Infinite Possibilities for who dare to dream

French famous astrologer Michel de Nostredame or Nostradamus published his prophecies and predictions of the future in his 1555 magnum opus Les Propheties. He is credited with many famous events like death of King Henry – II to Great Fire of London to rise of Adolf Hitler. Now when world is struggling to cope with first ever pandemic called Coronavirus touching every country of the world, impacting survival of humans; huge economic loss to the tune of trillion $ across verticals and boundaries, questions ponders if Coronavirus would have predicted scale and impact then we would have in a different world today instead 2.01 Million impacted patients; 131K fatal case (as on 15th April 2020 data).

Markets have been in turmoil for much of the year since 2020 kick started. This would be first ever government induced recessions to safe guard public health beyond anything. Concerns on the global economy is heading for another major recession impacting huge blow across organizations, countries, people. In history never it happened when recession impacted so many countries, people, organizations at same time and everyone is helpless as how long and when it will come back to normalcy. Historically if we look back in previous recession; post 9/11 it took almost consumers about six weeks to start spending again; and about six months post the subprime crisis in 2008. History will tell when all is going to be normal.

Recessions as per oxford dictionary — a difficult time for the economy of a country/set of countries, when there is less trade and industrial activity than usual and more people are unemployed. Point in case here recession 2020 attributed to Coronavirus as potential consecutive quarters or more of forecasted negative economic growth. Most organizations will suffer during a recession, primarily because demand (and revenue) falls and uncertainty about the future increases. Based on my understanding historically from prior recession of 2001 (dot-com-burst) or 2008 (subprime crisis); there will be 3 categories of organizations

1)   Unprepared Organization – Organization who are not sure how to address and evolve from an economy recession. Depending on leadership they might just survive or become history

2)   Sparse Organization – Semi prepared organization, probably have experienced one prior economy recession. They can be categorized as half prepared and will survive though it might take little longer

3)   Resilient Organization – Resilient Organization strive to build planned, adaptive resilience capabilities and does something better than predict the future. They continue in building more flexibility into their investment-planning and operations in addition to pursuing continued earnings expansion

At this unprecedented event, many organizations will try to emulate as resilient organization with disruption and a new normal for economic change and business practices resulting in creating avenues which will help them sail through these pandemic situations. With a home-based work population, the regular, 9 to 5 business days are likely to shift to more flexible working days, and a more significant segment of the workforce is expected to become "night people" and have off-hours and rest during the daytime while others are working — and its indefinite period of upended life — could speed adoption of such unfamiliar ways of doing business. Focus for industry as a whole on aspects like:

• Improving efficiency
• Reduce operational costs
• Advocating a cloud-first approach & aggressively migrating to cloud services
• Investment on collaboration tools and technologies
• Think “global”, act “local” will drive more nearshore manufacturing, software development, supply chain etc.
• Agility in out of box thinking to address temporary requirement spike (e.g. Automobile industry manufacturing ventilator to Retailers like GAP producing masks for the endemic to Indian railways converting coaches to isolation wards/bed which is movable and can be deployed in any city/state using its vast network) 

Summarizing my views as where industry can look forward in exploring opportunity

(A)  Automobile

a.    Use same facility to manufacture immediate healthcare need like ventilator, medical equipment etc. More collaboration with healthcare industry for economy of scale

b.    Digital car sale might increase than local automobile dealer sale, demand might go up, as people will avoid air travel in lieu of local vacation

(B)  Banking & Finances

a.    AI / ML specific development / tools or train model which worked best during the 2008 financial crisis, and how they could be adjusted for future crises including Corona pandemic.

b.    Greater investment in platforms supporting financial inclusion. Fintech will help with better digital banking solutions to the marketplace. 

c.     Help distribute unprecedented stimulus programmes across globe with govt. of each country. This will also help them get more customer into their system to leverage / push other services

d.    Digital payment would be rising significantly with the likes of PayPal / Paytm / Applepay / WeChat

(C)  CPG

a.    Using POS demand history and revised future forecasts to predict supply replenishment. Predict weekly and daily demand using sales orders and shipments in combination with POS data.

b.    Shift to online purchasing of CPG products with click and collect(ramp-up online purchasing and order fulfilment capacity).

c.     Simplifying range to limit production to the best-selling SKUs and pack sizes, so that lines can run uninterrupted and have a better chance of keeping up with demand.

d.    Hyper-localized production may lead to the kind of fragmentation (e.g. same product may be developed in many countries at same time)

e.    Direct to consumer (D2C) brand or CPG companies will prosper which bypass standard distribution channels to focus on an integrated path from production to consumer

f.     In-store experience also will be converted to digital (mix of chat, webinar, twitter etc.)

g.    Partner with food delivery apps to deliver daily usages items to customer

(D)  Education

a.    Learning anywhere, anytime, anyday would be the buzz word

b.    Traditional in-person classroom learning will be complemented with new learning modalities - from live broadcasts to ‘educational influencers’ to virtual reality experiences (Course curriculum will evolve where 60 % online and may be 40% physical presence in classroom)

c.     Multiple degree can be acquired at same time

d.    Course fees will come down and will be more affordable

e.    Apps like Padlets, Flipgrid, Byju will be created more for use (more opportunities for Infosys Lex / Wingspan to build content and sell to customer or even make it available in Amazon marketplace / Apple Apps / Google Playstore)

f.     Gamification of online courses (e.g. a finance course, students might compete in a virtual finance planning competition; or in a Psychology course, students might role-play as they engage in mock negotiations involving a hostage situation.)

