Ariel Skelley Coronavirus hasn’t just shut down huge swaths of American business and sent many employees scrambling to work from home — it’s also driving the acceleration of technological adoption. As people adapt to new modes of life, start-up businesses that enable us to work, study, shop, and interact […]
- A majority of the CNBC Disruptor 50 start-ups are in hiring mode, even as the U.S. unemployment rate sits at 13.5% due to Covid-19.
- Many of these companies have an existing focus on health care, financial services, cloud connectivity, digital marketing and online distribution to consumers, and they have seen demand for their core products and services more than double during the economic shutdown.
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence underlie much of the explosive growth.
Ariel Skelley
Coronavirus hasn’t just shut down huge swaths of American business and sent many employees scrambling to work from home — it’s also driving the acceleration of technological adoption. As people adapt to new modes of life, start-up businesses that enable us to work, study, shop, and interact virtually have skyrocketed to mainstream adoption. Driving these companies are key underlying technologies that have been growing in importance slowly for years and now have become essential.
“Businesses that had not only developed digital strategies but executed on them prior to the pandemic are now in a position to leapfrog their less nimble competitors,” writes consultancy BDO in a report on how Covid-19 is accelerating the rise of the digital economy. “That isn’t to understate the Covid-19-related challenges they now face, irrespective of their current level of digital maturity. Going digital in and of itself isn’t a panacea to all that ails businesses in the current economic environment. They do, however, have significantly more tools at their disposal to not only weather the storm but to come out the other side stronger for it,” stated BDO.
