Futurist Keynote Speaker Patrick Dixon -Future Trends: 15m users, Futurist speaker videos of keynotes. Ranked one of 20 most influential business thinkers.

The Truth about COVID - Part 2. Impact for next 12 months by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist, physician. Why Apple unable to innovate in lockdown. Impact on banks, insurance, real estate, virtual working, offices, travel, tourism, marketing, health care

Here is the truth about COVID. The bad news and the good news.

For many years I warned as a global futurist and physician about risks from new global pandemics such as COVID.

And many of my forecasts since the COVID pandemic began have turned out to be correct.

Yes COVID is a massive global menace and we have very far to go in overcoming COVID, but the world has not come to an end.

Separating FACT from FICTION

Many existing trends have been accelerated but the fundamentals drivers of the global economy have not changed.

Trends that have shaped our world step by step over the last 20-30 years have not suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke.

And human nature endures as the greatest constant of all: needs, hopes, dreams, desires and fears.

So what next?

(Written July 2021)

Future of Telcos - phone companies, next-generation telecommunications, winners and losers in post COVID global shakeout, mega-mergers, controlling the world's bandwidth and smartphone platforms, e-commerce and mobile payments - keynote speaker

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Telcos had a massive boost from the COVID pandemic. I work with many of the world's largest telcos. They all benefitted hugely from instant shift towards virtual work, virtual social life, virtual entertainment and virtual leisure. Huge increase in spending on personal bandwidth, increased use of personal devices. Huge increase in corporate spending on enterprise wide virtual working tools, upgrades of video conferencing equipment, upgrades in bandwidth with increased dependence on video

If we ever realised our total dependence on high bandwidth, it was at the moment that the world plunged into lockdown. Internet access or speed was no longer the issue, rather continuous, uninterrupted high bandwidth to allow high quality video links. However, the telco industry faced fundamental issues before COVID, and these issues remain.

Over 90% of all web traffic is now video in many developed nations - COVID just accelerated a long trend. It is already the case in the UK that BBC iPlayer, NetFlix and YouTube alone account for more than 60% of the nation’s web traffic. A single 2-hour video is equivalent to a hundred million emails, or days of voice calls. So forget charging for voice or anything else – costs are dwarfed by streaming video. Data on mobiles will increase 1000 fold in the next 5 years, on 50 billion mobile devices connected to 5G, running at 10gps or higher. That means an entire high-definition movie will download in less than 3 seconds. So telcos will be forced to focus on new kinds of business, for example cloud services for larger companies.

Future of Medical Tourism - $40 billion a year industry, over 11 million people travelling to other nations for lower cost hospital treatments, health care, dentistry or cosmetic surgery. Organ trafficking. Medical tourism will grow to $130bn by 2025.

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Health, Coronavirus Speaker Future Pharma Keynotes

One way to reduce health costs for individuals, insurers or government is to move patients abroad for treatment, and we will see a lot more of this in a world beyond COVID.

‘Medical tourism’ is already a $40bn industry, growing 20% a year, with over 11 million people annually travelling to another country for private treatment, and possibly convalescence in a nice hotel. The market could be worth over $130bn by 2025.

The savings in all types of medical tourism can be huge: private health care in Brazil is only 25% of the cost in America, India 73%, Mexico 50%, Thailand 65%, Turkey 60%. Within the EU itself there are also major cost differences – for example, dental treatment in Hungary is far cheaper than in Paris.

Future of Education - radical changes coming. Major rethink about how to prepare children and students for the next 30-50 years. Trends in High School education, Colleges, Universities, Business Schools and Post-Graduate Education. Keynote speaker

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The COVID pandemic forced major changes in education, some of which will endure. Over the next three decades, education will start younger in many nations than today. Education outside the home for 3-5 year olds increased by 10% to 85% in OECD nations in the decade to 2016. This will be driven by two-career parents, and by research showing how important early learning is to later success.

School and college is all about preparing a new generation for their own future. In many cases, we will be educating for jobs that have yet to be invented, but most teaching is locked into the past, training for tasks that no longer exist.

Take examinations: how absurd to force young people to scribe indelible symbols onto pieces of paper, and to lock them into rooms without access to their digital brains. Cambridge University is considering allowing students to write exam papers on laptops, partly because examiners can’t read their terrible handwriting. Many other Universities have already started giving permission to write exams answers on computers if people have a disability which means that writing is difficult or impossible. Yet handwriting in exams will still be the dominant mechanism for proving student knowledge by the year 2030 in almost every part of the world. Work means using keyboards, not pen and ink.

Future of Retail in Emerging Markets - Asia, Latin America, Africa - boom of chains and informal retailers - retail trends keynote speaker

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From Uganda to Congo, India to Vietnam, we will continue to see an almost identical retail experience. Almost all shops in the whole world will continue to be the roughly the size of a single shipping container – never much wider or deeper or higher. One outlet next to another for mile after mile. COVID had no impact on this megatrend despite all the media hype.

Such shops, typically with brick walls and tin roofs, are often living rooms of families who own them, and bedrooms at night. Lit by a single light bulb, such stores have an almost identical range of products as ten or twenty other similar shops within a few hundred metres. We see clusters of clothes shops, clusters of metal working shops, clusters of furniture shops. The most important rule in retail location has always been co-opetition. And this will be as true in the slums of a megacity as on the streets of Paris or New York. Jewellers will continue to cluster, fish sellers will cluster. Retail clustering will dominate physical retail globally for the next 100 years.

Malls will take off in all emerging markets. At the same time, expect growth in top-down mass-retailing in emerging markets, despite e-commerce. Big companies will invade a completely new area where there has never been a single store a fraction of the size before. The first mall in a new area will usually be relatively informal, not air-conditioned, housing smaller shops. And then premium malls will follow, identical in many ways to malls in Europe, Singapore, Beijing and North America.