As someone rightly said; “Innovation is the mother of disruption”. But, in the current global situation we have the biggest disruption of all, negatively thanks to Covid-19, which is and will become the mother of many innovations. Likely innovations, which I foresee, happening in some of the key technological areas and business domains are listed below.

Foreseen innovations in technology:

1.      Current situation will give a boost to automated delivery assisted by Drones & Rovers

2.      Long and short haul human-less driving assisted by Autonomous Driving mechanism

3.      Invasion of Robots, in a positive way, in various aspects of day to day operations enabling less human intervention and more effective implementation

4.      Deep learning assisted content creation for Entertainment

5.      Digital currencies will see a rise again as we move ahead in more “e” everything world

6.      Stronger Cybersecurity norms need to be implemented to safeguard everything Digital

7.      More and more use case generation for faster adoption and quick adaption of high speed and low latency 5G networks enabling all the above

Impact of technological innovations in various Businesses:

1.      Manufacturing: as robots already took over majority of the manufacturing work in past few decades but current situation will give rise to more and more automation in the manufacturing of Automobiles, CPG items, Fashion clothing line, Products, Medicines…etc. And these will also be supported by end to end automation of the QA, Packaging, Procurement, Transportation, Payments, Warehouse Management…etc processes which are already on the way of removing manual intervention

2.      Supply Chain: Manufacturing is incomplete without Supply chain as we need to move raw material transported for manufacturing and again ship the completed product to the consumers and customers. This domain will be heavily disrupted with Autonomous Driving and Drones. Human driver-less Long Haul driving will make it efficient to ship products faster between cities & countries. And, Short Haul deliveries to the end consumers will be made effective through Drones and Rovers for e.g. Pizza delivery, Medicines from Pharmacies, Groceries, clothes…etc through Drones

3.      Healthcare: Robot assisted healthcare/surgeries are not new but the current pandemic indeed has increased the value of VR/AR supported and Robot assisted treatment provisioning to critical patients. Also, autonomous driving assisted in Ambulance with the support of Smart City grid can optimally provision optimal routes to save lives of patients. Drones will also ship prescription medicines on time to the patient automatically which will get the data from Patient and Doctor connected DBs. Now a bit far-fetched sci-fi thought, we can have robo-paramedics/robo-nurses assisting patients at homes, car accident venues ....etc to provide instant care

4.      Entertainment: Deep Learning based algorithms are already disrupting this sector and it will see more and more boost as social distancing remains and will be used to create content for movies and web series where we can just have actors providing their individual contents which can be combined seamlessly to create a proper scene

5.      Banking: We already saw the disruption created by Digital Currency like Bitcoin and as the world become more socially connected but less and less Physically connected Digital Banking with Digital Currencies will see a boost again and may be one day it becomes the main payment foundation in near future

6.      Communication: One thing which will provide the foundation for all the use cases will be 5G enabled networks, as it will enable powerful link between devices be it autonomous vehicles, drones, rovers, robots along with industries like manufacturing, supply chain, healthcare, entertainment, smart cities…etc. Thus, communication industry will support each and every aspect of our life as we proceed strongly towards a more Connected Digital World

7.      Cyber Security: Above all, we need to have a proper security mechanism in place as all the information about everything; be it machines, robots and humans; will be online - it becomes prey to cyber thieves which needs to be protected. Thus, we need to embrace stronger norms and disciplines to safeguard us

Above mentioned topics does not cover the exhaustive list of technologies and businesses but highlight areas which are critical and with more impact to human life scenarios in near future. Some of them are already happening but will fast track to maturity now as we move ahead.