If you have been wondering what the post-pandemic world might be like, an excellent place to start is South Korea. Years before the coronavirus, they embraced a concept known as 'Untact', a vision for a highly automated society that required little or no human contact. Not only does that idea now seem prescient in a world still struggling to re-open, it is a glimpse into just how different our society may become when our apps, algorithms, and automatons combine to create operating systems for daily life.

Robots have long been a source of anxiety for humans. When not terrorizing us as theme park hosts or returning from the future to alter our timelines, they have embodied all our worst fears of work automation and job displacement. The COVID-19 crisis has seen the rapid adoption of robotics in a wide array of industries, from healthcare to logistics, and in doing so, given us a preview of what a mechanized world of a trillion, interconnected bots might be like. It is easy to assume this will be a zero-sum game: robots will replace humans like for like. The reality is more complex and potentially more challenging if we don’t act now to transform the way we think about work.

The 2020 pandemic thrust upon us the new reality of working from home. While for more traditional corporations, remote work came as a shock, for other startups and software companies, it was nothing new. They were designed from the outset to be location independent, to access a global pool of talent, and avoid the overhead of a corporate headquarters. So, when normalcy returns, will we see the resurgence of the office or something entirely different: the distributed organization?

What happens when your five-year plan for digital transformation becomes just an emergency strategy for immediate survival? True, the current COVID-19 crisis is accelerating the shift to a digital, automated, contactless future. But that raises a more complex question: what does disruption now mean in a world in which all the surviving companies are already digital?

The old adage goes that life insurance is sold, not bought. The digital revolution has not only flipped that idea on its head, it now also challenges the way insurance products are designed and priced. The real action is yet to come. Insurance companies have always been data-driven, but in a new era of consumer genomics, that is no longer an easy path to tread.