The Covid-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the business community and forced many businesses to either scale back their operations or stop them altogether. From this pandemic three priorities shall emerge for industries, namely, agility, digital adoption, and safety.

This challenge is even higher for SMEs that represent more than 94% of companies in the UAE, employing about 86% of the country’s private sector workforce, according to the Ministry of Economy. Helping SMEs ride out the pandemic is critical as well as to help them tackle the longer-term challenges that they will face envisioning a next normal for doing business.

One of the best ways for businesses to face the current economic uncertainty is to realign their roadmaps by making technological investments their priority.

On digital adoption remote working, collaboration tools and AI can help SMEs in finding solutions to complex business problems in a more human-like fashion. AI is poised in helping SMEs with AI chatbots, customer engagement and supply chain management amongst others. As per a Gartner analysis, within the next 5 years, 50% of the decisions will be based on AI: opting it over simple verbal interactions.

Every company in the world has large amounts of data at its disposal. The real value of data comes from being able to interpret it through data analytics and use your analysis to make strategic decisions. Analytics will help uncover actionable insights that can allow a business to solve a problem or identify a problem it did not even know existed. These analytical tools will become an extremely important skill for the 21st century business leader.

The global industry specially SMEs also must work towards ensuring safety of their employees especially in functions where teams need to work from company premises like manufacturing, supply chain, or operations. It is now certain that there is a need for a new category of devices specialised to protect us from viral attacks.

One such path-breaking technological innovation is a virus attenuation device, for example, Shycocan that can help businesses reopen with confidence to both, employees and customers. The innovative technology has been developed to address viral attacks and pandemics.

It is intended to physically disable the homing mechanism on the virus. It releases a high concentration of environmentally safe photons by exciting a proprietary superalloy. The photons emanate electrons when bombarding bulk surfaces and suspended particles in confined environments.

This electron cloud actively disarms air and surface transmission of the Coronavirus family. Such technologies will help create safer zones in homes, healthcare facilities, grocery chains, places of worship, residential, corporate environments to fill unmet needs.

The next decade will truly be for ones who are ready to evolve and adapt in a constantly changing climate. Agility, innovation, and safety shall be the corner stones of success over the next decade. For businesses, revolutionising the offerings and assuring the safety of its stakeholders will be the new norm.

Key Takeaways

• On digital adoption remote working, collaboration tools and AI can help SMEs in finding solutions to complex business problems.
• Agility, innovation, and safety shall be the corner stones of success over the next decade.
• A path-breaking technological innovation is a virus attenuation device.
• The next decade will truly be for ones who are ready to evolve and adapt in a constantly changing climate.

Businesses need to make technological investments their priority to face the current economic uncertainty, writes Alok Sharma of Shycocan.