The world of business communication has undergone significant changes in recent years. Corporate messengers have become a popular way of communicating both within companies from various industries and government organizations. Due to the growing need to improve the quality of collaboration, corporate instant messaging applications have become an indispensable tool for modern business along with telephone and email. Corporate communication does not stand still: developers are constantly improving these applications, adding new features and capabilities.
In this article, we will consider the latest trends in the development of corporate messengers for 2023. Read about the trends of 2024 in this article.
Our goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of trending technologies in the field of developing enterprise instant messaging applications and help companies keep up with the times.
ChatGPT and the Power of AI for Corporate Communication
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot launched in late November 2022. It is known to many, even those who are far from technology, as OpenAI's development instantly became a megahit and began to be used in a variety of professional fields. The trend has not bypassed corporate messengers, with MS Teams and Slack being among the pioneers in integrating with AI-powered chatbots.
What an AI-powered chatbot can do:- Take conference minutes. During the meeting, the bot highlights key points of the conference, automatically creates notes and tasks.
- Generate texts from scratch or change the text style according to specified parameters (for example, for business letters).
- Compose answers to questions.
- Make a short summary of the conversation in the selected chat.
The goal of integrating a messenger with an AI-based chatbot is to help teams automate routine processes, thereby freeing up valuable employee time for more important and creative tasks. In 2023, integration with such chatbots will become a trend for many market players. However, issues of information security, personal data protection and intellectual property protection may become obstacles to wider adoption of AI in corporate communications.
Corporate superapp
Corporate messengers, when isolated from other business tools of the company, are limited in their use. Employees have to switch between applications, instead of the official corporate solution, they begin to use public services that do not meet information security requirements.
A new approach to organizing corporate communications is containerized super app. Such an app is downloaded from popular stores (AppStore, Google Play), while the data area in it is encrypted, the exchange takes place inside the container. The superapp as a single access point contains the services that employees use every day. As a rule, this is mail, the messenger itself, video conferencing, telephony.
An example of such a corporate superapp is Atom Space, which was awarded the TAdviser award as "Mobile Workplace of the Year". It provides such popular services as ordering certificates, processing sick leaves and vacations, corporate news. It allows employees to significantly save time on finding the necessary information.
Task Manager and Social Networking Features
Functionality is still the key criterion when choosing a corporate communication tool. If a corporate messenger is not as functional as, say, WhatsApp, then employees will end up using the latter. In addition, there are specific features that are typical for corporate tools, the peak in this regard has not yet been reached, and the developers' imagination is working at full capacity.
There is also a trend towards turning corporate messengers into an internal social network for the company, when employees are actively involved both in teamwork and in the life of the company. Among these functions:
- User statuses (e.g. "on vacation", "sick", "working")
- Threads, reactions, regular and animated stickers
- Digital avatars
- Communities and channels
- Highlighting different types of messages in color (e.g. "urgent", "important", "off-topic")
- Conducting surveys (including multi-step ones)
- Setting tasks, timeline, completion status
Cross-platform
A corporate messenger is an integral part of such a concept as "corporate mobility" (i.e. the ability for employees to perform their functions regardless of their location and the device they use). A mobile application allows you to stay in touch with colleagues from your phone, while a desktop application or web version is more convenient to use from a desktop computer.
Teams use not only classic Windows and MacOS, but also other operating systems, so corporate messenger developers who want to be "in the market" develop versions for various operating systems. For example, in Russia, due to import substitution of foreign solutions, the trend is to develop solutions compatible with the domestic operating system "Aurora".
Corporate Federation
One of the key differences between corporate messengers and public services is "advanced" information security. Public services (such as WhatsApp and Telegram) have end-to-end data encryption, but they are still not suitable for exchanging confidential corporate information. In this case, companies cannot control where such data is transferred and stored.
Corporations, enterprises from "sensitive" sectors of the economy, and departments choose on-premise solutions as a corporate communication tool. This means that the solution is deployed on the company's servers, and all data is under its control. Moreover, there is an “advanced” on-prem level – Global Federation. This is a unique communication protocol that allows employees to communicate with colleagues registered on trusted corporate servers (including those from other companies), and at the same time safely interact with public users of the messenger. With this approach, there are protected on-premise servers and full control of data flows is ensured with the ability to create working groups with both internal and external users.
We have listed the main trends in the development of corporate messengers in 2023. Let's see how the situation changes in a year and update this article with information about trends for 2024.
