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Widthwise 2020
Science fiction - or fact?
Many pundits call it the ‘new normal’. Some consultants prefer to talk of ‘the great reset’ - 2020 speak for ‘paradigm shift’. Whatever
name you use, there is a consensus that
the Covid-19 pandemic is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play. One widely predicted change is that com- panies will redouble their efforts to digitally transform and automate their business.
There is logic in this. It is impossible, at this precise moment, to predict when - or indeed,
if - we will return to a model where eight out of ten us work on the company premises. In April, at the peak of the British government’s furlough scheme, 49.2% of employees were working from home. In other words, proba- bly for the first time in the history of British capitalism, more staff worked at home than in a factory or an office.
With the outlook for the nation’s phys-
ical health remaining distinctly uncertain, many staff are hesitant about returning to the workplace, especially if they must use public transport. Many employees and employers have also discovered that working from home can save significant amounts of time and money.
While print service providers (PSPs) assess these factors, technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are developing rapidly as, indeed, at a much more mundane level, are such virtual meeting packages as Google Meat, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
If you fancy having a business meeting inside the video game Animal Crossing you can (although why would you?). As for robots, as one expert recently argued: “Whether a machine can be conscious or not, and whether it can feel pain or not,
36 | Widthwise 2020 | www.imagereports.co.uk