COVID-19 - Impact on the business/tech industry

COVID-19 times are hard for everyone, businesses are coming up with new ways to do business and reaching customers. The digital channel traffic has grown several folds over last few weeks. The new normal for enterprises is 10x thinking, solving problems at much larger scale and being adaptable to change.

The Mandalorian tagline in this context may look like“ Going digital all the way is the only way”. 

Here is my list of top 5 tech trends which will pick up momentum in enterprises -

Tech Trend 1:

Virtual agents - Only way the customers can reach businesses today is virtually. There is a real need to invest in virtual agents (since they can scale as need arises) who can help the customer. Google and Amazon virtual assistants or the likes of it will gain more popularity in the coming times. Customer care centers will change drastically, will become more data and AI driven space.

Tech Trend 2:

More workloads on Cloud - There will be customer demand for providing services at a speed and much larger scale and organizations will find it hard to do this with the existing on-premise data centers. This will lead to more customers moving to cloud and acceleration in the cloud adoption for existing customers. 

Tech Trend 3:

Document Signing and AI - Businesses will look to digitize documents, e-signing for physical documents such tax documents, loan documents etc. may become mainstream. There will be a lot of improvement in the document management and AI across the board. This may also lead to compliance and audit changes in future, more OCR based than actual doc based. 

Tech Trend 4:

Collaboration - Team and customer collaboration will remain as a key focus area. Adoption of tools such as google sheets, slides and docs or other tools alike will rise due to the fact that multiple users can work on the same doc in real-time enabling people to work together.

User Base for video conferencing tools such as Google Hangout or Zoom other businesses will grow. My 7 year old daughter has classes via Google hangout now. I recently got an email that she will have her piano classes online and my friends are joining hangout for yoga classes. 

Tech Trend 5: 

Data - Last but not least, there will be more data. Better and faster ways to ingest and analyze the data is going to be in demand. In stream analytics, pattern matching, predictive analytics will become important for businesses.

I used to question big table for supporting petabyte worth of data in a single query, mainly due to the fact that most customer did not have that use-case but I think it will become a norm sooner rather than later.