Can Covid-19 Pandemic Fast Track Digital Transformation?

COVID-19 will have a far-reaching effect on business communities globally. This crisis is seen as an inflection point in the drive toward digitization across businesses globally. The connected, digital economy is helping enterprises, employees, and consumers remain engaged and do business, even as the virus continues to spread. This crisis has made it clear in the business world, more so than ever, that investing in emerging digital technologies can potentially do a world of good. The growing dependency on business conferencing tools, e-commerce, digital learning, VR-based training, and business apps supporting remote workers cannot be dismissed as a blip and is likely to remain the new norm among businesses worldwide. BioSpectrum illuminates few technologies joining the world’s battle to combat coronavirus.

- Hithaishi C Bhaskar

The impacts and consequences of Coronavirus pandemic on societies are immense to be tackled with existing healthcare systems in order to secure lives, healthcare, businesses and stabilise economies. Though the pandemic is blowing away industries and market, digital technology is emerging to assist in COVID-19 pandemic warfare.

Emerging digital technologies have potentials to drastically influence accessibility, tracing, diagnosis and treatment to track COVID-19 global impairment. Companies are transforming their business models to fast-track the innovations and discoveries at medical and diagnostic care. Technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) is also encouraging and expediting innovations. Advanced cloud-based technology applications Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group is offering “advanced cloud-based technology applications” for medical personnel around the world to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alibaba Cloud’s solution experts, scientists and researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy and the technical team at DingTalk have joined together to develop a series of cloud-native anti-coronavirus solutions.

DingTalk’s International Medical Expert Communication Platform, hosted on Alibaba Cloud provides a means of free communication for medical workers all over the world to directly contact doctors from medical institutions. DingTalk is a digital messaging and communication platform which provides free audio and video conference functionality, along with live broadcast functions for more-complex scenarios.

Through video conferencing and real-time artificial intelligence (AI) translation into 11 languages (Arabic, Bahasa, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese), Alibaba Cloud aims to build a virtual community, inviting Chinese doctors to share their experiences and answer questions from global peers.