Post Corona Trends and Opportunities in Technology
Yoram Yaacovi
June 2020
Target Audience
Government and Private Sector decision makers who are looking for guidance and directions in the post-Corona era.
Objectives
Assess the technology opportunities post-Corona
Suggest how to leverage these opportunities
Discuss potential risks in a potentially new world order
Author’s note: while this document focuses on technology, it does not pretend to or claim to suggest that other industry sectors are not important. On the contrary: during the outbreak we saw the importance of health-related jobs and the dependency on local agriculture and local products for our independence and well-being.
Executive Summary
The Corona outbreak is expected to have a substantial impact on a variety of aspects of our personal and business lives, long after the outbreak will be controlled and over. This paper is an attempt to outline the areas where technology will play an ever-growing role in our daily lives, post the outbreak, and accelerated by our experience during the last few weeks. There will be other aspects of our daily life that will change because of the outbreak, but the focus of this paper is the more frequent and broader use of technology that will follow the outbreak.
In general, we will do more tasks and events remotely and online:
We will work more frequently from home or from “local community hubs”, which will allow us more freedom in choosing our employer or methods of employment and will allow employers to leverage work globally (sharing economy). It will be more common and more acceptable to employees and employers to meet online for business and personal occasions.
We will see more business transactions that happen through online communication alone, without the need to travel to market, sell and to close deals.
We will use a variety of online services which was either lightly used or unavailable before such as online groceries, telemedicine, and government services.
Children and adults will switch to online learning in large numbers.
Business will rely more on deliveries than on distributors or shops to sell their products.
We will be more exposed to cyber threats and will need to change our behaviors in this respect.
Our privacy will be compromised at least to some degree, we will have to either get used to that “relaxed” privacy, or have tools that will allow us to retain control of it.
In order to be positioned well for the post-Corona era, governments will have to initiate and drive a set of programs that will require policies, regulations, funding, investments (including in communications and physical infrastructure), procurement technology, deployment in Government offices, and maybe most-importantly brace for a behavioral change, and embrace it.
Trends
The way this paper works is by outlining the trends impacted by the Corona outbreak, and trying to enumerate the technology-related products, services and policies that might emerge or accelerate as a result.
The Trends
1. Digital Transformation
2. Sharing Economy
3. Working from Home or Remote
4. Online Services
5. Delivery and Logistics Services
6. Healthcare (Telemedicine and Big Data)
7. Remote and Online Education
8. Contact-less Payments
9. Cybersecurity and Privacy
1. Digital Transformation
First, we must realize that the world that we knew just 5–10 years ago is changing immensely, even before the Corona outbreak. We are in the outset of a mega shift that we call Digital Transformation. You can read about digital transformation in Wikipedia, but it goes way beyond just everyone moving to the cloud, organizations going digital, or workers using Word, Excel, etc. (hint: they’ve been doing that in the last 15–20 years). What digital transformation really means is that every company on the planet is going to be — at least to some degree — a tech company and create technology. Examples: Textile and fashion companies will create wearable computing, agriculture and food companies will a variety of sensors, IoT devices and software. Banks are already creating hardware and software, and so do the car companies. This will immediately change Work as we know it. You can read more in my post about the Future of Work. Companies and governments all over the world are required to change how they look at future jobs, the job market, and how to train their employees for changing work realities. This paper from McKinsey demonstrates what companies should do in order to make it through the change, even before Corona stopped by for a visit. Many companies make the mistake of focusing too much on just the costs and ignore the potential of new technologies to generate new revenues. Companies are asked to:
· Scout: Quantify their digital aspirations and assess future talent gaps and organizational readiness
· Shape: Design future roles , create a talent accelerator and set up infrastructure for upskilling and reskilling
· Shift: Scale up work changes, develop new skills, and scale up employee transitions
Corona-related changes are likely to accelerate these trends.
