From Salesforce drama to the year of generative AI

Apologies to the Grateful Dead, but what a long, strange year it’s been in 2023 enterprise tech news. It began with a ton of Salesforce drama and eventually got taken over by generative AI and ChatGPT, which seemed to come out of nowhere to completely dominate the news cycle this year.

But even though AI clearly influenced much of the news, and even my own coverage, there was still a ton of other enterprise stories that made the news this year.

The rise of generative AI in the enterprise

It would be impossible to discuss this year’s news cycle without talking about the impact of generative AI. When OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of last year, it would have been impossible to understand the impact it would have on enterprise software in the coming months. Yet it has the potential to be truly transformative, changing the way we interact with software, and perhaps represents the biggest change to UX (user experience) design since point-and-click.