Great BIG move to 'Tech Centeredness'

There seems to be a massive but not consciously acknowledged change happening globally across businesses sectors. The covid lockdown and extended work from home has further turbocharged this change.

What is this change ?

Core of every large business sector is moving to its Tech platform and power is shifting to players with the latest and greatest tech capabilities.

Lets examine this change and how it is manifesting for 2 some prominent sectors:

1. Food: Not too long ago, food industry was dominated by individual restaurants and then came the chains (Mc Donalds, Dominos etc) but now the power is shifting to aggregators of restaurants who offered best tech in terms of a nice and easy app to order food, merchant driven offers and efficient delivery services...Behind all of this is FoodTech platform. These aggregators (Zomato, Swiggy, DoorDash etc) now have significant market power and are able to extract impressive incentives from once powerful restaurants.
2. Education: Here too, the Edtech revolution is sweeping the world where education apps like Byjus, Upgrad, Coursera and others are taking over from traditional colleges and offering rich content at the click of a button and are neutralizing the power of certifications through smart partnerships which feels like an intermediate step before they take over even the certification space.

Similar trends can be seen in Digital payments, Travel, Insurance and other sectors.

So fast forwarding into future, there seems to be massive change where the power will shift towards tech platforms in each sector and among these platforms the successful ones would be able to:

1. Build a platform and not a point service - Critical to get sellers, providers and developers on the platform and thus building a 'network' effect.
2. Use the best tech to bring optimizations in personalization, cost optimization and build loyalty through reward optimization and service delivery.
3. Smart partnerships to fill critical gaps (eg: EdTech partnering with universities for credibility and certifications).
4. Scale - This model only succeeds if a certain threshold is achieved to fund the high tech and user acquisition costs.
5. Focus on Unit economics - Focus on being positive on unit sales, early on is critical to avoid flying blind and burning out precious investor money much before reaching the desired scale.

There are huge implications for existing traditional businesses across sectors in all this change. They need to embrace this change through improving their own tech capabilities and build mutually beneficial partnerships with multiple platforms and go deep into their core offerings to thrive in the new tech oriented world.