Recommendations: In general, we need to prepare our work force for a future that is more technological and spend time on analyzing trends and future directions, and assess future occupations. Examples of actions we can take to capture this advantage and leverage it farther, mainly in a post-Corona world:
a) A state-level project to assess future trends and their relevance to the nation and its capabilities. A startup called Alpha10x is trying to help companies, VCs and governments with that prediction (for full disclosure, I invested in this startup).
b) Initiatives and funding for universities, colleges, and institutes to add such occupations to their curriculum. For example, if in the past (and present) we taught CNC machine operators, in the future we might want to train drone operators. If in the past we trained ultrasound technicians, in the future we might want to train bio-hackers. If in the past and present we train web designers, in the future we want teach people to design virtual spaces.
2. Sharing Economy
Beyond changing how companies (and governments) work and how they are managed, I expect that we will see a massive acceleration to what is called Sharing Economy, sometimes called the Uber Economy. In a nutshell, this means that more and more companies will work more with freelancers and contractors and less with employees. More with part-timers, and less with full-timers. More with people from all over the world, and less with people that are in a driving/bus-ride distance from the office. Currently the sharing economy model is mostly limited to delivery services (of people or goods) and to development or creative services. In the future it will span many businesses and many business functions, mainly as businesses transform to being mostly digital. With this already being an uprising trend in the last few years, the realization of effective online work models, the practices that were created, tried and improved during the outbreak, and even the reduced health risks of working remotely, will drive this trend much faster. The impact of such a trend is something that we must look into and understand its risks, challenges and opportunities. For example, as employees’ physical presence dimension is reduced, and as corporations will fill the demand and execute business functions remotely and by engaging remote contract workers, it will require the development of a new set of technological, regulatory and managerial tools.
Recommendations: If we start with risks, if your workers can work from anywhere, it can present risks to countries where cost of labor is high, and they need to figure out how we mitigate it. If we look at opportunities, we can take the strengths of the country, and deploy these strengths everywhere. The action plan here is simple to explain, but not as simple to execute:
a) Map the strengths of the country across multiple domains (examples: security, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship/courage to take action)
b) Understand where and how we can deploy these strengths globally.
3. Working from Home or Remote
It is probably obvious to everyone that one of the areas where we will see a tectonic shift post-Corona is Work from Remote (WFR) or Work from Home (WFH). A trend that started to slowly grow in the last few years — with the advent of the relevant tech tools — is going to take an exponential (the most popular word these days) step post-Corona. The reasons for that are endless:
(1) Corona helped us understand that it is possible to work remotely and lifted the psychological barrier
(2) It is more productive (This is based on personal experience and on conversations with the CEOs of 10 tech companies. I do not yet have empirical/scalable evidence showing that)
(3) It reduces costs for companies for travel, food, etc.
(4) It is environment friendly, another trend that will peak as well post-Corona
What is next are some of the areas that can benefit from the WFH/WFR trend. This is by no means a complete list, but only a start. I plan to expand on this in future writeups.
Companies with Remote Employees
First off, a much faster WFR/WFH growth curve can fundamentally change how companies (and governments) will work. This starts with the basics of companies being more tolerable about employees working from home or remote locations, or even attending meetings online when they are physically in the office. This can lead over time to lower company expenses, better employee productivity also due to reduced commute times, and likely higher employee satisfaction.
But it can go farther, to companies where most of the work is online, and employees only meet physically once a week or once a month. And even to companies that are completely virtually located. See this article from the Economist. And it will not stop with the company employees, and will impact how the company scouts for employees, interviews them, and makes hiring decisions.
The trend will also funnel substantial investments into tech companies that will provide disruptive solutions for working in a mostly-online work environment such as 3D holographic meetings, constantly virtual rooms, and more
Outside the scope of this document are a plethora of challenges that such a WFR/WFH model will create to the fabric of our life, culture, society, health and more. Or even to the way meetings are being held, the attention of people during the meeting, confidentiality of the material discussed and more.
