COVID-19 Means a Fundamental Change in Business

In 2013, the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford published a paper studying activities over the spectrum of employment that could potentially be automated by computers. While this is certainly contentious, given its potential impact on the human workforce, many businesses have already begun to take the road towards automation. For example, outside of the industrial sector, Pizza Hut has experimented with robotic servers, Amazon has opened several grocery stores with no checkout staff, while China has pioneered'cloud hospital' telemedical services as well as, more recently, robot-serviced field hospitals for coronavirus patients. One of the original premises of the IoT was to introduce a higher level of automation; while the impact of this was limited up until now, the pandemic will certainly lead many enterprises to examine what, and how processes can be automated in order to reduce any future business impact from similar wide-ranging events. Gregory Gundelfinger, CEO of Telna advises that "businesses will need to adapt their business models in order to remain operational and relevant in our rapidly changing society. This means adopting technology that supports automation and reliable connectivity."