BUSINESS TRENDS REPORT 

2024 / 2025

PIVOT

The OneAdvanced Business Trends Report has evolved into a vital resource for organisations, offering actionable insights into the current business and technology landscape. It will empower leaders to assess where they are against the most important trends, providing a clear roadmap to understand their position in relation to competitors and peers. These insights can offer guidance for future technology adoption, increased productivity, and strategic growth.

This year we sampled the experiences and perspectives of over 6,000 UK senior decision makers working in organisations with 100+ employees, across eight industry sectors. With data collected from eight previous annual reports, OneAdvanced is in a strong position to identify continuing trends alongside current emerging and declining themes that will influence the way we work in 2024 and beyond.

Reveal a strong correlation between several of the biggest challenges faced by UK organisations and their combined impact on greater productivity gains. Organisations are being held back from achieving their goals by a number of factors, chiefly:

• Skills and workforce shortages.
• Lack of budget to invest in technology and AI.
• Disparate technology solutions and lack of integration.
• Insufficient understanding and preparedness to implement emerging technologies.
• A worrying lack of cloud adoption hindering potential to benefit from cloud-based technologies.

2024 is a pivotal year for the UK, as a new government’s bold ambitions signal transformative change across public services. With fresh investment in the NHS, rail, energy, and technology, we’re on the brink of a more resilient, tech-driven future. This report uncovers the key technology trends set to reshape the UK – and the opportunities they bring

For organisations, there is increasing focus on driving more productivity that can enable prosperity for their customers, service users, investors, their people, other stakeholders, and their communities. Many leaders are embracing the benefits of digital technology, helping their businesses become more efficient, driving higher productivity, that in turn supports more investment and profitability. However, achieving consistent, higher productivity is often an elusive nirvana for many.

As we have seen over the eight previous years of this annual report, skills and talent shortages are a key factor behind the loss of productivity. With organisations struggling to maintain business as usual without a full complement of people, along with the added costs of rehiring and onboarding staff. The introduction of new technologies, chiefly AI, has compounded this shortage, many organisations simply do not have the people, the know-how, or the resources, to implement the AI projects that could positively transform their impact.

Cloud-based technologies are the key to unlocking success with digital transformation, yet our survey reveals many organisations are still reliant on legacy and on-premise systems that do not integrate with more powerful, modern solutions. Cloud-based systems deliver the flexibility businesses need, enabling employees to work more effectively in the office and remotely. Whilst also helping organisations reduce their carbon footprint, and crucially, cloud-based systems are an effective mechanism towards secure, ethical AI-powered technologies.

AI is already powering automation for faster, more effective processes that free people to focus on higher-value, strategic tasks. AI has the scope to handle massive datasets, helping spot the anomalies that flag potentially fraudulent activities, as well as underpinning more actionable insights and data-driven decisions. 

In uncertain times, cloud-based systems can provide a cost-effective, and scalable solution, supporting businesses in their ambitions to thrive and grow. 2024 has also been a year where many have been exposed to the potential risks and threats posed by cybercrime, and the cloud can offer greatly enhanced security benefits over legacy systems. This is not time for sticking heads in the sand – transition to cloud-based systems is an absolute necessity for businesses that seek to remain competitive.

BY SIMON WALSH, CEO, ONEADVANCED

for organisations in the next 12 months, highlighted by 44% of respondents.

• Better systems integration is the number one feature leaders need and want more of from their technology systems.

• Attracting & retaining talent remains the top challenge for another consecutive year, negatively impacting organisations’ ability to prosper.