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Intel CEO: COVID is 'just a huge accelerant in the digitization of humanity'

In a new interview with Yahoo Finance anchor & Editor-at-Large Brian Sozzi, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that the coronavirus pandemic will have an irreversible impact on the digital world — making lasting changes to work, health care, and education.

Video transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Pat, if we're sitting here five years from now having this conversation-- hopefully it's in a studio. I'm not sitting in my home studio. Let's just call it that. Obviously you can see my sink a little bit behind me. But what--

PATRICK GELSINGER: Hey, I'll take a cappuccino there, if you don't mind.

BRIAN SOZZI: All right. I could duly get you one very quickly.

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But, you know, what is-- what do you think the long-term impact of the pandemic is going to be on society and even the tech sector?

PATRICK GELSINGER: So, you know, unquestionably the tech sector has seen a large accelerant from COVID, right? And we've seen-- you know, part of the reason we have the semiconductor shortages, you know, demand was increasing for semiconductors 5-ish percent. COVID moved it to 20%. Wow. You know, an enormous acceleration. It disrupted supply chains. They went negative for a year, right, and now we're building semiconductor supply. This year, we'll increase 15%.

But an extraordinary acceleration in technology, and we all know that, right? You know, our kids are going to school online. You know, we're all working online more. We're educating online. We're seeing more cloud services, you know, Grubhubs and everything. You know, deliveries are-- you know, every aspect of our life has become more digital, and it's accelerating.

And it isn't just some of those, you know, I'll say consumerish things, but how do you think mRNA happened? I mean, it took us 35 years to create an influenza vaccine, right? We created mRNA-based COVID vaccines in under a year. This is because of computing technology, because of digitization of health care and medical research as well. So it's this extraordinary accelerant of the digitization of humanity.

And as we think about that, you know, when we're sitting here five years from now, there's going to be these things that we would have never dreamed of before. You know, if you say over the last 20 years, my iPhone and my social experiences, et cetera-- we're going to have many of those that become, hey, you know, yeah, I go to the office every-- you know, once a month. You know, we go in for our team sprints and things, but otherwise I work where I want to work because it's so productive, so effective, such an improvement in the quality of life. We don't think we ever go back, right, to saying we all show up, we all burn, you know, hours a day in commute traffic. You know, that's the exception, not the rule.

You know, we're going to see an explosion in how we educate online, how we provide care online. You know, these social systems are going to settle into our lives as we mix both physical as well as virtual. I call it the "phigital," right, experiences of the future.

So we don't think there's a going back. It's just a huge accelerant in the digitization of humanity.