Jim Harris

Pandemic Has Driven a Decade of Change

The pandemic has driven a decade of change in just two years. Here are a few examples:

• eCommerce experienced a decade of growth in the first 90 days of the pandemic! You can take the value of Walmart, Best Buy, Target and five other retailers, add them together and multiply by three and it’s just worth Amazon’s market cap.UBS predicts that 100,000 US retail locations will permanently shutter by 2025 as a result.
• Telemedicine experienced 10X the growth rate in the first 15 days. In 2020 Americans made 1 billion medical visits via telemedicine. More than 300 million Chinese use the Ping a Good Doctor app.
• Zoom grew its customer count from 10 million daily users to 300 million downloading the application in the first 90 days of the pandemic. How many companies do you know that grew their customer count by 30X in the pandemic? Zoom is now facilitating 3.5 trillion minutes a year. More than all theinternational long-distance calls of all telcos combined added to all international long distance VoIP calls globally of all providers.
• Video Streaming (Netflix, Disney+and others) experienced 7 years of growth in the first 5 months of the pandemic.
• Tesla is now worth more than the following 11 traditional car companies combined: General Motors, Ford, Toyota, VW, Honda, Daimler (Mercedes Benz), Subaru, Hyundai, Ferrari, Mazda and BMW. So if you don’t think that electrification and autonomous vehicles are going to change the $10 Trillion a year transportation market, think again.

What are the permanent business changes as a result of COVID?

• Future of Work & Hybrid Work: Dell computers says that 60% of it’s 165,000 employees will never come back into the office. They’ll work from home. What are theimplications for commercial real estate?
• Mental Health: Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce admitted that 36% of the company’s 50,000 employees were experiencing mental health challenges. And that’s in a company that was growing during thepandemic! In this time of high stress for employees’ mental health and wellness has become very important.

Global Pandemic Has Driven a Decade of Change in Healthcare

41% of patients skipped care during the pandemic. In China, more than 50% of all medical visits have been virtual during the pandemic  and 300 million Chinese use the app Ping a Good Doctor! These changes raise profound questions and that have critical implications

Telehealth

• In the US, 46% of all medical visits in 2020 used telehealth. And there are now a billion virtual medical visits in the US in a single year.
• McKinsey estimates that the telehealth market will be $250 Billion by 2025.
• The need for telehealth existed pre pandemic. American Medical Association estimates 40% of emergency room visits & 70% of doctor’s office visits could be eliminated simply by phone calls.

Mental Health

• 36% of Salesforce’s 50,000 staff report experiencing mental health challenges during the pandemic(and that’s in a company that’s been growing).
• Anxiety and depression are widespread. What are strategies to help staff? Patients?
• Health care professionals are burnt out and anti-mask, anti-vax protests in front of hospitals have increased employee stress and frustration.

Staffing Crisis

• We have a shortage of 108,000 medical professionals in Canada currently, creating anunprecedented staffing crisis. Strategies to cope?

Demographic Shifts

• There are more Canadians over the age of 65 than under 14! Who’s going to care for aging boomers?
• Millennials and Gen Z’s are now 50% of the workforce. By 2025 it will be 75%. How does organizational culture need to evolve to attract, retain and engage these demographics?

Technology

• As our smartphones are getting ever smarter, we are seeing its medicalization. A University of Cambridge developed an app who listens to breathing and coughing and predicts, with exceptional accuracy, whether you have COVID.
• Using a high-res image of your retina an AI can predict your gender and age; whether you have high or normal blood pressure; whether you are a smoker; are at risk of a stroke or heart attack. Is our medical system taking advantage of technology advances?What are the implication for the insurance industry?
• To sequence the first human genome took 13 years and cost $2.7 Billion; today, it takes 13 hours and costs less than $600. Within five years, it will only take 13 minutes and cost $10.

Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies

Blockchain’s impact on society will be as transformative as the web’s!

On April 30, 1993 Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN in Europe publicly released code that created the world wide web. The impact over the last 30 years has been transformative as the web now profoundly influences our modern life. In the same way, Blockchain will have a transformative effect over the next 30 years.

Blockchain broke into global consciousness when Bitcoin spiked to more than $60,000 in October 2021. At the time the market capitalization of all crypto currencies peaked at $3 Trillion. Because of this Bitcoin–and more widely crypto currencies–became the top-of-mind blockchain application. But crypto is just one application of blockchain. Here are three applications illustrating how blockchain will transform greatly differing industries.

2022 : The Year of Ransomware

CEOs Rate Cyber Risk the #1 Threat for Organizations!

