Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

2022: The Year the Low-Code Developer Rules the Digital Experience

By Nishant Patel, co-founder and CTO, Contentstack

This year brands realized the importance of delivering personalized, content-rich digital interactions to each customer, and invested in digital experience platforms that not only meet their content delivery needs today, but can scale as they evolve their content architecture in the future.

Marketing teams made significant technology investments to support the Content Development Life Cycle (CDLC). As a result, next year the number of "citizen developers" will also increase, as team members will be empowered to create custom applications that bring customer interactions to a whole new level. IDC expects the number of industry-specific digital apps and services to explode to 500 million by 2023. And by 2025, roughly 10 percent of these apps will be led by artificial intelligence.

In 2022 we'll see the low-code developer rule the digital experience using tools like AI and APIs to generate ROI from CX. Businesses will start to derive real value from AI through contextual experiences, and we will see front-end developers take a larger role across the organization as the adoption of open source frameworks continues to grow. Big and emerging brands alike will dip a toe in the Metaverse and build digital strategies to better engage with customers within this new space.

Businesses will finally derive value from AI through contextual experiences

Though the benefits of AI have been lauded for years, it's challenging to find use cases of AI providing true organizational value. Non-contextual AI/ML can only go so far. For content creators, contextualized intelligence will be a game-changer - especially when it comes to managing and searching for images. The CMS will eventually learn business lexicon to add context, provide warnings about sensitive content and provide guidance in terms of any content that needs to be trimmed down.

Front-end developers become full-stack architects

The accelerated developer lifecycle has required a blend of frameworks and methodologies, with a move towards an automated CI/CD. A heavy investment in low-code tools has driven a shift towards the developer as king - the trend of developers as the decision maker will continue into 2022.

In 2022 developers will have even more control to chart the course. Front-end developers will creep towards the domain of ‘full-stack' - with a preference for open-source frameworks like Gatsby, Nuxt.js or Next to offer performance, scalability, and security built-in.

Intra- and Inter-app automation to help accelerate workflows and integrate extensible products

API ecosystems are open, but very difficult to work with. Integrations typically involve tedious experimentation and are generally not reproducible. Services will come online to help bridge the connectivity between extensible products. The analogy would be electric cars needing to work with each other's charging stations.

Successful brands will embrace the Metaverse as a broader part of their omnichannel content strategy

The launch of Metaverse brings with it a new channel for customers to engage, connect with, and transact on. The Metaverse will become a part of the broader omnichannel strategy and will be plugged into the tech stack. In fact, 25% of our customers are already strategizing about the best ways to leverage Metaverse and create captivating content and experiences for their customers.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nishant Patel is Founder & CTO at Contentstack- a leading Content Management System and Content Experience Platform. Previously, Nishant was Founder, CEO and CTO of Digital Experience Platform Built.io, which was acquired by German software powerhouse Software AG in September 2018. Nishant is a technology visionary with an extensive track record of spotting and setting industry trends and creating software products that power digital transformation and further the rise of the API economy. Under his leadership as Founder and CTO at Raw Engineering, Nishant ran an R&D incubator to pioneer new category-forming products like Raw Engineering's MBaaS, Built.io iPaaS and Contentstack (Headless CMS), which all became industry leaders in Enterprise SaaS. With 20+ years of experience solving complex technology problems, Nishant has become a respected and trusted technology advisor to many Fortune 500 companies. Nishant holds a B.S. in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.