Credit: Sebastian Derungs/WEF
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made a prediction on Tuesday that “over 50 per cent of business travel and over 30 per cent of days in the office will go away”.
Speaking via livestream at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference on a CNBC livestream to host Andrew Ross Sorkin, Gates acknowledged that the event itself was being run in person.
“Yes, you flew all the way here to sit in front of me,” he said, calling it “the gold standard”.
But Gates said the pandemic had changed things permanently.
“There will be a very high threshold for actually doing that business trip and there will be ways you can work form home a lot of the time.”
At the end of October, Microsoft announced that its Teams videoconferencing platform now has 115 million daily active users, up from 32 million in early March.
Gates, whose foundation is working on a Covid vaccine as well as other global heath issues, said he regularly flies to New York for pharmacy round tables but all five this year had been done virtually.
On a podcast this week with Rashida Jones, he said, “I haven't been to the foundation office or on a business trip since early March.”
“Most of my time would've been going on business trips, doing a lot of conferences about the various diseases and raising money for helping the developing countries, and sitting in the office together with colleagues. And so my life has changed utterly. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit there's parts that I kind of like.”
“Iit's a simpler schedule. You know, if I do drive somewhere, there's no traffic. Business trips, even though I'm one of these macho people who says, ‘Okay, I'll get on a plane and go see those guys,’ that is disruptive to your being thoughtful, getting reading done, you know, your sleep gets disrupted.”
Gates admitted to Sorkin at the Dealbook conference that he had not made any new “business friends” since the start of the pandemic.
He said, “The fact that the software doesn’t have any serendipitous thing of people you run into after the meeting [means] there is some work to be done there. There is something missing there.”