ACADEMIA Letters COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry Mohathir Sheikh, University of Calgary Peter Anto Johnson, University of Alberta John Christy Johnson, University of Alberta Jasrita Singh, McMaster University Austin Mardon, University of Alberta The World Health Organization (WHO) first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of international Concern in January 2020 and then a pandemic in March of the same year. This announcement caused governments around the world to start implementing measures to limit the spread of the pandemic through nationwide lockdowns and social distancing policies. However the effect of the lockdowns have led to people around the world having to adjust the way they work and live. For a lot of individuals and organisations, turning to digital technologies was the only way stay connected and continue running their businesses. Many companies had to shift to a work from home (WFH) model to continue providing their services to customers while respecting COVID-19 restrictions. In the educational sector we saw the adoption of a more online model. Schools, universities and colleges turned to digitalization of lecture material and assessments with a heavy reliance on video conferencing platforms such as Google Meet and Zoom. As millions of individuals were unable to go out due to lockdown restrictions, they turned to online streaming and entertainment services (Grand View Researcher, 2021). The video streaming services saw a rise of around 10% in viewership during the lockdown (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Video streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, YouTube and Netflix saw spikes in viewership worldwide (Grand View Researcher, 2021). One of the video streaming giants, Netflix, experienced record-breaking growth during the first six months of 2020, adding 26 million new subscribers worldwide (Walsh, 2020). During the pandemic, the advancements in cloud computing revolutionized video streaming (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Since many video streaming Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 1 platforms do not have the networks or infrastructure capable of handling heavy traffic, they adopted the cloud-based deployment to enable large bandwidth and speed. Cloud-scaling also helped further increase bandwidth and reduce latency issues. Even now there remains a large demand for cloud-based deployment in the streaming of videos. Impact on the Technology Sector Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the economy and has hit small businesses hard, but some were able to survive and thrive better than others. For example, the retail e-commerce market saw sales more than double year over year compared to May 2019. Activities and services including healthcare, shopping and entertainment were forced to move to a more virtual or remote model. In retail overall, there was an increase of 94.8% in online sales since the start of the pandemic (The Canadian Press, 2020). The health and personal care subsectors saw an increase of 55.6%. The sports, book, hobby, music subsector saw an increase of 154.9% (The Canadian Press, 2020). Online retailers such as the giant Amazon saw their stock price increase by 59.6% in the six months after the beginning of the pandemic (Arora, 2020). But Amazon was not the only company to experience this level of growth. Digital service companies such as Zoom saw an increase of 458% Year over Year (YoY) by July 2020 in a performance metric tracking the number of customers with more than 10 employees (Evans, 2020). With an increase of people staying in due to restrictions and lay-offs, the stock market saw a large influx of new investors. Many new and existing investors piled back into the stock market last year and focused on companies that they believed would benefit the most due to the pandemic. These investors focused on grabbing shares of technology and growth stocks such as Zoom Video Communications Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, and PayPal Holdings Inc (McCabe et al., 2021). This influx helped push U.S. stocks off their 2020 low and kicked off a stretch of sustained growth in technology and growth stocks. Other investors’ fear of missing out helped sustain the rise of growth stocks. Companies such as the fuel-cell company Plug Power Inc and electric-vehicle manufacturers Tesla Inc and NIO Inc became the favorites of these types of investors. And all three of these stocks surged 840% or more from last years low until February 2021 (McCabe et al., 2021). Despite the recent pullback in tech and growth stocks from growing concerns about inflation, the impact many of the tech companies had on facilitating the digital transformation during the pandemic can not be overlooked. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 2 Impact on the future of technology The increased need for cloud computing and digital services coupled with higher network traffic and demand compared to pre-COVID has led to the acceleration in digital transformation. We have seen a numerous in-person activities successfully switch to being delivered online. Many companies were able to switch to a WFH model and for knowledge workers, there have been evidence suggesting the WFH model increased productivity (Elnaj, 2021). Despite lockdown restrictions lifting in many states and provinces, some firms are continuing to offer their employees the ability to work remotely. According to a Gartner study, 82% of employers will continue to allow employees to work remotely some of time and 47% say they will do it all the time (Elnaj, 2021). Indicating companies may shift to WFH as a norm rather than an exception. Many companies and government bodies have implemented chatbots, or virtual assistants to help mitigate the influx of calls and online traffic (Trajanov, T. 2020). These virtual assistants can help answer basic questions and issues and helped customer service representatives focus on the more difficult tasks that can not be completed by an automated system. We also saw the transformation of technology in training and education. The rise and use of video conferencing applications