Page 135 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

show rooms in the manufacturing industry allowing clients to
browse and choose the products they like best, most business-to-

consumer companies rapidly understood the need to offer their
clients a “beginning-to-end” digital journey.

As some lockdowns came to an end and certain economies
crept back to life, similar opportunities emerged in business-to-
business applications, particularly in manufacturing where

physical-distancing rules had to be put into place at short notice
often in challenging environments (e.g. on assembly lines). As a
direct result, the IoT made impressive inroads. Some companies

that had been slow in the recent pre-lockdown past to adopt IoT
are now embracing it en masse with the specific objective of doing
as many things as possible remotely. Equipment maintenance,
management inventory, supplier relations or safety strategies: all
of these different activities can now be performed (to a large

extent) via a computer. IoT offers companies not only the means
to execute and uphold social-distancing rules, but also to reduce
costs and implement more agile operations.

During the peak of the pandemic, O2O – online to offline –

gained major traction, highlighting the importance of having both
an online and offline presence, and opening the door (or perhaps
even the floodgates) to eversion. This phenomenon of blurring the
distinction between online and offline as identified by the famous

science fiction writer William Gibson who stated “Our world is
everting” [130] with the cyberspace relentlessly opening out has
emerged as one of the most potent trends of the post-COVID-19

era. The pandemic crisis accelerated this phenomenon of
eversion because it both forced and encouraged us towards a
digital, “weightless” world faster than ever, as more and more
economic activity had no choice but to take place digitally:
education, consulting, publishing and many others. We could go

as far as to say that, for a little while, teleportation supplanted
transportation: most executive committee meetings, board
meetings, team meetings, brainstorm exercises and other forms of

personal or social interaction had to take place remotely. This new
reality is captured in the market capitalization of Zoom (the
videoconferencing company) that skyrocketed to $70 billion in

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