Digital race is leaving people behind

Such has been the scale of the devastation wrought by the response to the pandemic that countries will take years if not decades to recover.

For many industries across the globe, the change has been irrevocable. Customers have adapted to a different way of living and will not return.

Chief among those long-term changes is the turbo-charging of the digital revolution. A momentum to move anything and everything online that was already unstoppable has picked up pace.

As a result, a future that might have taken years to arrive is already in our rear-view mirrors.

Business leaders and politicians who were nervous of embracing the digital revolution found the reins ripped from their hands by the pandemic and the needs of customers.

Much of that transformation will be to the world’s benefit. A connected world can find huge benefits in medicine, retail, security, artificial intelligence, renewables and training.

It will save countless lives and enable some countries to provide a standard of living for their populace unimagined by previous generations.

Like all revolutions, however, the digital transformation is riding roughshod over all who are unwilling or unable to keep up.

Retail banking is just one example. The move online by the tech-savvy has been under way for most of this millennium. As a consequence, thousands of bank branches have shut across the UK.

Under cover of lockdown and Covid-19, that trend is set to accelerate as hard-nosed executives close expensive bricks-and-mortar branches in favour of cheaper online solutions.

Long-term, the change is inevitable. However, the speed of the revolution is adding to the hardship of non-tech customers – principally, but not exclusively, the elderly and small, cash-friendly businesses – at the very time they can least bear it.

Many are understandably angry. They have been customers for decades yet find their needs and concerns brushed aside.

It seems, though, a forlorn hope in the current economy that any business will slow its race to cut costs and move online just so everyone can keep up.