such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams played a large role in online teaching. Now that educational institutions and corporations have gotten familiar with these applications, it is reasonable to assume that they will continue to incorporate these tools in the future. A technology trend that will continue is touchless technologies. We have already seen companies start pushing for contactless payments and transactions to help limit the need for human contact. In the retail sector, we saw an increase in online orders and deliveries. And in airports, we are starting to see the adoption of self-service check-in where passengers create a digital token on their smartphone that can verify their identity (Elnaj, 2021). And probably the most important technological advancement made during the pandemic was in biotechnology. The advancements in biotechnology are what made it possible to create vaccines with over 90% efficacy in 10 months over the multiple years it used to take (Elnaj, 2021). After the virus sequence was published in January 2020, companies raced to create a vaccine using a variety of different technologies one of which was using mRNA. While mRNA technology was in the making for over 20 years, it was the pandemic that drove the growth and eventual implementation of this technology. The biotech company Moderna was able to use advanced computer simulations and sequencing tools in design the synthetic mRNA in just two days and in less than two months start shipping its first batch of vaccines for clinical trials (Elnaj, 2021). Biotechnology is a field that could revolutionize the medical and pharmaceutical industry and the pandemic was huge accelerator for innovations within this field. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 3 The COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to adjust and embrace technology like never before due to government mandated lockdowns and social distancing policies. During the pandemic companies adjusted to using virtual tools to continue running business operations. We saw a huge market rally in the technology and growth sectors as new investors entered the stock market. And finally, we saw an acceleration in our digital transformation resulting in new innovations and potentially new norms in the workplace and education sector. References Arora, R. (2020). Which companies did well during the coronavirus pandemic? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rohitarora/2020/06/30/which-companies-did-well-during-thecoronavirus-pandemic/ De’, R., Pandey, N., & Pal, A. (2020). Impact of digital surge during covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102171 Elnaj, S. (2021). The “new normal” and the future of technology after the covid-19 pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/01/25/the-new-normal-andthe-future-of-technology-after-the-covid-19-pandemic/ Evans, C. (2020). The coronavirus crisis and the technology sector. Business Economics, 55(4), 253–266. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-020-00191-3 Grand View Researcher. (2021). Streaming market size & share report. Grand View Researcher. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-streaming-market McCabe, J. B. & C. (2021). Tech stocks led the market rally. Now they’re falling behind. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-stocks-led-the-market-rally-nowtheyre-falling-behind-11616491800 The Canadian Press. (2020). Online shopping has doubled during the pandemic, Statistics Canada says. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/online-shopping-covid-19-1. 5661818 Trajanov, T. (2020). How the pandemic has shaped the future of technology. Forbes. https:// www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/08/18/how-the-pandemic-has-shaped-the-futureof-technology/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 4 Walsh, J. (2020). Netflix subscriber growth slows after surging during pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-aftersurging-during-pandemic/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 5 

ACADEMIA Letters COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry Mohathir Sheikh, University of Calgary Peter Anto Johnson, University of Alberta John Christy Johnson, University of Alberta Jasrita Singh, McMaster University Austin Mardon, University of Alberta The World Health Organization (WHO) first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of international Concern in January 2020 and then a pandemic in March of the same year. This announcement caused governments around the world to start implementing measures to limit the spread of the pandemic through nationwide lockdowns and social distancing policies. However the effect of the lockdowns have led to people around the world having to adjust the way they work and live. For a lot of individuals and organisations, turning to digital technologies was the only way stay connected and continue running their businesses. Many companies had to shift to a work from home (WFH) model to continue providing their services to customers while respecting COVID-19 restrictions. In the educational sector we saw the adoption of a more online model. Schools, universities and colleges turned to digitalization of lecture material and assessments with a heavy reliance on video conferencing platforms such as Google Meet and Zoom. As millions of individuals were unable to go out due to lockdown restrictions, they turned to online streaming and entertainment services (Grand View Researcher, 2021). The video streaming services saw a rise of around 10% in viewership during the lockdown (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Video streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, YouTube and Netflix saw spikes in viewership worldwide (Grand View Researcher, 2021). One of the video streaming giants, Netflix, experienced record-breaking growth during the first six months of 2020, adding 26 million new subscribers worldwide (Walsh, 2020). During the pandemic, the advancements in cloud computing revolutionized video streaming (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Since many video streaming Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 1 platforms