Doing Business Online
WFR and WFH will not stop at internal company meetings and interactions. Lacking the ability to travel to meet customers and to support customers on-site, companies are already adjusting to run their business completely online, and those that are not yet doing this, will learn to do it in the near future, or disappear. Even when air travel or cross-country travel will return to normal, there is no expectation that business travel will ever return to its pre-outbreak scale (Bill Gates has suggested travel for work will never be the same after the coronavirus), and we should expect travel limitations for at least a couple of years. Within this timeframe, companies that will not learn to market, create leads, negotiate, sell and support their customers online, will not survive by the time travel will be back to normal. This is true for every product or service, and not just for Software as a Service (SaaS). It is also true for investors. Technologies will emerge to support this new way of doing business.
Online Meetings, Conferences and Rooms
Zoom is emerging as the clear winner in this round of the Corona outbreak, and they are likely to take this leadership forward at least for some time. But Zoom meetings are just part of the solution, and usually companies with such a significant business find it hard to innovate elsewhere, even within the same domain. If WFR/WFH is indeed going to play a much more significant role in our lives, we will need more advanced technologies, better infrastructure, and new user experiences to allow us to hold really virtual meetings (3D holographic meetings,), conferences with many people and the so important mingling/networking enablers, virtual rooms to allow folks to work together all the time and not only for meetings. Another satellite domain will be HR tech, providing technology and tools for human resources teams to scout, interview, retain and manage employee relations.
Recommendations: To prepare for such a shift in the working model, which I believe will happen faster post-Corona, we should think about what the requirements for such an environment will be. We also need to encourage companies that develop products in the virtual meetings space and create the necessary infrastructure. Here are some examples:
a) Broader, stable and consistent Internet infrastructure to every home in the country, starting with major area hubs.
b) Remote working hubs (think WeWork-like spaces) in every town, to allow people to work close to home. We can seek some private sector participation here, and I assume we can reel in the municipalities for this.
c) The necessary cybersecurity for WFR/WFH. More on this in the cybersecurity section.
d) The services infrastructure for WFR/WFH, such as food, delivery services, etc.
e) Investments in products, tools and technologies that enable WFR/WFH.
f) Guidelines, subsidies and government incentives to businesses and government offices that will use state of the art remote work tools and will demonstrate a growing use of remote work (just like we provide incentives to business in the periphery)
4. Online Services
We are likely going to see a significant growth in the use of online services. These will not be only the services that flourished during the outbreak, such as Netflix and Gaming services, but also a plethora of many services, some of which we used lightly before and are expected to use much more often now (e.g. online grocery services), and some which we did not use at all before and are guaranteed to take a prominent place in our post-Corona lives (e.g. telemedicine). Some of these services are covered in detail below, while other examples will be briefly mentioned here. Governments will be expected to become much more online-friendly. During the outbreak people learned — after initial hiccups and help — to file for unemployment or for social security online. Post the outbreak, they will demand that service and similar services on a regular basis.
Recommendations: Overall Governments must bolster and speed up its investment in its online services and create policies and programs to promote and encourage commercial online services. If current Government online services offerings that were leisurely deployed over time, they now became overnight mandatory services that are should be industry grade and must cover all government functions.
a) Bolster and fund a faster progress of Governmental online service offerings
b) Faster processes for deployment of online services (e.g. Amazon)
c) Establish A government committee that will seek, identify and drive deployment of key online services that are essential for the country and its people
5. Delivery and Logistics Services
Once we will emerge from the Corona outbreak, we are going to find out that many businesses that relied on stores and distributors to sell their products, had to find way to do it by themselves during the outbreak, if only to survive. Even if a large percentage of them will eventually go back to the store/distributor model, we are likely to see a non-marginal portion of businesses that will continue to market their products directly to consumers, eliminating the middleman. These will require a whole new scale and service level of delivery companies that will be able to not only deliver goods (food, flowers, medicine, etc.) in a reliable fashion, but also do it in an optimized and cost effective way. Mega players such as Amazon are likely to play a major role in this, but countries will have local players as well that will specialize in local logistics and delivery. All these players will need tools many of which do not exist today. These tools will span a spectrum of hardware and software technologies that will include drones, drone management systems, cybersecurity, delivery optimization systems, fully automated storage and fulfilment centers, and more.
