations need to be flatter in order to process information faster unless they want to risk nimble competitors seizing business opportunities.

Raju Vegesna, Zoho

Some of the biggest changes we expect to affect SMBs in the next few years are around CRM and AI. For CRM, personalization without violating privacy will be a big factor, since in order to offer really personalized customer experiences, businesses need to know a lot about their customers. Often this involves collecting and using customer information across various channels and touchpoints, a lot of which may be sensitive in nature. There’s no doubt that personalization will be crucial for success in 2020, but pulling it off without intruding into customers’ privacy will be an important challenge.

Rich Rao, Vice President, Small Business, Facebook

Automation will grow in 2020: Small business owners are always looking for new ways to spend less time running the business so they can spend more time on product development and customer service. Whether for accounting, operations, or advertising, automation will increasingly help business owners and their employees focus on the more rewarding parts of the job.

Millennials/Gen Z

Dan Biewener, Fundbox

Millennials and Gen Z will drive growth: Millennials recently pulled ahead of boomers as the most populous generation in the U.S., and they themselves are about to be surpassed by Gen Z. In fact, in 2020, more than a quarter of the U.S. population (and 41% of the global population) will be age 24 or younger.

Whether your business sells to younger generations or not, this shift will affect your marketplace and must inform your marketing. Millennials are now the most educated, egalitarian, and racially-diverse population in U.S. history. Gen Z consumers have also entered the workforce, bringing $44 billion in buying power, or nearly $200 billion considering their influence on household buying decisions. With 2020 ushering in this new era of predominantly younger consumers, businesses should consider these current trends when developing their marketing plans:

• Gen Z consumers are more likely to shop in brick-and-mortar stores than online, especially compared with millennials. This behavior may be driven as much by their desire for real-world social interaction as it is by their limited access to credit cards.
• Reviews matter more than ever. Previous customer reviews of your product now hold as much sway as its features and price, influencing 97% of people considering a purchase. This is true especially for younger, internet-savvy shoppers who even check reviews via mobile when shopping in a physical store. A Fan & Fuel study found that “92% of consumers hesitate to make a purchase if there are no customer reviews.”
• Shorter content is better—15 seconds or less. StatisticBrain research says that the attention span of Gen Z viewers has shrunk eight seconds. This is not from lack of concentration, but from the need to quickly sort through and assess the enormous information overload they receive online.

Mobile

Dan Biewener, Fundbox

Businesses must get moving on mobile: Regardless of your line of business, a mobile strategy is now critical to your success—57% of shoppers used a mobile retail app to look for more information about a product or a service in 2019, according to Statista. This trend will be even more pivotal for B2B sellers. Forrester forecasts that U.S. B2B eCommerce will reach $1.8 trillion and account for 17% of all B2B sales in the United States by 2023.

A mobile strategy starts with your company’s website. Most users now access search engines through a mobile device. That’s why Google switched to mobile-first indexing in 2019, so having a mobile-friendly version of your website is essential to maintaining a page one presence in search results. Take note: 61% of users won’t return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing, and one-third will then visit a competitor’s site instead.

Beyond gaining better visibility on search engines, mobile-friendliness provides other capabilities that drive business:

• Push notifications sent through a mobile app can help sellers engage buyers and reengage existing customers through selective offers triggered by their user data.
• GPS-enabled mobile apps can provide customers of multi-location sellers with convenient directions to nearby pickup or retail locations.
• Quicker conversions, since Forbes reports that 70% of mobile searches result in an action within an hour of the search.
• Mobile marketing, including in-store offers and data-driven recommendations, can influence shoppers’ purchasing decisions and boost sales by 32%.
• Mobile payments (in-store or online) have gained the trust of consumers and will continue to climb as a preference for conducting transactions in 2020.

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Sydney Ivey, Bank of America Merchant Services

How has adoption of mobile payments been? Will that pick up in 2020? The payments landscape is changing faster than ever. Merchants need to be prepared to accept the forms of payment that are most relevant to their consumers. According to our 2019 Small Business Payments Spotlight, digital wallets and third-party payment services both doubled in usage within two years. Increased convenience and security are attracting more consumers than just the typical early adopters when in-store shopping.

When it comes to online shopping, third-party payment methods like PayPal are gaining even more popularity, with usage nearly tripling in the last two years. Our research found that 17% of consumers said they wouldn’t make a purchase if they couldn’t pay with their preferred method of payment. To meet their customers’ payments preferences, small businesses should assess their own payment options to make sure they’re responding to consumer demand.

Who are biggest adopters of mobile payments on the business side & consumer—younger consumers? According to our findings in our 2019 Small Business Payments Spotlight, 44% of consumers younger than 30 use their mobile devices while shopping more often today than five years ago. This shift means small businesses need to actively manage their online presence, from creating their own websites to monitoring review sites, and it appears small businesses are following consumer trends.

