Systematics has experienced major recent developments via advances in biodiversity informatics and genomics. Digitization efforts and developments in biodiversity informatics are allowing the systematics community to explore novel ways to discover new species, access new sets of characters for taxonomy via machine learning, and characterize the ecological variation of taxa under study. Large-scale genomic information has been increasingly used to construct the Tree of Life, improve taxonomic classification and species delimitations, disentangle complex (often network-like) evolutionary histories across deep and shallow levels, and has led to the discovery of new species. In this new era of discovery and big data, systematics has an incredible capacity to unlock the potential of collections to advance the field to meet the biodiversity challenges in the Anthropocene. With millions of species yet to be discovered, despite a pervasive public misconception that biodiversity discovery has been largely completed, increased efforts to chart the biosphere should be a central priority of 21st century biodiversity science. New collections need to be targeted not only from poorly sampled regions, but also globally across all ecosystems in order to document the climatic and biodiversity changes that are currently unfolding. The systematics community must value collections and herbaria (including small local herbaria), and work together strategically to support collections-based systematics. The systematics community needs to effectively link electronic resources and develop pipelines that will make the production of monographs, revisions, floras, checklists, and other taxonomic treatments more dynamic and feasible, while emphasizing the importance of making our work better understood and appreciated by society at large. The recent rapid advances in phylogenetics and phylogenomics call for major biodiversity reassessments including classification. Yet our community faces a stark decline in the number of taxonomists, just when they are needed the most. Moving forward, the community especially needs to further develop collections-based systematics as a highly relevant field in today’s biodiversity science and society, and build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce of systematic biologists with integrative skills to thrive in the job market in this new age of discovery and big data.