6 Post COVID Tech Trends Expected to Grow in 2022

A New York Times article from March, 2020 suggested that the world has now ushered into a new era of date-keeping system: BC (Before Corona) and AC (After Corona). For that time, this might have seemed like a comical idea, but as months passed, this thought seems to have materialized, not in a literal sense though. It would be fair to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has cast its impact on nearly every individual of the world, from financial parameters to sociopolitical ones. However the COVID-19 pandemic gave way to the unprecedented, the vanguard of which became the tech industry. With the birth of the following trends, today, the future is more promising than ever for the tech industry.

1) The online migration

With the imposition of lockdown and social distancing protocols, online companies and businesses saw the biggest boom of their trajectories: from clothing stores and brands turning to fixing and improving their online operations to college classes moving from campuses to laptops, the wave of digitalization flushed everything with it. A BBC article stated that the video-conferencing company Zoom amassed a profit of more than 671.5 million USD in 2020, an amount unprecedented so far. It can be speculated that even once the panic and the isolation is over, most enterprises would find it more suitable to run themselves online and reduce their physical presence and liabilities as much as possible.

2) A.I. – the latest employee of the month

The pandemic plunged the whole world in the depth of economic recession: after bearing the brunt for some time, most companies have started putting employees out of jobs and reducing their human staff, shifting to A.I. and algorithms to run the business while mortal beings take days off for preventing the spread of the virus. Now that enterprises from the small scale to the big one are shifting to the binary code, the probability of them coming back to the tedious process of human resource management seems to be very low. Surely, making machines and software do the math does not anymore seem like a bad idea for an entrepreneur trying to keep his startup afloat in a highly competitive and uncertain market, not to mention that AI is far more reliable and better performing than humans in all aspects. Such is evident with A.I.’s major applications across multiple industries.

3) Big Tech – the new owners of Wall Street

In the tough times when the stocks market crashed, oil barrels hit an all-time low price and the transportation industry hit rock-bottom, the tech industry persevered almost unaffected, even profiting from the situation. A quick glance at the Wall Street trends would reveal that all tech industry magnates such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Facebook benefitted tremendously from the reduction of human contact and an uncertain isolation. So far, it seems that the head-start of the tech industry will not fade away for a long time after the pandemic is over, with a few of the tech nobility gaining power and leverage that others could only view as ambitions, all the while subjecting themselves to scarce accountability. How long would this facet of Anthropocene remain free, fair and ethical? No answer seems to be something more than one of speculative nature.

4) The Clouds of Cloud-Computing

If not anything else, the pandemic has reminded us that we are utterly unprepared to deal with unforeseeable circumstances. Now that only less than a quarter of US companies were able to successfully operate from homes, that number can be safely expected to increase in the future. With companies seeking to provide remote access to their employers, cloud computing will see an increase in subscription. For any company, this seems to be the most logical move to make to ensure remaining flexible and up-and-running in the future in case of any other unforeseeable circumstance.

5) Online Shopping

Although online shopping seemed unreliable in the past, lockdown has pushed the best of enterprises to change this image: with verified online stores and shopping facilities, online transactions and getting products delivered to the doorstep seems to be the culture now. The subculture of finding human contact less and less desirable is the norm now, exactly to which online shopping and food delivery services are catering. This e-commerce growth is not something new: similar happened circumstances worked out for the immense growth of Alibaba in China during the SARS epidemic of the early 2000s.

6) “Smart” Tech Products

The pandemic has left everyone health-conscious and more careful about their bodies than before. In addition to the aid of technology in diagnostic services, smart products such as fitness bands, smart thermometers and smart clothing have boosted their sales multiple times. Keeping up with the trend, tech companies are increasing their investment in innovation and designing for forming more accurate and reliable products such as the Oura Ring, an activity tracker device that keeps one updated of their health conditions. Although most of the progress in this field is yet to be made, the future seems very bright for innovation and invention in this cadre and for the tech industry as a whole.