COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of tech and ecommerce that will impact the lives of people who aren't online, especially in the developing world
At the beginning of this year (which now feels like 100 years ago), I gave a presentation on macro trends in tech, at an event in Davos.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months before this piece, Benedict Evans had framed the 2020s around a world where tech has already connected most of the globe — connectivity was largely done, and the open question was what happens to the people and economies on the far side of it. This essay is his first pandemic-era answer: lockdowns didn't just move existing users online faster, they pushed commerce and services toward populations who were never online to begin with.
First-order effects
- Ecommerce and remote-work tools absorb demand they would have taken years to win, compressing adoption cycles into months — a pattern the year-end coverage confirmed when it noted trends like virtual commerce unfolding at pandemic speed (years compressed into months).
- People who aren't online, especially in the developing world, now face services migrating to channels they can't reach, making offline status a concrete economic disadvantage rather than a lagging indicator.
Second-order effects
- The same acceleration splits workforces: relationships in the corpus show COVID deepening the divide between remote-capable and non-remote workers, so the offline population and the non-remote workforce overlap into a widening access gap.
- Firms racing to serve newly digitized demand turn to automation, chatbots, and AI in call centers — substituting software for the human channels that previously reached less-connected customers.
Third-order effects
- If the compression holds, the developing-world offline population becomes the next adoption frontier: once behaviors like virtual commerce are normalized everywhere else (fringe behaviors going mainstream), the marginal growth market is the billions still outside the network.
- Structurally, the pandemic-era jump means digital infrastructure stops being an optional layer and becomes the default interface for commerce and work — raising the cost of exclusion for anyone the acceleration leaves behind.
The trend: COVID-19 turned gradual global digitization into a step change, shifting the industry's growth question from connecting the world to serving the people the connection hasn't yet reached.