Alternatively, we could see technologies that will allow people to create themselves the products they need at their location or in their proximity, eliminating the need for delivery. This need can accelerate the development and use of 3D printers for a variety of materials such as plastic, metal, ceramic and later even food.
Recommendations:
a) Government program for preferred funding support for startups in the Logistics and Delivery space, including drone management systems, delivery optimization software, 3D printers and marketplaces.
6. Healthcare
Healthcare is the area where the Corona outbreak might have had the most fundamental impact, albeit an obvious one. I selected to highlight two healthcare areas where I believe technology will play a major role post the outbreak.
Telemedicine / Remote Healthcare
We have already seen remote healthcare products and services being deployed in developed countries, but if there’s one unquestionable learning from the outbreak is that we will have to deploy such technologies, tools and services on a global scale to allow us to diagnose patients remotely using new devices or existing infrastructure (e.g. TVs), treat them from a distance, and even allow for robotic surgeries. One example that people will connect with post-Corona is the need to be able to operate and centrally manage multiple respirators and ventilators, including the use of artificial intelligence that will replace scarce human staff. Another example could be a set of devices that can diagnose and monitor people remotely and/or without a human touch. Or technologies that can help mental health sessions by analyzing the voice or the face of the patient. We expect to see investment money flowing in these directions.
Recommendations:
a) Government program for preferred funding support for startups in Telemedicine
b) Faster regulation to allow the use of such devices and procedures
c) Incentives for HMOs and doctors that will use such technologies on a regular basis
d) Drive the implementation of 24x7 medical coverage for patients through Telemedicine
Big Data Analytics for Health-related purposes
The different reactions and handling of the Corona outbreak in different countries, or even states and cities around the world, as well as the slow process of developing tests or a vaccine, demonstrated a couple of main challenges. First, our health system and drug development processes are still not leveraging the technology available today, mainly in the area of big data analytics. Second, as human beings, we are not able to make consistent and educated decisions when overwhelmed with unrealistic amounts of data. The Corona outbreak could be an opportunity to leapfrog over political and bureaucratic obstacles that seemed unsurmountable just few months ago, and create the legislation and environments for institutions and organizations to share patient data, using technologies such as blockchain and encryptions that will ensure the authenticity of data and its security. Once data will become available cross-organization with the right legislation (see recommendations below), even current big data analytics and machine learning technologies can make wonder in our ability to not only analyze the data, but also create insights that will help decision makers make better and more educated decisions, or even — God forbid — make decisions themselves that are free of political and ego implications. Once we feed specific medical and healthcare knowledge to these systems (Expert Systems), such algorithms will be able to make better decisions than a human being, mainly — but not only — in time of crisis.
Drug and vaccine development, as well as the development of test kits and procedures, can also get a boost from the outbreak. When we understand the impact of months or even weeks on the health of people, but also on the economy, we should use technology to speed up drug development, its test procedures, and the approval process. The technology aspect here spans the ability to use data analytics to detect drug resemblance, impact on people with similar DNA, crowd sourcing of drug results, and use computing resources to accelerate drug development.