do not have the networks or infrastructure capable of handling heavy traffic, they adopted the cloud-based deployment to enable large bandwidth and speed. Cloud-scaling also helped further increase bandwidth and reduce latency issues. Even now there remains a large demand for cloud-based deployment in the streaming of videos. Impact on the Technology Sector Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the economy and has hit small businesses hard, but some were able to survive and thrive better than others. For example, the retail e-commerce market saw sales more than double year over year compared to May 2019. Activities and services including healthcare, shopping and entertainment were forced to move to a more virtual or remote model. In retail overall, there was an increase of 94.8% in online sales since the start of the pandemic (The Canadian Press, 2020). The health and personal care subsectors saw an increase of 55.6%. The sports, book, hobby, music subsector saw an increase of 154.9% (The Canadian Press, 2020). Online retailers such as the giant Amazon saw their stock price increase by 59.6% in the six months after the beginning of the pandemic (Arora, 2020). But Amazon was not the only company to experience this level of growth. Digital service companies such as Zoom saw an increase of 458% Year over Year (YoY) by July 2020 in a performance metric tracking the number of customers with more than 10 employees (Evans, 2020). With an increase of people staying in due to restrictions and lay-offs, the stock market saw a large influx of new investors. Many new and existing investors piled back into the stock market last year and focused on companies that they believed would benefit the most due to the pandemic. These investors focused on grabbing shares of technology and growth stocks such as Zoom Video Communications Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, and PayPal Holdings Inc (McCabe et al., 2021). This influx helped push U.S. stocks off their 2020 low and kicked off a stretch of sustained growth in technology and growth stocks. Other investors’ fear of missing out helped sustain the rise of growth stocks. Companies such as the fuel-cell company Plug Power Inc and electric-vehicle manufacturers Tesla Inc and NIO Inc became the favorites of these types of investors. And all three of these stocks surged 840% or more from last years low until February 2021 (McCabe et al., 2021). Despite the recent pullback in tech and growth stocks from growing concerns about inflation, the impact many of the tech companies had on facilitating the digital transformation during the pandemic can not be overlooked. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 2 Impact on the future of technology The increased need for cloud computing and digital services coupled with higher network traffic and demand compared to pre-COVID has led to the acceleration in digital transformation. We have seen a numerous in-person activities successfully switch to being delivered online. Many companies were able to switch to a WFH model and for knowledge workers, there have been evidence suggesting the WFH model increased productivity (Elnaj, 2021). Despite lockdown restrictions lifting in many states and provinces, some firms are continuing to offer their employees the ability to work remotely. According to a Gartner study, 82% of employers will continue to allow employees to work remotely some of time and 47% say they will do it all the time (Elnaj, 2021). Indicating companies may shift to WFH as a norm rather than an exception. Many companies and government bodies have implemented chatbots, or virtual assistants to help mitigate the influx of calls and online traffic (Trajanov, T. 2020). These virtual assistants can help answer basic questions and issues and helped customer service representatives focus on the more difficult tasks that can not be completed by an automated system. We also saw the transformation of technology in training and education. The rise and use of video conferencing applications such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams played a large role in online teaching. Now that educational institutions and corporations have gotten familiar with these applications, it is reasonable to assume that they will continue to incorporate these tools in the future. A technology trend that will continue is touchless technologies. We have already seen companies start pushing for contactless payments and transactions to help limit the need for human contact. In the retail sector, we saw an increase in online orders and deliveries. And in airports, we are starting to see the adoption of self-service check-in where passengers create a digital token on their smartphone that can verify their identity (Elnaj, 2021). And probably the most important technological advancement made during the pandemic was in biotechnology. The advancements in biotechnology are what made it possible to create vaccines with over 90% efficacy in 10 months over the multiple years it used to take (Elnaj, 2021). After the virus sequence was published in January 2020, companies raced to create a vaccine using a variety of different technologies one of which was using mRNA. While mRNA technology was in the making for over 20 years, it was the pandemic that drove the growth and eventual implementation of this technology. The biotech company Moderna was able to use advanced computer simulations and sequencing tools in design the synthetic mRNA in just two days and in less than two months start shipping its first batch of vaccines for clinical trials (Elnaj, 2021). Biotechnology is a field that could revolutionize the medical and pharmaceutical industry and the pandemic was huge accelerator for innovations within this field. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 3 The COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to adjust and embrace technology like never before due to government mandated lockdowns and social distancing policies. During the pandemic companies adjusted to using virtual tools to continue running business operations. We saw a huge market rally in the technology and growth sectors as new investors entered the stock market. And finally, we saw an acceleration in our digital transformation resulting in new innovations and potentially new norms in the workplace and education sector. References Arora, R. (2020). Which companies did well during the coronavirus pandemic? