Digital acceleration during Corona

Digital acceleration during Corona

Despite Corona, and in some cases because of it, the digital revolution continues to push forward, extending further every day into new areas of our business and private lives. Here we illustrate just four areas into which the digital revolution extended in a big way, in 2020.

eCommerce
In recent years, the volume of online sales, particularly mobile has grown, and it’s no secret that the world is increasingly embracing this trend. The Corona crisis has accelerated this move, even inspiring people who haven’t done so before to shop online.
Whereas most large chains have had large, complex websites for years, smaller high street stores tend not to have the necessary resources or infrastructure to create a commanding online presence – they rely on customers physically coming to them. Even though when Corona hit, we, the consumers, wanted to buy from and support smaller shops – our local greengrocer or butcher – in times of social distancing and lockdown, we simply have not been able to access them in person.
To keep their businesses going, many began to offer ‘click and collect’ services, enabling customers to place their order online – through apps like ‘easy’, or a simple Wix site – and collect their ready-packaged order from outside the store. Now that they’ve taken the first step and the initial urgency to find a solution has passed, it is expected that small stores will give deeper consideration to the impact and potential of eCommerce for their businesses, seeking out the most appropriate platform/s to serve their needs.

Voice commands
We’re all familiar with Siri and her good friend Alexa… The world of voice recognition is continually advancing (even in Hebrew in some cases!) and the capabilities of Machine Learning and Natural Language Protocol (NLP) are making it possible to achieve more and more through voice commands. It seems people are hugely in favor of such technology – consider the increased use of voice messages in WhatsApp, for example. It seems we’re more comfortable talking than writing, and of course it keeps our hands free to do other things at the same time.
Existing applications for voice technology are many and varied. A recent study conducted in the US found that 27% of site visits through a search engine came from a voice search. Leading companies are increasingly enabling voice commands in their apps. Starbucks’, for example, lets customers speak their order into their phone – even if it’s for a tall iced sugar-free vanilla latte with soy milk, and a double upside-down macchiato half decaf with a splash of cream in a grande cup! The app then turns the voice instruction into text, asks for verbal confirmation and advises the customer when and where to pick up their order. Alternatively, a text typed into the customer’s phone may be turned into an audio playback, to check of that the system has ‘understood’ correctly.
In the world of IoT too, for example in the automotive industry, the use of voice commands is fundamentally changing the way we operate equipment, place orders, carry out searches, and communicate with people.

IoT in Telemedicine
Medicine is one of the fields that has been most affected by Corona. Patients who need treatment, check-ups and other medical attention are ordinarily seen in person at a clinic, but with the advent of Corona, this is no longer possible – or desirable – in many cases. This is a key example of how Corona has sped up technological advancement – many initiatives for streamlining or automating the remote delivery of healthcare that were in the planning stages before Corona have been propelled forward by urgent necessity, with providers achieving in one year what had been expected to take 10.
The willingness of the medical sector to enter the world of IoT, find solutions to information security challenges, and implement development procedures required by medical regulations, together with the willingness of patients to get on board with such services, has opened the door to manufacturers and integrators to offer their solutions to healthcare entities. Examples include connecting Bluetooth to IoT devices, migrating to the cloud through medical applications, including identity-recognition entry for physicians. The result is a new world of telemedicine where doctors can see patient information via cloud applications and prescribe the relevant treatment, while the patient uses increasingly advanced devices at home to replace tests usually carried out physically by a medical team. This wave of solutions is just beginning to rock the boat of public health.

Remote working
It goes without saying that our work environment has also been greatly influenced by Corona. When faced with lockdowns, organizations had to make provision for employees to work from home – even in occupations where it hadn’t previously been considered possible to work remotely – or cease operations. Employees are having to behave differently, discovering the self-discipline required to work alone, and in a new work environment – often the family living room or dining table, with the pet cat climbing over their computer keyboard. Managers too have had to deal with supporting their team in working productively, onboarding new recruits, and more, all without any face-to-face, in-person contact.
While part of the solution lies in organizational management processes, much of it comes down to technological capabilities. The most basic, of course, are remote access and conference calling (who among us doesn’t spend hours Zooming these days?). But beyond that, every employee connection to the organization – project management, task reporting, contact with HR, etc. – has become more complex.
Thinking of their employees as they would a customer, many organizations have developed organizational portals, often with a mobile-first approach, in which they try to recreate the personal touch of the casual “good morning” in the office hallway, give employees access to information and processes that are relevant to them, such as viewing their salary, submitting vacation day requests etc., and even provide tools for managing project teams and personal tasks.

With all these changes already happening, when the pandemic is finally over and we get back to the outside world, we can expect to find it far more digitized than the world we knew before.