Tech expert Wayne Sadin on how the C-suite and board can prepare for the metaverse – Audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview where we look at how big topics will impact global business over the next decade and beyond. Today, we're talking about the metaverse future. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti and I'm joined by renowned tech strategist Wayne Sadin. Who has had a 30-year IT career where he's been a CTO, CDO, CIO and advisor to CEOs and boards. Currently, he's the lead analyst covering C-suites and boards, IT governance, cyber and metaverse for Acceleration Economy. Wayne, thanks so much for joining me today on the program.

Wayne Sadin: Hey, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Kornik: Wayne, you focused on board strategy at Acceleration Economy, and I think there's some skepticism actually out there. Certainly, some uncertainty about Web 3 and the metaverse among that group, right, the board and the C-suite. Maybe there's some hesitation about perhaps being one of the first in the pool, especially if the water is a little too cold. What advice would you give them as they think about their metaverse future?

Sadin: Well, I think the first thing, Joe, is the board at that level needs to understand what do we mean when we say metaverse? That definition is so hazy and so all encompassing. Let's maybe start with that. So, when people think of the metaverse what they think of is the virtual reality headset. So, here is a state-of-the-art VR headset right now. I mean, this new one just got announced. This is what I wear when I want to play. Can you imagine your board director wearing this five-pound thing on their head for a board meeting? I can't. So, first of all, it's VR, it’s AR, augmented reality or XR, extended reality. So, all of these things that involve taking visual and audio and maybe one day, touch, your tactile sensation, and making them available to people at a distance. So, that's one view of it. Another one is cryptocurrency, which is a whole another discussion. Then the third part of it is the Web 3, the underlying technology of the metaverse. Now can you do metaverse without Web3? Yes. Can you do Web 3 without metaverse? Yes. What happens when you put them together is you get something bigger than either.

So, if you're a board, you want to be educating yourself on what is your business strategy relate to in AR and VR, XR all those R things? Are you a game company? Are you a consumer products company where the gamification of your interaction really matters, or do you make industrial widgets and maybe you need something to help train your people or guide the technicians when they're doing the repair. Or maybe you're just a company that wants to get more nimble and be able to react as the economy goes ever, ever faster and faster? Acceleration Economy, where I do a lot of work, is about the rate of change of the world. If the world is speeding up and your technology isn't, you're going to be left behind. So, the first thing you got to do as a board is understand what you mean by metaverse. So, get somebody, your CIO, your CDO, Chief Digital Officer, an outside person, read and learn what it means.

Kornik: Right. They're in a tough position certainly. I know you talk to them frequently and a lot about readiness and where they are in this process. In your opinion, are they ready? If not, what steps should the board be taking to get themselves ready?

Sadin: Boards are generally not ready for the metaverse. Now there are exceptions. Again, there were these digitally enabled companies. There's a whole lot of startups. But I tend to work with what I would call flyover companies or companies making things, whether it's financial services, or shipping, or manufacturing, or healthcare. They're not in the technology business per se, they just use technology. In most cases, companies are woefully behind in technology. The quick example from a couple of weeks ago was Southwest Airlines—technical debt sunk them. They were however many releases behind on a major piece of software, and that crippled them during a time of great stress.

So, my first message to boards—and Joe, it's a message I give boards no matter what we're talking about—is technical debt is an unfunded, generally unknown, off-balance-sheet liability. In many companies, it's bigger than what sunk Enron and WorldCom 25 years ago. If you are a board member, or a CEO, CFO, and you don't know what your company's technical debt is—I'll define it in the minute—you really are in for a world of disappointment. If you've got to respond to a competitive initiative, if you've got to do something around your M&A strategy, growth strategy, whatever it may be.

So, quickly the definition is, technical debt is the sum total of all the technology changes since you put the stuff in that you didn't apply. It's the 15-year-old server, running a piece of software that's 12 releases behind. It's the old mainframe system that is at the end of its life and nobody knows how to program it anymore because they all retired or died. It's the collection of things you bought because you've done 42 M&A acquisitions, and now you have 23 data centers, and you haven't rationalized it. All of those things are millstones around your neck, preventing you from moving into the future. Metaverse is the top-level thing that needs a lot of modern components but just about everything else you want to do, IT gets to say, “Hmmm, I need a couple of years to do that,” or they rush it through and quite frankly, screw it up. So, if you're a board, you should be focused, if you're looking at the metaverse, Web3, on where are we today, versus where we need to be to compete.

