It has been said that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated the remote economy, but is that really true?
The facts seem to agree. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, around 5% of Americans worked out of the home, but by the spring of that year that number had skyrocketed to 60%. What’s more, the workers preferred it thanks to a host of factors like less commute time (or virtually none, unless you count the steps from the bedroom to the computer) and more schedule flexibility.
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If more and more employees choose to work from home on a regular basis post-pandemic, it will be a major driver of the remote economy that will become built around virtual connections. Remote learning has taken off during the pandemic, as has telehealth services. Multiple businesses around the world were forced to adapt to the biggest public health crisis in recent memory in order to survive – Esports, insurance, eCommerce, entertainment, even natural resources,. You name it, and the paradigm has shifted.
“Before the pandemic hit, everyone was talking about the the ‘shared economy’,” Brian Kalish, CEO at Canadian technology company Xigem Technologies Corporation (CSE:XIGM) told Proactive recently. “Sadly, we can’t share much of anything anymore, and it created this groundswell socioeconomically where people had to figure out what the new normal is. While the pandemic was the ultimate accelerant, the remote economy, in whole or in part, is here to stay.”
Xigem is building up a portfolio of technologies to help businesses transition to working remotely. Its flagship Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology platform, iAgent, provides organizations, businesses and consumers with the tools necessary to support remote working, learning and treatment environments, to name a few. The company recently launched an “out of the box” version of iAgent that will help it expand the platform’s addressable market.
Kalish estimates that the remote economy is a “multi-trillion-dollar global marketplace” that has room for multiple players, many of which are just starting out. “It may seem like this is a mature economy, but I believe we’re on the ground floor of opportunities in this tech space.”
The new normal
Companies of all shapes and sizes have had to adjust to a new way of working. Just look at how CRM systems like Salesforce or Oracle transformed the world of SaaS by allowing remote work, loosening the tether between employees and offices.
“Adopting any kind of flexibility to function in a remote world is going to be the new normal,” Kalish said. “You can be a doctor without an office, or a professor without a lecture room.”
Kalish and Xigem are hoping to use iAgent as a jumping-off point to aggregate technologies that are specific to emerging industries that use remote technologies, creating an “ecosystem” of technology.
Xigem recently struck a letter of intent with a consumer packaged goods company to include iAgent in its personnel management and manage their assets, as their staff work remotely. It also announced a letter of intent to acquire a position in Israeli logistics technology company Shipit.to that supports the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector, among others, to help companies track packages and finished goods as they make their rounds through supermarkets and distribution centres and into the hands of consumers around the world.
“We try to link the ecosystem not just through the technology, but also through the clients that we’re looking to acquire,” Kalish said.
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For a lot of companies used to more traditional workplaces, the shift to remote work can be challenging. But the pandemic has taught us that even the most risk-averse industries are being pushed to incorporate virtual software or artificial intelligence-powered technology in their day-to-day operations.
As things with coronavirus start to abate, companies are starting to wonder how much they are going to need to keep up with this new way of working. Interestingly enough, recent studies show that employees are actually more productive when working from home, at least in the US. The findings also indicate that the quick adoption of new technology amid the pandemic will offer lasting economic gains.
“The companies that saw the writing on the wall got an extra little push from the pandemic, and I think they’re going to continue to make those changes in the future,” Kalish concluded. “Once you’ve taken the plunge, it’s hard to go back.”
Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas