The Top 7 Trends Shaping the Consumerization of Enterprise Technology

In 2001, Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone, and Douglas Neal and John Taylor coined the term “consumerization of IT.” 

Both events occurred in the same year, foretelling the next two decades. When users brought consumer devices into the workplace, employees started expecting consumer-level design in their professional environments, and consumerization swept from the IT department to enterprise technology as a whole. 

Prior to the consumerization of the enterprise, technology companies commercialized their products at the organizational level—often selling to a company’s executive leaders and letting them deploy it to users who had little say. 

As computers became personal and mobile phones became smart, consumers gained dominance over markets for technologies that were once meant for business users. The pace picked up as web applications and SaaS applications showed consumers they could access better tools via the internet than they could in their workplaces. 

As a result, consumers exerted their newfound influence in the workplace, and enterprise technology was never the same—and though the transformation started decades ago, the changes are ongoing, as the enterprise technology market and the consumer market continue to influence each other. 

Over the years, the term “consumerization of the enterprise” has swollen with meaning and grown to comprise numerous different trends. It remains a huge trend, but you can only understand it if you parse the other trends that feed into the ongoing transformation.

1. Consumer-grade UX

Decades ago, enterprise technology companies didn’t need to worry too much about the user experience (UX). Back then, they sold their products to executives, and end-users had little choice but to use them, and little sway over the next tool the company would adopt. 

As users learned how easy it could be to use software with consumer-grade UX in the devices and software they found outside of work, they began to demand it in their workplaces too. Executives soon saw the advantages in terms of productivity and morale numbers: If workers could use the tools better and more efficiently, they could get more done with less frustration. 

Once this seal was broken, the trend became a reality enterprise technology companies had to embrace. Increasingly, companies started developing mobile apps, began running A/B testing programs, and built up design teams that could compete with companies like Apple. A whole market of design tools emerged, such as Sketch, Framer, Abstract, and Figma, all of which made it possible—and therefore necessary—for enterprises to have effective and delightful UX. 

By 2015, research from the Design Management Institute showed that 16 publicly traded stocks from design-centric companies showed a 211% return over the S&P 500. And because consumer UX is always improving, enterprises are now in a much broader race to produce the most effective, most usable products. 

As a result, even the largest enterprise technology companies are using design thinking and user research to create products that meet the needs of their users—both as workers and as consumers.

2. Product-led growth

Decades ago, when enterprise technology companies sold software to new customers, the software itself was almost an afterthought. The technology companies focused on results and the promises they could make to the company leaders who would choose whether to adopt and deploy the software. 

With the rise of the cloud and SaaS, technology companies flipped this structure and gained the ability to grow from the bottom up instead of the top down. Slack, Zoom, Notion, and Airtable are all examples of companies that sell to enterprises by convincing end-users to try the product—often for free—and letting them convince higher-ups to deploy the software enterprise-wide. 

By focusing on consumer-grade UX, enterprise technology companies can directly meet the needs of their end-users and leverage them for enterprise-level sales. Companies with product-led growth models tend to offer free trials, freemium models, and cheap single-user seats to get end-users started. 

With product-led growth as a primary sales driver or supplementary sales driver, enterprises can connect to end-users who know the product space better than any executive and who have as much influence, collectively, as a company leader does. 

The best example of this model in action is one of the first companies to try it: Atlassian. Jira, Atlassian’s premier product, is targeted at software developers, a particularly influential segment of end-users with a lot of sway over product decisions. 

In Atlassian’s 2015 S-1 filing, the company wrote, “We recognize that users drive the adoption and proliferation of our products.” Today, Atlassian is worth $42 billion. 

Many more enterprise technology companies are increasingly following similar models, and the ones that aren’t yet are looking closely at how they too can build product-led growth funnels. 

3. Democratization of enterprise tools

As a result of improving UX and the success of product-led growth, the usage—not just the adoption—of enterprise tools is becoming democratized. Increasingly, users are seizing more control over the tools they use, and how they use them. 

In the past, end-users were just passive recipients of software that they could use correctly or incorrectly. Today, especially with the rise of niche SaaS solutions, end-users function more like power-users. Now, enterprise accountants, for example, are less likely to see themselves as “just” a user and more likely to see themselves as a power-user who considers software critical to their workflow and who deserves software built to fit their needs. 

For example, back in 2013, Tomasz Tunguz, a Venture Capitalist at Theory, pointed out that much of the success of PaaS provider Heroku was due to circumventing IT. “It’s often much faster to build and deploy a project externally on Heroku than to coordinate with IT to deploy internal resources,” he writes. “And those developers are much happier for it.”

As users get more control over their tools, IT departments shift to a more strategic role. Now that enterprise software providers can offer flexible pricing models and self-service options to meet the needs of these power-users, IT departments can spend less time managing device fleets and more time working on bigger initiatives. 

