Digital Asset Management in 2023: What's in store for the industry?

5th January 2023

It's that time of year again, where we reflect on the previous 12 months and think ahead to what the New Year might bring.

Here at ResourceSpace, 2022 was an exciting year. We launched v10 of the platform, qualified for G-Cloud 13 and onboarded some exciting new customers. We also achieved B-Corp Certification - something we've been working towards for a long time.

But what about the industry as a whole? Will it continue to grow strongly? Will the machines have taken over by this time next year? We consider what 2023 will have in store for Digital Asset Management.

The growing role of AI and machine learning

Last year saw notable breakthroughs in artificial intelligence technology - not just in terms of capability, but also in terms of adoption.

The development of GPT-3-powered copywriting tools and image generation software like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were game changers for AI, showing just how close these tools are to being genuinely useful for content creation.

GPT4 - expected to be launched next year - is already being billed as 100X more powerful than GPT-3, while the launch of ChatGPT in November got the tech industry very excited about what could be achieved in 2023.

Naturally, there's going to be a crossover between AI tech and DAM in 2023.

ResourceSpace already uses machine learning for automated metadata tagging, with the ability to recognise faces, objects and places, but expect to see it play an increasingly large part this year.

We're also launching an exciting new artificial intelligence R&D project in early 2023, exploring a number of developments, including integrations with OpenAI's keyword functionality and DALL-E. If you're an existing ResourceSpace customer and want to be involved, be sure to get in touch.

Continued market consolidation

The DAM market has been growing quickly for a number of years as more and more organisations recognise the benefit of the software.

However, 2022 may have been the year where this growth started to slow down. This slowdown shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise. After all, there's a finite number of organisations to invest in Digital Asset Management, and vendor loyalty is common in this market.

At the same time, there's been an increase in vendor acquisitions in the last 12 months. For example, PhotoShelter acquired Third Light and FotoWare purchased Picturepark.

Digital Asset Management News editor Ralph Windsor wrote a fascinating and in-depth piece on this in August, describing deals like these as 'essentially a competitor deletion exercise.'

With the pool of organisations who have never invested in a DAM shrinking, acquiring competitors (and therefore their customers) is the only way for some vendors to grow at the pace they need to in order to satisfy investors.

We'd expect to see these acquisitions to continue in 2023 although, importantly, ResourceSpace can never be acquired.

DAM will be at the heart of your tech stack

Digital Asset Management software isn't just part of your marketing tech stack - it should be at the heart of it. Increasingly, your content will be connected across every channel and touch point, with DAM the central hub for controlling it.

Not only will sharing and user access to digital assets be controlled by the DAM, but the system will also be integrated with all of your most commonly used apps.

ResourceSpace already integrates with a number of the most popular systems, including Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as WordPress - the world's most popular content management system.

ResourceSpace can also be added to your organisation's existing Single Sign-On solution.

What about ResourceSpace?

We were delighted to release v10.0 of ResourceSpace back in September, and we've got another exciting year of updates and improvements planned for 2023.

You can follow our detailed development roadmap here, and so far we're planning to officially launch v10.1 in February 2023, and v10.2 in May 2023.

Version 10.1 is set to include:

• Multiple resource type metadata fields
• Uppy Companion Server Side Implementation
• Search changes for large fields / indexing
• Update to the Google Analytics plugin to use Google Analytics 4
• API Webhooks plugin

Version 10.2 is set to include:

• Enhanced error logging
• Validation of email addresses when external users request resources
• Ability to deprecate field options
• Ability to set preferred asc/desc sort order in user preferences

We're excited about what 2023 will hold for our platform and the industry as a whole, but if you'd like to find out more about what ResourceSpace offers right now, you can launch your free DAM instance within minutes by clicking below. There aren't any user or features limits, allowing you to fully assess whether or not ResourceSpace is right for your organisation.

Alternatively, if you'd prefer to be shown what ResourceSpace can do, book your free 30-minute demo here.