Recommendations: In addition to accelerating the transition of the entire population to digital health records, we need to be able to combine and analyze the data for a variety of health-related purposes such as outbreak prediction, detect areas of specific illness, understand genetic ties and their health impacts, and develop and reduce the time for drug testing.
a) Address and drive legislation of privacy rules around our health information that will allow the use of cross-organization patient data and medical records, while addressing privacy and security concerns
b) Given (a), create legislation that will enable and impose the sharing of medical and health data for analytical purposes
c) Government program for preferred funding support for startups in the area of accelerated drug development
7. Remote and Online Education
The last ten years carried along nothing less than a revolution in online education. While it has not yet taken by storm the K12 education world, it is also omni present in post high school studies, with initiatives such as University of the People and Kahn Academy. Many high school graduates choose to learn online from the best (crowd-voted) courses out there, even if they are enlisted in a university that can eventually grant them the degree they are looking for. This becomes harder when you look at K12, mainly because younger students still require the human touch, but even in this case it is not an even ground. First, some students require it less than others, and second, older (11th and 12th grade) require it even less.
The Corona outbreak eliminated some of the main barriers for online education:
- It is simply not working — gone
- It is a new frontier, disruptive, hard to adapt — not any more
- It takes teachers out of their comfort zone — they already stepped out in the last few months.
- High school students cannot learn online — not true
All the above drives a very simple conclusion: the education world is ready for online education and it deserves (requires) much better online-targeted content, tools, technologies and processes that will allow for easy-to-use, productive and comprehensive remote and online learning. Yes, some students will need and continue to use “physical” learning, but let’s give all the others — the majority in my mind — the content and tools they need, and create the policies and the rules that will allow them to use these tools. In addition, remote and online education can bring to a level ground students that are located remotely from major urban centers, and/or are underprivileged, provided that they will get the right equipment and tools. Hopefully, the Corona outbreak has created the incentive to do that now and despite a multitude of objections. Technology and tools will not be enough. Just taking the same content taught in class and moving it online will miss many of the advantages of teaching online. Specific content will have to be developed for use in online classes, and to reduce content development costs, it can be developed once for multiple schools/classes.
Recommendations: Transitioning the country into a testimonial for online and remote education should be a nothing less but a national mission. Here are some examples of what to do that:
a) Completely transform our universities to be online-based, allowing students to take courses online either here or from global source, and focus the precious and high-IQ academic staff on guiding projects, mentor advanced degrees and do research. This will also reduce the budgetary pressure on the universities.
b) Fund online content development to be shared across multiple schools
c) Require schools to pilot and deploy online-based education
d) Direct government funding to Ed-tech projects and startups that will pilot deployment in the local school systems, mainly since this domain is not and will not be attractive to for-profit investors.
e) Revise education policies, processes and methodologies to not only allow for remote and online education, but drive the change
f) Create funding and program to provide remote and under-privileged students with the tools they need to join the online learning evolution
8. Contactless Payments
While the US is still somewhat behind, payment systems in many countries around the world have already moved to cashless payments, and in some countries to contact-less payments thru contactless credit cards (Europe), and phone-based payments (China). The “new normal” post the outbreak, will present a major shift towards completely contact-less payments, for obvious reasons.
Recommendations: Drive the adoption of contact-less payments throughout the country:
a) Require government offices to create the infrastructure to allow for contact-less payments
b) Create incentives for businesses that will move to contact-less payments
9. Cybersecurity & Privacy
Cybersecurity and privacy are not trends, but are both super important enablers and/or outcomes of the trends mentioned above.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity started to be a big deal even before the Corona outbreak, but just try to imagine what will happen post-Corona, when the world will become multiple times more virtual than it is now, and more of the business is going to move online. When many of the interactions that used to be physical will become virtual and online. When WFH is no longer a bad word. When many businesses and verticals that never thought they will go online will do exactly that. They are already doing it in the last couple of months. The cybersecurity challenges that such a sudden change of behavior will create are unimaginable. If you have spare cash, this is where you want to invest. Everyone and every company will be looking for cybersecurity solutions.
