By Jayjit Biswas
In 2019, the world ran on handshakes, paper files, crowded offices, and noisy classrooms. Then came COVID.
Not as a technological revolution. Not as a digital strategy. But as a biological shock that locked humanity indoors.
And suddenly, the analog world blinked!
Grandparents learned video calls. Children attended kindergarten on tablets. Doctors diagnosed through screens.
Courts went virtual. Board meetings shifted to grids of muted faces. Grocery stores became apps.Signatures became OTPs. Trust became QR codes.
From age 3 to 80 — no one was spared.
Every nation, every profession, every household was pushed into the same experiment: Go Digital or Pause Life.
And something extraordinary happened.
Every click became a data point. Every Zoom call became metadata. Every e-commerce order trained recommendation engines. Every digital payment enriched behavioural models. Every telemedicine consultation expanded healthcare datasets. Every online class refined speech recognition.
Humanity, confined to homes, began generating more structured digital exhaust in 18 months than it had in years. While we were fighting a virus, algorithms were quietly learning.
Artificial Intelligence thrives on three elements: Data. Compute. Connectivity.
COVID accelerated all three.
Cloud adoption exploded. Digital payments scaled. Telehealth normalised. Remote work redefined collaboration.
Governments digitised citizen services at unprecedented speed.
Was it preplanned?
That question will echo in conspiracy forums. But history often shows that crises accelerate trajectories already in motion. The AI race between nations did not start with COVID.
But COVID removed friction. It compressed a decade of digital transformation into two years.
In boardrooms across the world, CIOs who were denied budgets for years suddenly got approvals in weeks.
“Business continuity” became the strongest argument for digitalisation.
And AI? It was the silent beneficiary.
Facial recognition improved with masked faces. Speech models adapted to remote acoustics. Fraud detection evolved with surging digital payments. Healthcare AI advanced with real-world pandemic data.
If AI could speak, perhaps it would say:
“Thank you, humanity.
In your isolation, you trained me.
In your crisis, you fed me.”
But the story does not end there.
The same data that accelerated intelligence also amplified questions —
Privacy
Surveillance
Digital inequality
Ethics
Power concentration
COVID may have been a catalyst. But what we build next is a choice.
The pandemic forced us to go digital. The AI era will force us to go responsible.
History may one day record COVID not only as a health crisis — but as the moment humanity unknowingly fuelled the machines that will shape its future.
And perhaps the deeper lesson is this:
Technology does not wait for comfort.
It grows in disruption.
The virus locked us inside.
But it unlocked the data age.
Disclaimer : Conceptualised by Jayjit Biswas