With millions of people working remotely in North America due to the pandemic, the number of vulnerabilities in IT systems has increased exponentially. As a result, cybercrime grew significantly during the pandemic. CEOs rated cyber security risk as the topthreat, in a 2021 CEO survey by KPMG.

Ransomware has exploded into the consciousness of North American business, with high profile cases like Colonial Pipeline, creating gas shortages in the Eastern US, but most ransomware attacks never become public knowledge.

The US Treasury has tied $5.2 billionin Bitcoin transactions to US ransomware payments. Global estimates are $20 billion and are predicted to grow more than 20X over the next 10 years. But the ransom paid, however, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of cost to organizations. According to McAffe, cyber crime is a$1 trillion a year problem globally. Cyber security is one of the fastest growing areas of IT,which in turn has resulted in there being more than three million unfilled cyber security positions globally

Most cyber attacks begin with phishing. What is phishing you ask? You get an email from your bank telling you that your account has been hacked and urging you to immediately change your password, providing a convenient link to the login page. When you login you are actually not logging into the bank, you’re on the hacker’s site which looks like the bank and you’re providing them with your account and login details.

Then there’s spear phishing. That’s where the hackers research you–and the email you received is far more customized and sophisticated. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair in her 2016 presidential run, was the victim of spear phishing. All Clinton’s emails were leaked as a result–arguably costing her the election. Podesta even reached out to an IT staffer to ask if he should reset his password, and the staffer replied that it was legitimate.

Finally, there are whaling attacks. That’s where your CEO or another senior executive in your organization emails you and instructs you to urgently change your password or download a file and open it.

Ransomware, phishing, cyber crime . . . what can organizations do to reduce risk? Here’s the top ten strategies:

Top Ten Risk Reduction Strategies

• Training, training, training.
• Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).
• Password Management.
• Automatic Updating of Software.
• Antivirus & Antimalware software.
• Backups. Both cloud based and on prem.
• Steps to ProtectAgainstIdentity Theft.
• Use of AI to detect irregular behaviour on the network.
• Insurance.
• Ongoing training

Mega Trends 2022 - 2025

Select one or two trends from each category and Jim will create a custom keynote focusing on your choices.

• Energy Shift: The cheapest form of energy in North America? Globally? Solar.
• Mobile First: Mobile first companies have an 825% higher valuation on IPO than those with no mobile enablement.
• AI First: Artificial Intelligence is changing everything.
• Edge Computing or Internet of Things (IoT) preventative maintenance.
• Electrification of Transportation: Tesla is now worth more than the 11 traditional car companies combined. So if you don’t think that electrification and autonomous vehicles are going to change the $10trillion a year transportation market, think again.
• Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, DAOs, Web 3.0 Metaverse. See separate topic.

Permanent Business Changes Because of COVID 

• Future of Work & Hybrid Work: Dell computers says that 60% of it’s 165,000 employees will never come back into the office. They’ll work from home.What are the implications for commercial real estate?
• Mental Health. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, admitted that 36% of the company’s 50,000 employees were experiencing mental health challenges. And that’s in a company that was growing during the pandemic! In this time of high stress for employees’ mental health and wellness has become very important.
• Disruptive Innovation is accelerating. See separate topic.
• The Great Resignation. See separate topic

Work & Workplace Trends:

• Disruption: The Innovation Imperative, Digital Transformation & Accelerating Speed of Change.
• Collaboration & Engagement.
• Mental Health:36%+ of workers are experiencing mental health challenges in the pandemic.
• The Future of Work –Work from Home; Hybrid Work, Rise of Zoom, Teams & video conferencing, Demographic Shifts, Workforce shortages & Rise of the Gig economy.
• Cyber security, malware, data and info security & continuous training.
• Increasing use of AI in work processes.

Societal/Consumer Trends:

• eCommerce & mCommerce.
• Transportation ($10 Trillion industry): Electrification: EVs & long-haul trucking, Autonomous Vehiclesc & Rise of Transportation as a Service(TaaS).
• Privacy & Data Security.
• Streaming–Netflix, Disney+.
• Restaurants – Ghost Kitchens.
• Climate Change, Decarbonization.
• Mental Health.

Tech Trends Driving Disruption:

• Mobile – Smartphones & 5G.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML).
• Cloud Computing.
• Blockchain, Cryto, NFTs, DAOs.
• Edge/Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Devices & Predictive Maintenance.
• Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR).
• Smart: Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, smart manufacturing.
• Big Data.
• Genomic Sequencing.
• 3D printing.
• Robotics & automation in manufacturing.
• Metaverse & Web 3.0.