Additionally, the Spotlight found that 70% of small businesses engage in e-commerce through a website, app, or third-party marketplace. In order to stay competitive, it’s important small businesses pay attention to their customers’ experience, both online and in-store, and ensure things like shipping costs meet customer expectations.

Money

David Simon, SVP and Global Head of Small Business and Medium Enterprises (SME) Business, Visa

Contactless payments are the future of the customer checkout experience: In 2020, we will see a seismic shift in the ways small business owners adapt to rapidly changing technologies helping them pay, get paid, disperse funds and increase their advocacy efforts. One example of this can be seen through small business owners’ increased acceptance of and reliance on contactless payments technology.

We predict a significant increase in tap-to-pay usage in 2020 by small business owners and their employees alike as more merchants globally lean on this technology as their preferred payments platform. Reducing the handling of cash through the tap-to-pay experience ensures quicker transaction times, shorter lines, and a lesser likelihood of shopping cart abandonment.

Jon Fasoli, Intuit

What inhibits growth? Is it money? Lack of other resources? The primary challenge that inhibits small business growth is cash flow. Every day, self-employed and small businesses struggle to manage the movement of money in and out of their business. QuickBooks and Wakefield research indicates that 80% of small business owners feel stressed because of their company’s cash flow. And 33% say they are not fully confident they understand all the details of their business’ financial health.

When driven by a cash crunch, a third of businesses have made poor decisions that hurt their long-term potential, including delaying payroll or a loan payment, and 25% have missed a revenue growth opportunity. Many try to feel their way through managing their books with mental math or a spreadsheet that they struggle to keep updated, which leads to stress and suboptimal decisions.

Every small business owner should try their best to understand the big picture if they want their business to grow and succeed. One way is to work with an accounting professional who can help a small business gain insights into their finances, better manage their cash flow, and make informed business growth decisions.

Technology

Sandeep Harpalani, VP of Product Line Management for Connected Home Products, NETGEAR

What exactly is Wi-Fi 6? The latest technology which is now fully here and already supported on the iPhone 11 and Samsung Galaxy S10. Intel-based Wi-Fi laptops are also now being introduced with Wi-Fi 6. This game-changing technology allows more devices to connect and stream simultaneously, without impacting speed or reliability, by scheduling up to 12 streams at once and efficiently packing and scheduling data.

Working with high-speed Gigabit Ethernet wireless like 5G, Wi-Fi 6 caries four times the capacity for devices than its previous version. This vastly increased capacity ushers in faster speeds and enables users to stream to their devices with limited interruptions.

Prediction: Wi-Fi 6 will support businesses, both large and small. There is no denying that Wi-Fi 6 will give businesses of all sizes a competitive edge. From the ability to process more data to supporting a modern-day employee who wants the freedom to work anywhere at any time with any device, Wi-Fi 6 opens the doors to an entirely new digital experience for today’s workforce.

From a price perspective, Wi-Fi 6 will give businesses the same, if not better, value than 5G in its ability to provide more efficient power use and a more seamless data-transfer connection. And, if you look at it from the lens of an IT or security staff, the technology was developed to be an extension of a secure corporate LAN, which ultimately limits the need for a staff to go through the route of a VPN to access important information stored in a company-wide intranet. Bottom line, the technology is here to make our businesses run smoother and more secure.

Prediction: Wi-Fi 6 will vastly improve the experience of small business owners and their customers. Today, a key component in providing a great customer experience and building rapport with consumers is supplying strong and reliable Wi-Fi access. Wi-Fi is a key requirement that drives business process and activities, and is part of many overarching business-critical operations. Wi-Fi 6 will help SMBs solve real-life problems that businesses face to handle larger number of devices efficiently and securely with better throughput and less interference in an office environment.

In fact, according to a 2016 survey by IGR, 62% of local business customers spend more time in store if Wi-Fi is available. With consumers increasingly seeking durable Wi-Fi capabilities within small businesses, it behooves businesses to ensure their Wi-Fi systems are reliable and performing well, with little to no interruption or spotty network connections. While Wi-Fi is only one part of providing a great customer experience, it may be one fundamental reason why customers return for repeated visits.

SMBs will turn to Wi-Fi 6 for increased network capacity, which means more productivity and likely fewer access points needed to cover an entire small business, resulting in less investment. Better traffic scheduling and basic service set coloring equals less interference within the office environment.

Madhu Therani, CTO and Head of AI, Near

Personalized consumer experiences: 2020 will see personalization of consumer experiences reach a new level. Both online and offline consumer touchpoints will utilize various first-party and third-party enriched and privacy-safe data sets on multiple dimensions, including spatial, temporal, and behavioral cues to create compelling physical and virtual experiences.

