Customer Experience 
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can speed up enterprise digital transformation, but their adoption comes with significant challenges.
Legacy systems, cyber risks, and slow-changing regulations often prevent enterprise organizations from exploring these tools’ full potential in their digital transformation journeys.
In this article, we’ll explain how to overcome common AI and automation challenges and provide practical steps for digital transformation success.
What Does Enterprise Digital Transformation Look Like in 2025?
Here are our top predictions for digital transformation in 2025.
1. AI at the heart of business processes
About 72% of respondents in McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI survey said their organizations have adopted artificial intelligence in at least one business function.
In 2025, AI adoption will continue to grow, especially for driving decision-making and critical business outcomes, automating workflows, and personalizing customer experiences at scale.
Enterprise organizations will adopt AI agents to scale output and efficiency without increasing headcount. Chatbots and virtual assistants will provide round-the-clock support, instantly addressing customer inquiries and resolving issues. This will lead to improved response times and overall customer satisfaction.
2. Customer experience as a priority
More than 80% of Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends report participants said that customer experience and support were growing business priorities in 2024. This trend will continue as organizations increasingly leverage AI and other digital tools to boost customer satisfaction.
Digital transformation relies on modern customer experience technology to deliver seamless, personalized customer interactions in real time across all channels.
For example, AI chatbots can respond to customer inquiries, filter those that require a human response, and route these messages to the best-fit agents, reducing customer wait times.
3. Data-driven decision-making
A report by Accurity found that 28.5% of businesses established a data-first culture in 2022. This is up from 19% in 2019, meaning that data is slowly taking center in organizational decision-making.
This upward trend will likely continue in 2025 as more businesses advance their digital transformation journey.
Enterprise businesses will leverage big data analytics for real-time insights, optimizing operations, and making informed strategic decisions. They will also use predictive analytics to identify trends and opportunities and enhance business agility and competitiveness.
Benefits of Adopting Digital Transformation
1. Enhance your competitive advantage
Digital transformation optimizes your organization’s internal processes and equips your business with the capabilities to stay ahead of the curve, differentiate yourself in the marketplace, and ultimately strengthen your competitive advantage.
Technologies like enterprise customer success software allow you to personalize customer experiences at scale while reducing the efforts required to manage customer interactions. Positive customer experiences often translate into repeat patronage and loyalty — increasing your business’s market share.
AI and automation also free up the time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus human and capital resources on other innovative practices to deliver more value to your customers.
2. Increase your business agility and innovation
Digital transformation empowers businesses to evolve and meet new market demands quickly. With cloud computing, microservices, and APIs, enterprise organizations can scale or modify their IT infrastructure in response to growth or changes in the market.
In addition, digital transformation thrives on flexible systems that support rapid prototyping, collaboration, and deployment of new solutions, making experimenting and bringing new ideas to market more accessible.
Challenges of Enterprise Digital Transformation
Here are the common setbacks that slow down the implementation of digital transformation technologies.
1. Cultural resistance
In some cases, employees are not eager to acquire new skills or learn the skills required to move forward in a digital-first environment. So, they might resist new technologies and tools, ultimately slowing down digital transformation. This is normal.
As a leader, it’s your job to help employees prepare for and thrive amid the disruptions of adopting new workflows and technologies. The best way to do this is to embrace change management early.
Here are a few steps to help:
- Communicate why digital transformation is necessary and how it aligns with the business’s long-term goals.
- Implement changes in manageable phases. This prevents overwhelming employees and allows time to adapt between stages.
- Design and deliver training to help employees upskill and familiarize themselves with new systems and processes.
2. Legacy systems
Over two-thirds of IT leaders in an AWS and Tata World survey said they still rely on legacy systems for core business functions, including customer-facing functions.
Legacy systems are built on outdated technology incompatible with digital transformation tools and platforms. Implementing new features, integrating with cloud-based services, or adopting emerging technologies like AI or the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it challenging.
For example, a traditional contact who wants to adopt digital transformation must migrate from PBX phone systems to VoIP phones for unified cloud communication, which can be expensive and time-consuming.
To overcome the challenges of legacy systems during digital transformation, organizations must carry out a risk and dependency analysis, identifying which systems are critical to their operations and which are redundant. They should then plan a phased migration or replacement, starting with non-critical systems.