Recommendations:
a) Invest in cybersecurity companies, products and technology
b) Create school, university curriculum and training programs to ready more cybersecurity professionals
Privacy
And then there is the issue of Privacy. People sometimes confuse cybersecurity with privacy, i.e. if you are using services that are not secure, your data can be exposed and leak, and thus violate your privacy. While true, and while privacy is indeed related to cybersecurity in some respects, it is a much broader issue, which will be discussed here only briefly, addressing the post-outbreak aspects of it. Our privacy has been eroding regularly in the last 10–15 years, as technology allowed easier access to our data and our preferences. We keep struggling between the benefits of sharing our data — for example, we get better content viewing recommendations, or benefit from our medical data being available to any doctor or medical institute that needs to treat us — and the concerns of that data being shared, including being abused for purposes that can harm us. We have yet to find the balance that works for us, and I maintain that this balance will forever be dynamic. The Corona outbreak met us at a point in time when this debate is getting heated and had created at least in some countries a privacy violation precedence that could not have been imagined just a couple of months ago. So, it seems that when our health is in doubt, we are ready to forgo some of our privacy principles. Will this new balance remain post the Corona outbreak? Will some of it stick around? Will the privacy balance change in the “new normal”?
We are likely to see the privacy balance change and be more relaxed. It will be hard to bring the balance back to pre-outbreak levels, and maybe we do not have to. Instead, let us focus on creating the laws and policies to allow our data to be shared, under our control, and with a tight supervision and penalties for any abuse by the organizations that have access to our data.
Recommendations:
a) The government and the private sector should be aware and deploy cybersecurity solutions, mainly in areas which were not that obvious until the outbreak, such as online meetings and online education
b) Laws and policies to allow our data to be shared, under our control, and with a tight supervision and penalties for any abuse for the organizations that have access to our data.
Consolidated Recommendations
Government/Municipal
1. Focused and prompt Investment in communication infrastructure:
a. Establish a national committee for next generation fast communication with budget and the power to make decisions and drive deployment
b. Build a national Fast Internet Grid (FIG) similar in nature to the power grid
c. Incentivize and support the private sector in deploying the FIG
2. A national plan for community hubs
a. Design a national plan for cross country remote community hubs
b. Create a national program with secured funding to encourage municipalities and the private sector to create these hubs
3. Focused-Investment, in initiatives and technologies that are expected to prevail post-Corona. This can include co-investment with professional risk takers, which is something we are seeing happening in the UK and France post-Corona:
a. Telemedicine
b. Computational Biology
c. Accelerated drug development
d. AR/VR effective communications
e. Education Technology and remote learning
f. Logistics and Delivery
g. Cybersecurity
4. Transform the government and schools into an early adopter / playing field for post-Corona technologies and methodologies:
a. Completely transform our universities to be online-based, allowing students to take courses online either here or from global source, and focus the precious and high-IQ academic staff on guiding projects, mentor advanced degrees and do research. This will also reduce the budgetary pressure on the universities.
b. Fund online content development to be shared across multiple schools, and require schools to pilot and deploy online-based education
c. Revise education policies, processes and methodologies to not only allow for remote and online education, but drive the change
d. Create funding and program to provide remote and under-privileged students with the tools they need to join the online learning evolution
e. Drive the adoption of contact-less payments throughout the country
5. Create policies, laws and methodologies that will not only encourage a shift to online services but will drive or even demand such a change. Examples:
a. Address and drive legislation of privacy rules around our health information that will allow the use of cross-organization patient data and medical records (while addressing privacy and security concerns) and will enable and impose the sharing of medical and health data for analytical purposes
b. Demand and measure the use of online healthcare and Telemedicine in hospitals and clinics
c. Incentivize and support schools and universities/institutions that will adopt online learning and EdTech and will deploy them broadly
d. Seek, identify and drive deployment of key online services (e.g. Amazon)
6. Ensure the availability of tech talent for the next 20–30 years by:
a. Introduce mandatory computer science, coding and other tech topics at an early school age in all schools
b. Continue to drive under-participating populations to tech by addressing their needs and by creating incentives.
c. Allow for a permanent resident visas for key technology experts that will not only bring their expertise, but might also attract others to work with them.