Kornik: How should executives be thinking about ROI? I mean, it strikes me that investments in the metaverse may be a long way away about seeing any return on that investment. Will they need to shift their typical timetable or their traditional thinking or metric around ROI for the metaverse?

Sadin: Well, no, I don't think so. Again, if you're a company that needs to be on the cutting edge of some game technology or something like that, you have an R&D budget, and that doesn't have an ROI typically. R&D is what you invest in the hope that you'll get something back out of it, just like the venture capital investments. So, if you're making speculative investments, keep making them. For most of us, if I'm investing in technology—let's talk about a particular thing, augmented reality. So, I'm in a business where I make something and have to fix it. What can I be doing to make my techs better at fixing things? How can I give them the power of visual representation? I've got a camera pointing at something. I've got an AI system behind it, or you know what? Maybe I have a 50-year experienced tech who doesn't want to go out in the field, looking at that camera. Then I take my junior tech and I whisper in their ear with a headset. Go look here first. Go look there second. I once was involved with a system, Joe, where we were inspecting an oil rig kind of thing. Very dirty, very dangerous for people, you have to have a lot of training to go do it. Instead of having to fly senior techs in helicopters, just didn't want to get the helicopter. Have you ever taken the training where you go to an offshore platform in helicopter where they’d throw you in the water upside down? You'll know why you don't want to do that. We could take a junior tech and give them, it was an iPad with a camera, and they could point it at the oil rig pieces and it would tell them what to inspect first, because it was a digital twin although they didn't call it that in those days. It was a digital twin of the platform. So, we made the techs smarter by giving them the ability to visualize the physical environment around them. Then when they got to the component that it said inspect, you could scrape the oil off and read the barcode and it would give you a schematic, “Inspect it this way.” So, there's an investment that creates a tremendous ROI. It also builds a capability because now you can do that, what do you do in your manufacturing lines? What do you do to enable your customers maybe to do that?

So, I want to say, Joe, for a lot of these investments in metaverse—if it's augmented reality, if it's taking data, visual, and audio and superimposing them—there is a tremendous payoff if you have the right infrastructure.

The other thing I'll say is Web 3. Web 3 is about better communication. That's lower latency, higher bandwidth and better connectivity. How do I connect to my techs in the field? How do I connect to my construction sites, my factories, my ships, my trucks, my airplanes, and my drones? If I've got better connectivity, I can do all sorts of things—from telemetry, monitoring the performance, to control, to adding more data capabilities to these products. So, if I'm in making thoughtful investments, let me describe it this way. I call it a brick-in-the-wall strategy. If I want to build the Taj Mahal, I could draw the blueprint and say, 14 years from now, I’m going to have it built. I'd rather draw the blueprint, and then ask my business units to pay for the bricks. So, this brick has to be built before this brick before this brick before this brick, but I may not want to buy any bricks over there, because I don't need them yet. So, I'll say to the board, what is the architecture? What is the business architecture? What is the technical architecture that you're shooting for? And now, how do you invest brick by brick with ROI for the most part, or R&D spending on the other part, to get you where you want to be in a timely manner with manageable risk and decent-to-great ROI?

Kornik: Wayne, let's talk a little bit about those technologies that you mentioned earlier that will enable all of this, whether it's that headset that you showed us a few minutes ago or even generative AI which is getting a lot of press these days. Where do you think we are in sort of the maturity of these technologies, which ones are you most excited about, and when do you think they all come together to deliver what a lot of us think the metaverse could be?

