My Thoughts on the Coronavirus: 6. Immediate Opportunities

A Window of Opportunity

We all know that executing any large-scale systemic changes is very challenging, because so many other moving parts are affected. It’s like changing the tire while driving. The car’s inertia will often force us to do just what we’ve always been doing. So we often ended up just keep on driving because our customers and investors demand it. This makes implementing any change improbable.

The Covid19 pandemic is an unprecedented crisis, and the disruption it caused is unparalleled. Figuratively speaking, it has crashed the car and put it to a full stop. Although it has wreaked havoc, at least the car isn’t moving anymore. This makes changing the tire a lot easier, because the inertia has already been disrupted.

This pandemic has opened up a window of opportunity for us to make significant systemic changes. Since the coronavirus has put the entire world on pause, it has ironically made it easier to execute large-scale systemic changes that would’ve been infeasible otherwise.

Accelerated Digital Transformation (DX)

DX has been under the corporate radar for quite some time already. However, it’s a tough journey with frequent pitfalls that takes many years. Although I have developed some strategies and have many experiences helping companies achieve DX success, it’s not without fighting a herculean uphill battle.

The reason is that most enterprises, in an effort to optimize their operational efficiency, have already allocated most of their resources to keep their business running at full speed. This is a natural capitalistic mindset. If you have a few underutilized headcounts or extra money, wouldn’t you do everything you can to leverage these resources to boost your business performance? Obviously YES!

One consequence of an already very efficient business is that there is often not much resource leftover for anything new. Investing in DX means it would have to take resources away from other parts of the business. But DX is a long-term initiative and takes time to realize its ROI. So business leaders can either let their performance take a toll, or they have to do more with fewer resources to maintain the status quo. Neither outcomes are desirable. As a result, companies often invest too little or take too long to get started with DX. Both can lead to an even longer time to ROI, or worse, the premature failure of the DX. This is exactly the “Innovator’s Dilemma” described by Clayton Christensen.

The Covid19 pandemic is a shock to this well-oiled machine (i.e. your business). People are not allowed to work the same way they’re used to. This situation creates the perfect environment for leaders to restructure their business and reallocate resources for important (often less urgent) initiatives, including DX. Moreover, because over 3 billion people around the world are under lockdown, the best way to interact with the external world is via digital means. Hence, digital media consumption increases and e-commerce sales soar. This pandemic not only provides the environment but also the need for companies to accelerate their DX.

Automation of Digital and Physical Work

With DX underway, companies can now digitize and track our work, which becomes data that we can use to train AI systems to mimic how we work. It’s only a matter of time that all our digital work will be automated by AI. But most AI today are merely algorithms that do not have a physical manifestation, so they can’t automate our physical work as-is. However, this will change when we incorporate autonomous AI (the same kind of AI that powers the self-driving cars) into robots.

Emerging technologies (e.g. AI and robots) are often held back due to financing, bureaucratic scrutiny, or simply public ignorance and fear. However, Covid19 has created a burning platform, where the uncertainty in these new techs becomes relatively much easier to stomach compared to the certainty of a much worse outcome created by the pandemic. Furthermore, the Covid19 containment measures have created a shortage of human resources, because many people can no longer perform their work to keeps our society going. This created the opportunity for AI and robots to step up.

Field Testing AI and Robots

There is no shortage of use cases for AI in the frontline, joining the fight against Covid19. To avoid overloading the hospitals, conversational AI risk-assessment tools have been deployed widely through the mobile phone to enable self-assessment of infection risk before hospital visits. AI-based image analysis can speed up the diagnose of chest-CT scan 45x, with 96% accuracy for coronavirus detection. Numerous machine learning (ML) models have also been used to predict Covid19 prognosis and to forecast the consumption of hospital supplies to help hospital allocate their limited resources more effectively.

Text-mining AI is also helping virologists read through thousands of Covid19-related research publications to identify new findings, emerging trends, and inconspicuous patterns among the overwhelming body of research. Machine aided drug design and drug repurposing are using AI to explore, evaluate, and screen drug candidates for their efficacy before animal models or human clinical trials. Both of these AI systems have saved the research community thousands of hours and has accelerated the development of drugs and vaccines.

Robots have proven invaluable during this pandemic, because they are 100% immune to the coronavirus. Robots are using UV light or vaporized hydrogen peroxide to clean, sanitize, and sterilize everything from hospitals to airplanes, subway trains, hotel rooms, or anywhere that has been exposed to Covid19. Not only is this more efficient and more effective, it also frees up healthcare workers in the hospital to care for patients with more urgent needs.

Hospital delivery robots are fetching food and medicines to patients and those under quarantine. This reduces unnecessary human contact, further curbing the spread of Covid19. The shortage of drivers when demand is inflated during this pandemic will expedite the adoption of autonomous vehicles and delivery robots.

“In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.”—Albert Einstein.

This article is part of a series, if you miss the previous installments, they are linked below.

1. Making Sense of the Reality
2. The Immediate Urgency
3. Socioeconomic Side Effect
4. The Dark Side
5. The Bright Side

Ok, stay healthy and stay tuned.