Investors are hungry for a COVID-19 vaccine that can deliver a return to normal. That day may never come.

“We’re recovering, but to a different economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said during a virtual panel discussion hosted by the European Central Bank earlier this week.

It’s clear the pandemic has accelerated the use of technology, remote work and automation, Powell said. This will have lasting effects on how people live and do their jobs.

What comes next?

While advances in tech are generally positive for societies over the long term, on a short-term basis, they create disruption.

“Even after the unemployment rate goes down and there’s a vaccine, there’s going to be a probably substantial group of workers who are going to need support as they’re finding their way in the post-pandemic economy,” Powell said.

Such anxiety is shared by top business leaders as they look ahead.

“If there is a resurgence of confidence and growth, my concern is how evenly distributed [it is], and who gets left behind,” Viswas Raghavan, JPMorgan Chase’s chief of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, told me in a interview this week.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have already made changes to their business that will reverberate long after the pandemic is brought under control.

Take Disney, which reported its financial results on Thursday. The entertainment giant, which has had to delay the release of expensive blockbusters and shutter its parks for months on end, swung to a loss of $2.8 billion in its most recent fiscal year. The previous year, it hauled in $10.4 billion in profit.

Disney isn’t just sitting on its hands, however. During the pandemic, the company has made big investments in its Disney+ streaming service, which now has nearly 74 million subscribers. Last month, it announced an internal reorganization that moves the service toward the center of its media empire.

“I think you’re going to see that we’re going to put a lot of wind in the sails of our Disney+ business and heavily invest in it,” CEO Bob Chapek told analysts on Thursday.

The need to pump cash into new parts of the business has costs, though. Disney has announced layoffs of tens of thousands of workers this year. Lower-paying roles in the company’s parks division have been particularly vulnerable. Disney has indicated it could eventually rehire workers, but has not made any firm commitments.

Powell worries some Americans may be left behind. On Thursday, the central banker said he’s particularly concerned about where “relatively low-paid, public-facing workers in the service sector” will find themselves after the crisis.

“Those people are going to struggle to get back to work in their old jobs, or in many cases in new jobs,” he said.