Sadin: Well, until about two months ago, I wouldn't have told you AI was as close to being useful every day as it appears to be now. These multibillion-dollar investments made by the arms merchants, Microsoft and Google and I'm sure others are really changing the landscape on AI now. There's a lot of risk to this. We had the great excitement about generative AI and look all the things that it can do and then we discovered that ChatGPT can't do math. 200 plus 200 is 500. No, it makes mistakes on facts. It was trained weirdly. So, if you are a board or C-suite, and you're using AI, you've got to look at the risk of bias, or have you not fed it direct dataset. Have you fed it a slanted dataset? Have you not included your own information? Or maybe—here's another risk that I thought about—what if your information is leaking out inadvertently, inadvertent disclosure and winding up in some AI model that's letting other people know more about you than you want them to know? So, AI is clearly moving very, very fast. Dare I say maybe a little too fast? Because we don't want to be seduced by the hype.

Back to the solid technologies, it's communications connectivity. It’s Starlink, it’s 5G. It's building software-defined networks. Again, I hate to talk technical to boards and C-suites. Ask your IT department, “ Do we have a software-defined network?” which just means that I can pivot the network very, very quickly. In the old days we bought a thing, we put it into the forklift. When we needed a better thing, we got another forklift. With a software-defined network, if we do an acquisition in another country, we can build the rules into the network very quickly and go live very quickly, whether it's by satellite, 5G, or a hotspot in your hand. So, invest in your communications technology. Again, technical thing. Bandwidth is great, how fast I can push data down the pipe, but latency, how long it takes the message to go back and forth is even more important in the metaverse. If you and I are talking and our latency is very quick, you see my hands move, you seen my mouth move, you see the sensor reading. If latency is long, there's that lag and your drone flies into the wall. Your blade cuts the wrong angle, and your car drives into the pole. So, we got to be fixing latency. Again, a little bit geeky, but it's important to be building the right networks because everything sits on the network.

Then the other one is going to be cloud. Look, I don't want to say cloud’s the answer to all problems. The investments being made by the cloud companies, Joe, and the $50 billion a year and more range means for most of us, we can piggyback on what they're spending and buy a tiny little slice of AI or augmented reality or Internet of Things instead of having to build our own infrastructure ourselves. So, it gives you a tremendous amount of optionality and helps you remove a tremendous amount of technical debt. Because if Microsoft spends $10 billion on AI, which they just announced, guess what? We all get to use it for $1.98 a month per user or whatever the price is going to be. You can't do that if you have to build it yourself.

Then the technology, this thing I showed you here. Until we get away from this kind of stuff, and we start thinking about a projector on your desk that's holographic, or I envision something that maybe you’ll take your eyeglasses and put a thing on your chest with a battery pack that's not sitting on your head and then shine a light up into your glasses and use an interference pattern or do a face mask if you're in an industrial environment. When we can change the physical experience, I think that stuff will take off dramatically. Again, that's not where I'd be making my investment other than in the ability to use whatever technology comes out later.

Kornik: Sure. That teed me up for my last question, Wayne, which is, I'd like you as a visionary, a futurist, and a tech expert to take me out a decade or more. Take me out to 2035 or even 2040 and dream a bit and tell me what's the metaverse’s role and how will it impact our daily lives, our working lives. What do you see when you look out to 2035, 2040?

Sadin: What I see out there 10, 15 years out, is our interaction is going to be very different. Very natural. There'll be a lot of language recognition. There'll be gesture recognition. We won't be wearing these headsets because a little thing we wear stuck in our ear and the frames of our glasses will pick up sound perfectly, will do bone conduction. So, the user interface is going to become much more natural. We won't be getting carpal tunnel syndrome by typing all day. We'll be gesturing, talking, and moving, all the stuff you see in Minority Report is not that far away. The things that move when you move your hands and all that, it's there in some applications already. The communication networks. Again, I keep coming back to that, it's fundamental. If I can't connect, wherever I am, wherever I am, with low latency and high bandwidth, a lot of what I want to do doesn't work well. If I've got five million cars on the road, they have to be able to talk to each other. They have to be able to talk back to the infrastructure. So, we've got to be enabling individually, we've got to be enabling as companies, we got to be enabling quite frankly, as nation states good, effective communication, so that all this stuff can happen. I think it's going to be a life where we have intelligent agents that do a lot more, the Siris and the other products that make your life easier in many cases, and it's going to change the world. One thing we do know is we never know how it's going to change the world but it's going to make us probably faster, smarter, stronger, and more productive, even maybe at the expense of some other things.

