Looking ahead to 2025, Frédéric BON, Chairman of the Clever Age Group, shares his thoughts on the past year and the outlook for the future.
Entering a new year is an opportunity to take a step back from the past year. 2024 was undoubtedly a year of brutal return to earth for our sector. The excesses and sense of superiority among many market players, often disregarding other economic stakeholders (our customers, investors, public authorities, etc.), came at a cost in 2024:
- A wake-up call on the SaaS model, which, despite its advantages, can create painful dependency, especially when vendors increase prices far beyond the value provided.
- A revelation that the freelance ecosystem is often more focused on extending assignments than delivering finished products.
- The realization that white-belt agility (or “open bar”) shifts project risks entirely onto the customer.
- A diktat on full-remote work, when the real challenge is to break down silos and foster cross-functionality… instead, physical silos are imposed (everyone at home, isolated, with cameras off).
- Forgetting that transformations cannot be carried out by simply chaining projects together without relying on solid backbones (product/customer data chain, mastered enterprise architecture, identified inter-domain dependencies, etc.).
In short, beyond the macroeconomic context, this could no longer continue.. We have moved from a shortage of resources to a balance between supply and demand, where measuring the added value we provide becomes the main criterion.
True to our roots (we were born in 2001… that’s something), we, the Clever Age group, have come through this period by rationalising our choices to moderate and take a step back, and reinforcing our core principles: Independence, Conviction, and Sustainability.
We have continued to develop our organisation and invest for the future (strengthening our internal processes, reinforcing our certifications to meet new requirements in terms of security, data governance, quality, CSR commitment, etc.). We have also been working on extending our offering both in terms of services and geography, in particular with the arrival of our colleagues from Alfa Safety (a specialist in DevOps and facilities management) into the group in September.
What about 2025? There’s no denying that the year begins amid uncertainty, but we are ready! The market conditions will allow us to pursue our strategy of expanding our offering both organically and through acquisitions. And, as since our creation, we will be redoubling our collective efforts to demonstrate Clever Age’s ability to deliver high value-added assignments and projects for the benefit of its customers. The demand in our sector is limitless, it is simply a matter of adapting to the new market pace. The more we strengthen the human links and the automatisms within the teams today, the better we will meet the acceleration and innovation demands that arise after any slowdown.
At a time when artificial intelligence too often makes our minds complacent, let’s put relational intelligence at the heart of our priorities.
I wish you all a very happy New Year!
Frédéric BON