(E)  Food Service & Restaurant

a.    Delivery-and-pick-up-only mode options will see spike. Fine dining and restaurant visit will be low for next 3-4 months

(F)  Hi-Technology

a.    Virtual Experience with Virtual Companion (beyond Siri, Cortana, Alexa) - will start to seek out virtual personalities that have the power to entertain, educate, befriend, and heal. 

b.    Adoption of health products, including wearable technology such as fitness trackers and smart watches will show spike in demand

(G) Healthcare

a.    Digital Health capability and delivery at individual house than hospitals

b.    AI-powered alerting systems or virtual assistants, as patients take increasing ownership of their care.

c.     Remote Diagnostics facilities and quicker result sharing

d.    Agility to introduce new drugs and sample testing

e.    Symptom checkers Apps which is integrated with wearables or smart watch or smartphone can boost productivity as practitioners spend less time collecting data and forming an early view of patients, and they can help reduce the risk of misdiagnoses.

(H) Insurance

a.    Insurers will try to grapple with an increased volume of claims and customer as businesses and consumers find that many basic policies do not cover the impacts of a global pandemic

b.    Spike in policies specially addressing global pandemics and climate change related risk

c.     Revamp existing insurance to clearly articulate circumstances a policy will actually pay out

d.    Incorporating virtual care into their benefits program

e.    Trained conversational AI bots, capable of handling customer queries beyond basic queries

(I)    Lifesciences

a.    Fund for research and vaccines related to Corona related pandemic will increase – both from Govt and corporate philanthropists

b.    Costly, inefficient, market-based system for developing, researching and manufacturing medicines and vaccines will get a new approach

(J)   Logistics

a.    Autonomous trucking and delivery (e.g. fleet maintenance)

b.    Supporting supply chain across segment

c.     Surge in online purchases will lead to an increase in last mile deliveries and road freight volumes

d.    Surge in Load to Truck ratios will see increased pressure on access to capacity availability – Capacity optimization and carrier loyalty programs

e.    Augmented Intelligence is also expected to spike in use which can combine inputs from human planners (experience, responsibility, customer service, flexibility, common sense, etc.) together with AI technology which is left doing the repetitive and tedious work.

f.     Artificial intelligence will further accelerate supply chains by using data to improve carrier selection, identify new sources of products, classify products

g.    Ability to dynamically price lanes based on impacted markets and associated capacity pressures - more investments in AI/ML in traditional freight segments such as road freight brokerage and ocean freight.

h.    Surge in demand to expedited deliveries via air to restart supply chains as soon as factories reopen.

(K)  Manufacturing

a.    Resurgence in local manufacturing by trade wars and a need to diversify supply chains

b.    On demand cross manufacturing

c.     Manufacturers should focus production on core items and consider adding seasonal staff to support incremental production needs.

(L)   Retail

a.    Next-gen e-commerce and unmanned retail will be mainstream (e.g. Amazon Go)

b.    Drop-off and pickup areas will become increasingly important in new retail space design as well as retrofits, where possible.

c.     Collaboration with third-party platform such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat in 2 spaces – first is a pure-play C-store collect/ delivery space and the other is fresh food/ coffee delivery space.

d.    Brick & Mortar stores mostly will support online delivery for quick turnaround or support user experience

e.    Local sourcing will be the forte, to overcome the risk of a cross-regional transportation

(M) Real estate

a.    Due to probable change to work culture there will be abysmal low demand for new office space investment

b.    Agile workspace rent (pay-as-you-use) with upper cap any day would get spike

c.     Low demand for new housing property

(N) Telecom

a.    Work from home is new norm. So related infrastructure 5G, high bandwidth for individual consumption for wireless and broadband infrastructure needs to be modernized – reliable / predictable

b.    Collaboration tools will be mainstream

c.     Remote desktop technologies will be essential until native born-in-the-cloud applications can run core business functions

d.    Inexpensive, solid-state, zero-configuration thin client terminal that uses bandwidth-conserving, encrypted session protocols will be of high demand

e.    Network Optimization with AI as algorithm detect and predict network anomalies

f.     Preventive maintenance with network automation and intelligence will enable better root cause analysis and prediction of issues

(O) Travel, Tourism & Hospitality

a.    Local travel or closer to home vacation will see spike than global travel

b.    Virtual Experience driven touring

c.     Dynamic user experience personalization using customer behaviour, individual data, previous purchases and search destinations and general historical data

d.    Personalized Chat Bot to help a customer as their companions / advisers solving actual queries / problems e.g. baggage policy, boarding gate, shortest way

Conclusion

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to go down as one of the most significant events of the last 100 years. It’s already impacted the world in unprecedented ways, and that impact is likely to continue to grow. Organization which will traverse this pain and evolve will be the leader as this dust settles. There is going to be a mandate to leverage the collaboration between humans and machines to fight an invisible enemy that threatens our way of life and our economy like none other. Together, we can detect abnormalities faster, identify immediate shifts in demand patterns, and make decisions in real time.