Kornik: Thanks for your time today, Wayne. I really enjoyed this.

Sadin: It was a pleasure. Happy to have the conversation. I look forward to follow-ups. If people have questions, engage with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, please.

Kornik: Sounds great. Thank you so much. Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview for Wayne Sadin, I'm Joe Kornik. We'll see you next time.

Matthew Ball on how the metaverse will reshape the future of everything – Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview where we look at how current megatrends will impact global business over the next decade and beyond. Today, we’re talking about the metaverse future.

I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, and I’m joined by Matthew Ball, managing partner of Epyllion which operates an early-stage venture fund as well as an advisory arm. He is a leading global authority on the metaverse and you may have seen him interviewed on CNN, CNBC, VICE, the BBC, or in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and many more. He’s the author of the important and very influential book, The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.

Matthew, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matthew Ball: I’m excited to chat.

Kornik: Matthew, let’s start with the title of your book, The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. You don’t see this as just a Web 3 but rather sort of a watershed moment with almost immeasurable impact.

Ball: That’s quite right. I understand the degree to which the title can seem bombastic. Certainly, it is backed by a number of different third-party perspectives. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, estimates that roughly 50% of world GDP will eventually sit within the metaverse. Various estimates from Citi bank, Morgan Stanley, KPMG run from between $2.5 trillion to $16-trillion-plus dollars by the end of this decade as it relates to the world economy, in contrast to about $102 trillion as of 2022-2023.

Behind this is a fundamental distinction between how we often envision the metaverse—a giant video game, a virtual reality headset—and how the technologists who were pioneering it understand it. That is to understand it as a successor state to today’s internet, not fully replacing the internet as we know it today but much like the cloud and mobile computing era, it builds upon that foundation, TCP/IP forged in the late 70s-early 80s to produce new experiences, that leads to new devices, that leads to new software, that leads to new applications.

When we’re talking about the metaverse, to build it, we are therefore talking about fundamentally overhauling, re-architecting, transforming one of the world’s most important consequential technologies, one that itself has transformed almost every individual market, country, political culture, climate, and the individual—and that’s the internet.

Kornik: Right. For those trying to wrap our heads around its impact, you mentioned some of those forecasts and some of those various estimates. Some of them value the global metaverse economy could be as much as $15 trillion by the end of the decade, by 2030. Is that realistic?

Ball: The fun thing about these forecasts is that they’re really a question of allocation. You realize that we often talk about the digital economy, digital businesses, the internet economy, but no one really says this is the precise value. Why? Because it’s a question of allocation. The UN generally embraces an estimate and says 20% of world GDP is digital but, of course, allocation is the name of the game there. How much of AT&T’s revenues are digital? We know what percentage comes from mobile smartphone subscriptions but, of course, part of that is for voice communications.

When you purchase something from Amazon.com, is that a digital purchase? Is that an internet purchase? The internet is certainly the channel for the purchase but if you purchased my book, it’s a physical book that was manufactured physically. It’s distributed and fulfilled physically. It’s consumed physically. You might say, well, 90% of that is physical revenue, but what happens when it’s an e-book? Certainly, the allocation should change but what is it? What happens when you discover it through social media as opposed to an outdoor billboard?

What really matters about this is not whether or not the metaverse is $2.5 trillion or $10 trillion. It’s recognizing that almost all of the world economy runs on the internet. We may say 20% is digital but the remaining 80%—agriculture, energy, transportation—that certainly runs on the internet. That is certainly digitally powered and to the extent you’re an investor, digital is the growth engine, the opportunity for displacement-replacement. We’re looking at the metaverse as a game of allocation but more important is the transformation of value, both on the increase and the substitution replacement side.

Kornik: Interesting. How far away are we right now from the metaverse being mainstream?

Ball: I want to start by disabusing one of the challenges with the metaverse narrative today. This is an idea that has had a name for about 30 years. It has been varyingly described for close to a century. What’s new, of course, is that we’re talking about it all the time, most obviously because Meta changed its name from Facebook. When most people were building the metaverse a few years ago, they talked about it as a multi-decade transformation. That is my frame of reference. There’s a second cohort that talked about five to 10 years. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg and John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus, talked about it as a five-to-10-year transformation.

