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Technology adoption surged during 2020, but evolution didn’t so much and not in all areas, Milind Borate, Co-founder and Chief Development Officer of software-as-a-service unicorn Druva, said at a virtual session of YourStory’s Future of Work 2021 Summit on Saturday.

Milind said adoption and evolution are the two wheels of technology and they feed into each other. As the technology evolves, it becomes feasible to do certain things and it is then adopted by people and industry. 

He was addressing the session, “How one year of the pandemic created a 10-year tech leap globally” on the final day of the fourth edition of the summit.

When technology is adopted there is more investment and more requirements go into its evolution. This quickens the process of evolution, he said. Different consumers of technology — individual, business, and government — define how the adoption will grow and this goes hand-in-hand.

“When you look at adoption at an individual level, typically they optimise for a tactical benefit,” Milind said. “If there is a technology that makes it easier for me to do something today, I am going to start using that technology and also there is a network effect. Individuals drive the technology adoption, but a large part of it actually comes from the network effect.”

Based on the technology adoption, businesses take a little more strategic view, he said.

“They try to optimise it for business growth; they could also think about investing today and then take the benefit in upcoming years. And finally the government actually goes by the overall sentiments.”

With respect to last year, Milind said the stats bear out technology adoption well: In February, Zoom used to get around 10 million attendees per day; that number soared to 200 million per day the next month. The figure was almost sustained throughout the year. Also, UPI payment transactions in India registered huge month-on-month growth from April onwards.

On how the situation will pan out, Milind said, “Wherever the propensity is higher, even after the pandemic is over I expect that both the technology adoption and evolution that happened will stay on.”

A big shout-out to our Future of Work 2021 Co-presenting Sponsors Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Unique Solutions; Digital Excellence Partner, Google Cloud; Associate Sponsor HP and Intel; and Sponsors: Atlassian, Freight Tiger, Archon I Cohesity, TeamViewer, and Pocket Aces.