PwC, a leading professional services firm, has made six predictions about the Metaverse and how it will affect businesses in 2023.
The predictions, according to the firm, are to prepare businesses to position themselves without putting their organizations at risk.
While noting that the metaverse is not yet ready for prime time, it claims to be creating real business value today and can help businesses reinvent themselves tomorrow.
According to PwC’s first prediction, businesses will be the metaverse’s power users in 2023. It discovered that many metaverse conversations in 2022 focused on consumers, particularly younger ones, and revolved around activities such as games, virtual experiences, or shopping with cryptocurrency and other digital assets. It stated that while these activities will continue to expand, “we believe that by 2023, business applications will take the lead.”
Driving factors
Explaining the factors that will drive businesses’ usage of the metaverse, PwC said:
More and more companies are starting to simulate physical operations on the metaverse. Retailers, for example, can digitally recreate physical stores, and then let customers and employees virtually try out different configurations to see what increases satisfaction and sales. Restaurant operators can do the same with kitchens and seating arrangements. Manufacturers will use the metaverse’s new data to enhance digital twins in order to improve supply chains, manufacturing, and logistics.
It advised businesses to align their metaverse initiatives with specific, measurable business outcomes, noting that the metaverse can currently deliver common outcomes such as brand building and customer engagement, diversifying and growing revenue streams, workforce enablement, and process optimization.
Trust key to metaverse success
PwC, in its second prediction, said that trust would make or break metaverse success. It said:
We believe that metaverse initiatives will rise or fall even more on trust than on functionality. After all, as a business leader, would you let your organization bring its operations or customers into a metaverse space that offers a whiz-bang experience — but minimal security? Or would you look for an opportunity that lets you feel confident that your company won’t be garnering headlines as the victim of a metaverse scam, security breach, privacy violation, data preservation sanctions or tax penalty?
Some of these threats to trust are familiar, but others are brand new. The potential harm of an abusive experience for your customers (or their children), for example, may sadly be especially great in an immersive, three-dimensional digital world.
PwC further predicts that AI will drive metaverse transformation. According to the firm, artificial intelligence (AI), can draw insights from troves of data and simulations, such as what metaverse avatars buy or do, how they play or work, whom they meet, and how they engage with brands.
AI can make it possible even for those without technical experience to create immersive metaverse experiences. Just as you don’t need to be a coder to design a web page on today’s internet, you won’t need to be a techie to make a metaverse space. AI can also increase the power of “digital humans” — computer-generated avatars that look realistic and, perhaps, inspire people to interact with them as they might with fellow humans.
It further predicted that the metaverse would redefine every business leader’s agenda, adding that it may soon touch upon nearly every aspect of every company. While PwC also predicted that the metaverse would be a force for good, the last prediction was that from next year, organizations would scramble for skills they never needed.
What businesses need to do
Advising businesses to prepare for these metaverse trends, PwC said non-tech executives in organisations will need to work closely with each other and with chief digital, chief innovation, chief information, and chief information security officers, who will be creating (and protecting) your company’s metaverse infrastructure, experience and data pipelines.
To make your metaverse initiative a force for good (and an ally in achieving ESG goals) the guiding principle is the same as for risk management: Design in these priorities from the start. If you embed ESG targets (including diversity targets) and related controls early on, you’ll not only be ready for the future. “
You can teach basic metaverse skills through the metaverse itself, including with off-the-shelf training modules. But for new, highly specialized skills, you may need a more aggressive approach: sending your tech specialists to adjacent fields for focused training, making new hires, and allying with third parties that can provide key skills for you. Critical too is fostering a culture that can attract and engage creative, cutting-edge technologists, it added.