4. Low-code and no-code tools

A perennial problem for enterprises is that development resources are always scarce. According to a 2018 longitudinal study on developers’ daily work, 23% of development time is spent paying down technical debt. The bigger and older the company, the more tech debt is likely present, leaving those enterprises vulnerable to lean startups with developers freed up for innovation work. 

Low-code and no-code tools provide a solution: With these tools, non-developers can build software solutions without requiring developer resources. As a result, the nontechnical employees can build solutions faster, and the developers can stay focused on more strategic work. 

In many cases, too, non-developers are, by nature, much closer to the problems at hand than developers, and can produce solutions that more closely fit their needs. As companies adopt low-code and no-code tools, they increase the pace of development and reduce time to market.

5. Generative AI

AI has been one of the hottest topics in years—and it’s here to stay.

Recent research by a16z, for example, found that in 2023, enterprises invested an average of $7 million in generative AI. Almost all respondents reported promising results, and the majority plan to increase their investments in generative AI by 2x–5x.

Information access, for example, has become a use case in AI that’s particularly useful to enterprises. As Lightspeed Ventures reports, “Between 80 and 90 percent of all enterprise data is unstructured or semi-structured — emails, chats, video, web pages, and so on. LLMs excel at analyzing this data and making it easily accessible.” 

Enterprises are using AI to automate critical business processes, improve the customer experience, and drive revenue growth. As AI technologies evolve, they’ll give enterprises even more opportunities to leverage data and build business-changing applications. 

6. Self-service support

The complement to product-led growth, which empowers users to choose which tools to adopt, is self-service support, with which users feel empowered to fix software problems on their own. 

This trend is another result of consumer-grade UX: As professional users start to see themselves as power-users, they’re less likely to want to throw up their hands at the first sight of a problem and file a ticket with IT. Instead, these users want to be able to fix the problem themselves. 

Tidio research shows that “Over 67% of customers prefer using a form of self-service rather than talking to a customer service representative” and “73% prefer using the company’s website exclusively instead of social media, SMS, or live chat apps for support.”

For traditional enterprises, this can be counterintuitive. Providing world-class customer support is a great feature, but for many users, even perfect customer support can’t beat not having to call support at all. Examples of self-service support include:

• Discussion forums where users can work with other users. 
• Knowledge bases and help centers where users can reference comprehensive, useful, intuitive documentation.
• Customer portals where users can track their work and, as necessary, pass problems onto support after they’ve done everything they can on their own. 

Companies that adopt self-service support functions are well-positioned to improve both efficiency and customer satisfaction—a win-win for enterprises and users alike. 

7. First-party data and personalization

For a long time, enterprise marketers have been stuck between a rock and a hard place: On the one hand, there’s pressure to collect data to improve marketing campaigns and fuel personalization-based features—but on the other hand, that very pressure created tool-sprawl that left them unable to capture and use all the data they had. 

As a result, many enterprises are now prioritizing the ability to capture first-party data and build transparent ways of collecting it, secure ways of storing it, and effective ways to communicate to customers how much they benefit from the personalization features this data supports. 

According to “A Technology Overview of Consumer Personalization,” a 2023 Forrester report, the average marketer today uses eight separate products or technologies to run personalization programs. Each marketer can spend hours each day trying to reconcile buyer identities from the many fragments of information strewn around those tools. 

With the rise of commerce operating systems like Shopify, however, marketers and enterprise leaders are able to capture first-party data to support personalized features while relying on information that isl captured and hosted on the same platform. 

With a unified core customer model, enterprises can bring together all the browsing, purchasing, and order data they collect—as well as all the data they collect from the many tools that integrate with Shopify—to build personalization features without getting lost in tool-sprawl. 

Key takeaways for enterprise technology providers

The seven trends above feed into one long-term trend—the consumerization of enterprise—but each trend is likely to split into further tributaries over time. As a result, the key takeaway for enterprise technology providers is to ensure they find a balance between getting ahead of trends, and avoiding pursuing trends for their own sake. 

Consumer-grade UX, for example, was the first trend in this list because it triggered so many other trends, and even now, it’s still one of the biggest growth levers enterprises can pull. But it’s not enough to improve UX and deem the job done—each of these trends is a moving target that requires ongoing iteration. 

This is why it’s often best for enterprises to partner with platforms supported by teams who can see around corners for them—teams who stay so far ahead of the curve that they’re always ready to help you accelerate. 

Since 2020, Shopify has shipped more than 800 features and improvements for our customers, launching about 100 every six months with Shopify Editions. If you’re looking for long-term growth supported by the biggest trends, Shopify is the platform and team to turn to.