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rohitarora/2020/06/30/which-companies-did-well-during-thecoronavirus-pandemic/ De’, R., Pandey, N., & Pal, A. (2020). Impact of digital surge during covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102171 Elnaj, S. (2021). The “new normal” and the future of technology after the covid-19 pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/01/25/the-new-normal-andthe-future-of-technology-after-the-covid-19-pandemic/ Evans, C. (2020). The coronavirus crisis and the technology sector. Business Economics, 55(4), 253–266. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-020-00191-3 Grand View Researcher. (2021). Streaming market size & share report. Grand View Researcher. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-streaming-market McCabe, J. B. & C. (2021). Tech stocks led the market rally. Now they’re falling behind. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-stocks-led-the-market-rally-nowtheyre-falling-behind-11616491800 The Canadian Press. (2020). Online shopping has doubled during the pandemic, Statistics Canada says. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/online-shopping-covid-19-1. 5661818 Trajanov, T. (2020). How the pandemic has shaped the future of technology. Forbes. https:// www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/08/18/how-the-pandemic-has-shaped-the-futureof-technology/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 4 Walsh, J. (2020). Netflix subscriber growth slows after surging during pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-aftersurging-during-pandemic/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 5 

ACADEMIA Letters COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry Mohathir Sheikh, University of Calgary Peter Anto Johnson, University of Alberta John Christy Johnson, University of Alberta Jasrita Singh, McMaster University Austin Mardon, University of Alberta The World Health Organization (WHO) first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of international Concern in January 2020 and then a pandemic in March of the same year. This announcement caused governments around the world to start implementing measures to limit the spread of the pandemic through nationwide lockdowns and social distancing policies. However the effect of the lockdowns have led to people around the world having to adjust the way they work and live. For a lot of individuals and organisations, turning to digital technologies was the only way stay connected and continue running their businesses. Many companies had to shift to a work from home (WFH) model to continue providing their services to customers while respecting COVID-19 restrictions. In the educational sector we saw the adoption of a more online model. Schools, universities and colleges turned to digitalization of lecture material and assessments with a heavy reliance on video conferencing platforms such as Google Meet and Zoom. As millions of individuals were unable to go out due to lockdown restrictions, they turned to online streaming and entertainment services (Grand View Researcher, 2021). The video streaming services saw a rise of around 10% in viewership during the lockdown (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Video streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, YouTube and Netflix saw spikes in viewership worldwide (Grand View Researcher, 2021). One of the video streaming giants, Netflix, experienced record-breaking growth during the first six months of 2020, adding 26 million new subscribers worldwide (Walsh, 2020). During the pandemic, the advancements in cloud computing revolutionized video streaming (Grand View Researcher, 2021). Since many video streaming Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 1 platforms do not have the networks or infrastructure capable of handling heavy traffic, they adopted the cloud-based deployment to enable large bandwidth and speed. Cloud-scaling also helped further increase bandwidth and reduce latency issues. Even now there remains a large demand for cloud-based deployment in the streaming of videos. Impact on the Technology Sector Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the economy and has hit small businesses hard, but some were able to survive and thrive better than others. For example, the retail e-commerce market saw sales more than double year over year compared to May 2019. Activities and services including healthcare, shopping and entertainment were forced to move to a more virtual or remote model. In retail overall, there was an increase of 94.8% in online sales since the start of the pandemic (The Canadian Press, 2020). The health and personal care subsectors saw an increase of 55.6%. The sports, book, hobby, music subsector saw an increase of 154.9% (The Canadian Press, 2020). Online retailers such as the giant Amazon saw their stock price increase by 59.6% in the six months after the beginning of the pandemic (Arora, 2020). But Amazon was not the only company to experience this level of growth. Digital service companies such as Zoom saw an increase of 458% Year over Year (YoY) by July 2020 in a performance metric tracking the number of customers with more than 10 employees (Evans, 2020). With an increase of people staying in due to restrictions and lay-offs, the stock market saw a large influx of new investors. Many new and existing investors piled back into the stock market last year and focused on companies that they believed would benefit the most due to the pandemic. These investors focused on grabbing shares of technology and growth stocks such as Zoom Video Communications Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, and PayPal Holdings Inc (McCabe et al., 2021). This influx helped push U.S. stocks off their 2020 low and kicked off a stretch of sustained growth in technology and growth stocks. Other investors’ fear of missing out helped sustain the rise of growth stocks. Companies such as the fuel-cell company Plug Power Inc and electric-vehicle manufacturers Tesla Inc and NIO Inc became the favorites of these types of investors. And all three of these stocks surged 840% or more from last years low until February 2021 (McCabe et al., 2021). Despite the recent pullback in tech and growth stocks from growing concerns about inflation, the impact many of the tech companies had on facilitating the digital transformation during the pandemic can not be overlooked. