How technology is helping the post-Covid scale-up

At January’s Passenger Terminal Live event, I was part of a panel of aviation innovators on a panel, discussing the Covid-19 response, the value of innovation to airports during the pandemic, and looking forward to what kind of technology themes we could expect as we (hopefully) move into a post-Covid world.

You can view the panel in the video above. In one of my responses, I talked about how technology will be used to scale up your business as passenger numbers begin to grow, and thought it was explaining what this means in more detail.

As the Covid-19 pandemic broke, most companies scaled down their operations to meet lower or non-existent demand and reduce their cost base. This was about immediate survival over anything else. Yet as the pandemic deepened, it presented many of these businesses with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to permanently modify and modernise their operation for the future.

This might just be the kickstart that automation needs to become a more mainstream driver of business change. As our economies re-open, there cannot be many – if any – enterprises that would want to go back to their costs of old. The two core problems with recruiting human resources is that it is an expensive process and it doesn’t scale very well. Two people can of course, in theory, do twice the work of one. But what if you need four people from one person currently, or even more?

The continued evolution of technology has brought about the Software as a Service (or SaaS) model, which suits scaling up perfectly. Cloud computing underpins most of this and is a prime example; you only need pay a monthly cost for what you need and use. If your business suddenly grew, such as a lockdown being lifted for example, you’d need more of that resource. So you can spin up more capacity, processing power and bandwidth, to accommodate.

In automation, a similar model applies, particularly given that most vendors in this space will be operating a SaaS offering. You wouldn’t buy a new server to go in your office today, and similarly, as and when driverless vehicles become available, you’re unlikely to write a cheque to buy and operate them – they’re much too complex, and would likely need frequent servicing or updates. But again, if you wanted to scale, you couldn’t rush to the shops to make lots of purchases.