Data-as-a-service goes mainstream: We expect various data vendors handling different types of consumers (people), places (locations), and other entity data to launch reliable data-as-a-service offerings. These offerings may drive adoption by various app economy publishers and retailers to enrich their first-party data sets to drive better consumer acquisition and retention, better product and content offerings, and better measurement for various customer-centric projects.

Continuous intelligence: Consumer facing businesses will continue to generate copious amounts of data continuously as all consumer touchpoints are instrumented for data collection. Incorporating the data in real time to drive better decisions across the consumer’s journey and improve overall business processes will be a key objective as enterprises adopt continuous intelligence practices as predicted by Gartner.

Edge computing: Expect advances in edge computing in the coming years. In a bid to be privacy compliant, B2C companies are exploring how consumer data can be stored and processed on the mobile device itself. This will not only expedite data analysis and content delivery, but also keep consumer information private.

Chris McGugan, CTO, Avaya

Will 2020 be the year of the cloud for small businesses? While a majority of enterprises currently use some form of public or private cloud services, many small businesses have not yet fully embraced the benefits of cloud due to costs, misinformation around cloud adaptability, and the perception that it may not even be necessary for the size of their operation. However, according to research from Gartner, more than $1.3 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud by 2022, which includes small business spending.

In 2020 and beyond, small businesses should be looking to the cloud to stay competitive, and new subscription service models are making cloud communications solutions more affordable and customizable than ever before. Business decision makers now have the ability to find the right cloud model based on the size of the company, their growth trajectory, their specific needs and the overall needs of their industry.

Cloud services have already revolutionized the way we do business on a daily basis and will continue to do so. However, the perception among many small business owners previously was that cloud adoption was typically only attainable to large enterprises. 2020 is the year of cloud migration for small business–here is a look ahead at this trend and ways that SMBs can transition to the cloud:

• The right cloud services for your small business. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been around for a while and is being applied to cloud communications solutions. Finding the right public or private cloud is becoming easier and enabling businesses of all sizes to pick and choose the solutions they need and passing on the ones they don’t. In 2020, we will see a shift of cloud services aimed at small and medium-sized businesses due to this customization, and to subscription service models that can be a great step on the path to cloud.
• Cloud security and preparing for quantum computing. While large enterprises have fallen victim to data breaches over the past few years, it doesn’t mean small businesses can ignore their cybersecurity needs, especially as quantum computing becomes a reality. Traditional encryption, even on cloud services, are vulnerable to the power of quantum computing, and private encryption will become more prevalent in 2020 to prepare for potential breaches.
• Leveraging cloud and 5G for the remote workforce. The modern workplace is more fluid and flexible than ever. Cloud collaboration tools have made the remote workforce a reality, and this will continue to grow even more in 2020. For example, with the rollout of 5G, downloadable apps across all devices will enable workers to seamlessly connect with each other reliably in real time (i.e., screen sharing with minimal lag) without having to be in the same physical location.

On the other hand, cloud collaboration and communication tools running natively on a server means less software to download, and platforms will be able to stream uninterrupted across a 5G network. From team communication tools to virtual meetings, employees can be connected to the company’s network and infrastructure quickly and securely from any location–providing small businesses with access to top talent that was previously hands-off.

2020 is poised to be the year of the cloud as adaptability is more attainable than ever. With the rise of 5G, the remote workforce and prevalence of subscription services, it’s the perfect time for your small business to move to the cloud.

Women

Sharon Miller, Bank of America

Women are a force to be reckoned with; more and more are opening businesses. They’re starting businesses for different reasons. Many are tired of working for the corporation. Others are turning their side gigs into businesses.

Women will continue to accelerate the growth of their businesses. We’re supporting them through the Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship at Cornell. Women can get counseling, training and certifications. We want to help them get them past the million-dollar mark and get bigger market share.

Suzan Kereere, Global Head, Merchant Sales & Acquiring, Visa 

In a survey of U.S.-based female small business owners conducted by Visa, 73% reported difficulty in obtaining the funding they needed to start their own business, and 61% are self-funded.

Female entrepreneurship is undoubtedly on the rise, but many challenges still exist, specifically around funding opportunities for female founders. To help in their pursuit of business expansion, women entrepreneurs in 2020 will tap into the power of data more than ever before.  If you’re going to compete as a business, big or small, you have to figure out how to use data and technology to make your business and your personal brands thrive.

Meredith Schmidt, Salesforce Essentials

Women and minority-led small businesses are finally getting the recognition and support they deserve. With new spaces like The Riveter and The Wing, and online communities like Alice growing, women and minority business leaders are finding like-minded leaders and safe and welcoming spaces to learn and grow.

Stayed tuned for next week, when I’ll share even more predictions and forecasts from additional small business and entrepreneurship experts.

RELATED: The Surprising Business Trend That Could Make You a Better Leader

Disclaimer: Bank of America and Fundbox are clients of mine.

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