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 2 Impact on the future of technology The increased need for cloud computing and digital services coupled with higher network traffic and demand compared to pre-COVID has led to the acceleration in digital transformation. We have seen a numerous in-person activities successfully switch to being delivered online. Many companies were able to switch to a WFH model and for knowledge workers, there have been evidence suggesting the WFH model increased productivity (Elnaj, 2021). Despite lockdown restrictions lifting in many states and provinces, some firms are continuing to offer their employees the ability to work remotely. According to a Gartner study, 82% of employers will continue to allow employees to work remotely some of time and 47% say they will do it all the time (Elnaj, 2021). Indicating companies may shift to WFH as a norm rather than an exception. Many companies and government bodies have implemented chatbots, or virtual assistants to help mitigate the influx of calls and online traffic (Trajanov, T. 2020). These virtual assistants can help answer basic questions and issues and helped customer service representatives focus on the more difficult tasks that can not be completed by an automated system. We also saw the transformation of technology in training and education. The rise and use of video conferencing applications such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams played a large role in online teaching. Now that educational institutions and corporations have gotten familiar with these applications, it is reasonable to assume that they will continue to incorporate these tools in the future. A technology trend that will continue is touchless technologies. We have already seen companies start pushing for contactless payments and transactions to help limit the need for human contact. In the retail sector, we saw an increase in online orders and deliveries. And in airports, we are starting to see the adoption of self-service check-in where passengers create a digital token on their smartphone that can verify their identity (Elnaj, 2021). And probably the most important technological advancement made during the pandemic was in biotechnology. The advancements in biotechnology are what made it possible to create vaccines with over 90% efficacy in 10 months over the multiple years it used to take (Elnaj, 2021). After the virus sequence was published in January 2020, companies raced to create a vaccine using a variety of different technologies one of which was using mRNA. While mRNA technology was in the making for over 20 years, it was the pandemic that drove the growth and eventual implementation of this technology. The biotech company Moderna was able to use advanced computer simulations and sequencing tools in design the synthetic mRNA in just two days and in less than two months start shipping its first batch of vaccines for clinical trials (Elnaj, 2021). Biotechnology is a field that could revolutionize the medical and pharmaceutical industry and the pandemic was huge accelerator for innovations within this field. Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 3 The COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to adjust and embrace technology like never before due to government mandated lockdowns and social distancing policies. During the pandemic companies adjusted to using virtual tools to continue running business operations. We saw a huge market rally in the technology and growth sectors as new investors entered the stock market. And finally, we saw an acceleration in our digital transformation resulting in new innovations and potentially new norms in the workplace and education sector. References Arora, R. (2020). Which companies did well during the coronavirus pandemic? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rohitarora/2020/06/30/which-companies-did-well-during-thecoronavirus-pandemic/ De’, R., Pandey, N., & Pal, A. (2020). Impact of digital surge during covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102171 Elnaj, S. (2021). The “new normal” and the future of technology after the covid-19 pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/01/25/the-new-normal-andthe-future-of-technology-after-the-covid-19-pandemic/ Evans, C. (2020). The coronavirus crisis and the technology sector. Business Economics, 55(4), 253–266. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-020-00191-3 Grand View Researcher. (2021). Streaming market size & share report. Grand View Researcher. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-streaming-market McCabe, J. B. & C. (2021). Tech stocks led the market rally. Now they’re falling behind. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-stocks-led-the-market-rally-nowtheyre-falling-behind-11616491800 The Canadian Press. (2020). Online shopping has doubled during the pandemic, Statistics Canada says. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/online-shopping-covid-19-1. 5661818 Trajanov, T. (2020). How the pandemic has shaped the future of technology. Forbes. https:// www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/08/18/how-the-pandemic-has-shaped-the-futureof-technology/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 4 Walsh, J. (2020). Netflix subscriber growth slows after surging during pandemic. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-aftersurging-during-pandemic/ Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Peter Anto Johnson, paj1@ualberta.ca Citation: Sheikh, M., Johnson, P.A., Johnson, J.C., Singh, J., Mardon, A. (2021). COVID-19: Impact on Technology, Economy, & Industry. Academia Letters, Article 2533. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2533. 5