Where complete replacement is expensive or not feasible, you can prioritize integrating legacy systems with modern platforms to enable better data flow and functionality. APIs and middleware can act as bridges between old and new systems.
You can also opt for a hybrid solution where legacy systems continue to function alongside new digital solutions. This allows for gradual transformation, enabling teams to learn and adapt to the new systems while maintaining business continuity.
3. Regulatory compliance
Digital transformation currently outpaces regulations. Take artificial intelligence, for example. While organizations already use AI tools to boost operational efficiency, many countries, including the U.S., don’t have comprehensive AI adoption or usage regulations.
This creates a gray area where businesses, especially those in highly regulated industries like health care, hesitate to fully adopt digital tools due to unclear compliance issues and considerations around safety, privacy, and ethics — thereby slowing down digital transformation.
Organizations must remain flexible and informed about regulatory changes to overcome these challenges. As regulations catch up to technological advancements, businesses must adjust their practices to stay compliant without stifling innovation.
Steps for Implementing Enterprise Digital Transformation
Digital transformation isn’t a one-and-done project. As long as a business exists, it must adapt and evolve workflows and processes to meet technological advancements, reduce costs, and deliver outstanding customer experiences.
1. Set a clear strategy
Set a clear digital transformation strategy to guide long-term implementation. Digital transformation continues as long as the business is in operation. However, leaders who pioneer implementation might move on from the organization at some point.
When this happens, the risk of losing direction becomes significant. Without a well-defined road map, digital transformation efforts halt, deviate, or become inefficient as new leadership takes over.
A successful digital transformation strategy aligns with the overall business strategy and goals. For example, say your organization is focused on improving customer experience.
In that case, you can implement digital transformation initiatives that leverage AI chatbots and automation to streamline customer communication.
2. Invest in critical digital technologies
Tools and technologies are the vehicle for digital transformation. They help you streamline processes, speed up execution, and reduce costs — without which digital transformation is impossible.
Assess your current systems and setup against your digital strategy to see which tools and technologies can be modified and which need to be replaced entirely.
For example, if your strategy requires standardizing communication across all your channels, you must upgrade to unified customer experience solutions, such as omnichannel contact center software.
Beyond that, ensure these tools integrate seamlessly with your current workflow and business processes to limit disruptions. Partner with experienced digital technology providers to streamline the adoption of new tools, reduce the learning curve, and ensure a more efficient, reliable setup.
3. Prioritize cybersecurity
Digital transformation relies on online systems, artificial intelligence, and cloud storage. Unfortunately, this reliance increases your vulnerability to cyberattacks and information breaches. Much of your data is stored in digital tools, posing security risks if not properly managed.
In addition, digital transformation systems are so tightly connected that a cyberattack of one puts your entire ecosystem at risk. For example, a data breach in an omnichannel contact center affects all your communication channels and even third-party systems like your CRM software and customer data platforms.
Incorporate cybersecurity from the initial stages of your digital transformation process rather than treating it as an afterthought. Before adopting new technologies, assess their potential security risks and devise contingency plans to deal with them.
Most importantly, adopt a zero-trust security model. Don’t trust any user, device, or application by default, even if it is inside your infrastructure. Instead, continuously verify identities, access rights, and privileges to ensure only authorized parties can access sensitive data sources.
4. Measure and iterate
Digital transformation isn’t a one-and-done process. You need to continuously measure your efforts to see what’s working and what requires improvement. You’ll use these insights to iterate your digital initiatives to keep up with technological advancements.
You must first set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and improve digital transformation. You’ll use these to assess your initiatives and determine their success. For example, if your goal is to improve customer experience, you can set a KPI to achieve a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) that’s 20% above the industry average.
You’ll use the performance data captured in your digital tool and other feedback methods like surveys to track relevant metrics, which will show whether you’ve met your KPI. To track CSAT, for example, you can administer a customer satisfaction survey at the end of each interaction to gather real-time feedback.
Tackle Digital Transformation With Nextiva
Collaborating with an innovative customer experience partner like Nextiva can help you overcome common digital transformation challenges and thrive in the age of AI.
With AI-powered chatbots, customer journeys, customized agent workflows, and automation, Nextiva’s unified CXM platform empowers forward-thinking brands to deliver exceptional digital experiences now and in the future.
Learn more about Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center for enterprise businesses. 👇
