5 emerging use cases for productivity infrastructure in 2021

Published April 22, 2021

Gleb Polyakov
Contributor

Gleb Polyakov is co-founder and CEO of Nylas, which provides productivity infrastructure solutions for modern software. Gleb studied Physics at Georgia Tech and enjoys chess, motorcycles and space. Previously, he worked in finance and founded an IoT coffee company.

When the world flipped upside down last year, nearly every company in every industry was forced to implement a remote workforce in just a matter of days — they had to scramble to ensure employees had the right tools in place and customers felt little to no impact. While companies initially adopted solutions for employee safety, rapid response and short-term air cover, they are now shifting their focus to long-term, strategic investments that empower growth and streamline operations.

As a result, categories that make up productivity infrastructure — cloud communications services, API platforms, low-code development tools, business process automation and AI software development kits — grew exponentially in 2020. This growth was boosted by an increasing number of companies prioritizing tools that support communication, collaboration, transparency and a seamless end-to-end workflow.

Productivity infrastructure is on the rise and will continue to be front and center as companies evaluate what their future of work entails and how to maintain productivity, rapid software development and innovation with distributed teams.

According to McKinsey & Company, the pandemic accelerated the share of digitally enabled products by seven years, and “the digitization of customer and supply-chain interactions and of internal operations by three to four years.” As demand continues to grow, companies are taking advantage of the benefits productivity infrastructure brings to their organization both internally and externally, especially as many determine the future of their work.

Automate workflows and mitigate risk

Developers rely on platforms throughout the software development process to connect data, process it, increase their go-to-market velocity and stay ahead of the competition with new and existing products. They have enormous amounts of end-user data on hand, and productivity infrastructure can remove barriers to access, integrate and leverage this data to automate the workflow.

Access to rich interaction data combined with pre-trained ML models, automated workflows and configurable front-end components enables developers to drastically shorten development cycles. Through enhanced data protection and compliance, productivity infrastructure safeguards critical data and mitigates risk while reducing time to ROI.

As the post-pandemic workplace begins to take shape, how can productivity infrastructure support enterprises where they are now and where they need to go next?