In this recent Article, author Paul Gillin provides insight on trends and technologies that are likely to be forever transformed by the events of recent months. SiliconAngle asked several technology executives for their thoughts on the topic. Here are the technologies and trends identified.

Low-code/no-code software development: even the development of software is likely to be automated – and the pandemic is accelerating its path. Forrester last year forecast that the low-code market will grow 40% annually to $21.2 billion by 2022. Gartner estimates that low-code tools will be used for 65% of all application development by 2024. The article provides a benchmark: apps are coming together in somewhere between one and four weeks compared to three to six months using conventional programming languages.

Digital retailing: one thing is clear across domains; aversion to digital is being overcome by necessity. That phenomenon is visible in Retail. COVID-19 has created long lines and empty shelves in retail stores, and as a result, millions of people began to buy online. The article shares a Forrester survey of 1,122 online adults in April, which found that 21% said they have bought groceries online for the first time and 41% are buying more things online than they have in the past. Additionally, chain stores in the U.S. and Canada saw an 80% increase in online sales in April compared with a year earlier. As I have said before, predictions – especially in times of crisis – are rarely accurate. To conclude that physical retail is dead is disputed by 45% survey respondents that said they hope to resume normal shopping habits soon.

Chatbots and robots: in an era of extreme events, the impact of our reliance on humans is exposed. This is likely to Accelerate the Path to Automation. The article focuses on two elements of this automation. Chatbots are picking up the slack at call centers decimated by absences with notable success. The author identifies the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control as recent converts. Chatbot technology is likely to expand into new areas like digital portals for interactive healthcare. The second area is robots. The need to continue with risky jobs will fuel an already accelerating investment trend in robotics. The movement towards robotics is not limited to warehouses, farms, and meat packing plants; it will also handle increasingly more knowledge work.

Telemedicine: another area accelerated by current events. Those that may have been averse to the remote delivery of healthcare services have no alternative. Once experiencing it, many will overcome this aversion. As described by the author, Telemedicine was already in line to become a $130 billion market by 2025. With some online services reporting up to a 500% increase in usage during the pandemic, it appears that digital healthcare will go mainstream even faster than expected.

Open software: the need for speed and cost reduction always drives open source software adoption. The article identifies how open-source components made available during the pandemic are unleashing a flood of applications for everything from contact tracing to viral research. The author states that Github lists more than 27,000 repositories of open-source projects related to COVID-19. They include Coronavirus Tracker, which presents visualizations of the global outbreak using an open data repository maintained by Johns Hopkins University, and COVID-19 Scenarios, an analytics dashboard for modeling outbreak trajectories and hospital demand.

Zero-trust security: an aggressive movement to remote work introduced security risk. The article identified a zero-trust approach to provide an added layer of protection against unknown visitors. As applications are rushed to market, the usual security rigor is not applied; the zero-trust approach can also help guard against resulting flaws.

Next-generation databases: the virus has driven an acute need for tools to track and contain it, and as the article states, the tools have one thing in common: massive appetites for data. The author describes how applications such as contact tracing are fueling demand for new database engines capable of working at massive scale. As a result, interest is particularly high in graph databases, which are uniquely well-suited to tracking relationships. Gartner saw the graph analytics market doubling annually for at least the next two years.

For additional thoughts on the pandemic, see my previous posts.

FEATURED: A Post Pandemic Society

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• Digital Learning And Resilient Supply Chains
• Will Coronavirus Accelerate the Path To A Surveillance State?
• Does COVID-19 Accelerate The Loss of Jobs To Automation?
• Lack Of Comfort In Close Spaces
• A Post-Pandemic Virtual Roundtable
• Learning From Leaders Around The World
• A Digital Divide
• What Behavior Changes Will Stick?
• 30 Top Experts Describe The Things That Will Change Forever
• Global Economic Recovery
• Does COVID-19 Change Your View of Innovation?
• COVID-19 As An Accelerant
• COVID-19 Tuesday Morning News
• How Long Until The Economic New Normal?
• We Must Think Critically and Differently
• How Might The World Respond?
• Rehearsing Possible Post COVID-19 Futures
• Possible Futures Emerging Across Multiple Domains
• More Thought Leaders Weigh In On A Post Pandemic Future
• Mid-Pandemic Impact on Supply Chains
• Post COVID-19 Economic Recovery Scenarios
• Is The Canary Dead?
• How Will The Corona Virus Impact Globalization?
• The Corona Virus Serves As A Catalyst For Change
• Post COVID-19 Economic Recovery Scenarios
• COVID-19 Monday Morning News
• Anatomy Of An Outbreak
• Discussing A Post-Pandemic Society on Salem Radio Network
• The COVID-19 Economic Impact On China and a Glimpse Of The Future
• Assessing A Post Pandemic Future: A Video
• Coronavirus: Permanent Change? 34 Big Thinkers Explore the Possibilities
• Futurist Gerd Leonhard Looks Back From The Near Future