But there was another cohort, including Sachi and Adello or Bill Gates, many in the Web 3 community who talked about it as imminent, if not here now. The challenge of that last perspective is, it raised expectations, even though such as Mark Zuckerberg started to lose that battle where people started to say, “If the metaverse is here, why isn’t my life more different? Where are the revenues? What’s the product I can buy and how is it different?” I think of this as a transformation, but what’s most important here, and certainly relates to investors and entrepreneurs, is to recognize that the question of “when is a technology mainstream?” is a bit elusive. It’s actually not that practical a question. Certainly, the timeline matters, but all technologies about when is what available for whom, when, how, and why.

The mobile era began in some regard in 1973 with the first cellular call. In 1991, we had the first 2G network. That was the first digital wireless network. The first smartphone came in 1992. That was IBM, by the way. We had the Apple Newton in ’94, BlackBerrys in the late 90s, the first direct-to-consumer media services in the early 2000s in Japan, but we would really say that for the average person the smartphone and mobile cloud era felt present until 2007, 2008. We have the coincident launches of the iPhone, then Android, then the iPhone App Store.

But even if you say it began in 2007, 2008, the average American did not have a smartphone until 2014. The average human didn’t have a smartphone until 2020, and so for them, it would be wrong to say that the mobile era had arrived prior to, truthfully, 36 months ago. For you and I, Joe, I imagine the answer to the question when was mobile here was probably 1998, 1999, and so that’s how we think about it. There’s a technology question. There’s a demographic question. There’s an application question, and there’s a sector question.

Kornik: Right, and I think some of those, maybe those early predictions around timing and how long before the metaverse became mainstream, might have led to some of the skepticism right now that we’re seeing around the metaverse, some of the stops and starts, particularly among business leaders, I think, you have a challenge. They’re probably not engaged with the metaverse very much at all. How would you suggest they started to begin to map out a strategy around the metaverse?

Ball: I think that’s quite right. The immediacy to which the metaverse emerged as a buzzword, plus the learnings of internet and mobile disruption, led many to start asking themselves the question, “What is our metaverse strategy?”—if not demand outright that they establish one, that they start testing one. The challenges here are the intent is right, but often I found the business leaders didn’t have a good sense of what it was they were trying to establish. What were they trying to solve? What were they trying to answer? What was the problem that, what I would define as real-time 3D simulation technology, could answer? If the question is you want to start a think-tank, that’s a legitimate objective. If you wanted to make a signal to the market, to your peers, to shareholders, to perspective employees about the seriousness through which you are taking this transformation, about your willingness to experiment, that’s all valid. But the broader question is, if you go back to the question, the metaverse is not a when, it’s a when is what here, why, how, and to what end? Business leaders need to start from, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve for?

Often, it’s as simple as establishing a digital twin that aids industrial design and then potentially supplements live operation. That doesn’t require you to imagine a future state that’s that different. It doesn’t imagine or require you to deploy VR headsets. It just requires a focused exemplar and business case.

Kornik: You talked about Web 2.0 and mobile earlier. We saw some legacy companies, well-established brands disrupted to the point of extinction because of it, and we say we saw new companies emerge in that space. Do you expect a similar sort of fate for companies in Web 3 in the metaverse? Do you expect new players to emerge and old, more established brands to maybe go by the wayside?

Ball: Certainly. If you imagine that the metaverse is as transformative as I imagine it to be and the forecasts of third-party agencies are to be realized, then you almost have to imagine that there’s going to be widespread disruption in displacement because the technological platforms and software and services that we use today will change. I imagine this change in five buckets that we’ve seen throughout history. The first of those companies which will perish, they’ll be so significantly disrupted that their business model and going concern evaporate. Blockbuster is a famous example of that. You can think of web crawler as another, and the search engine space replaced by PageRank and Google.

The second or companies which actually do endure but they languish because they’re so far surpassed by another company in that space. Skype and ICQ exist but, of course, the leading instant messaging services of this era are tens if not hundreds of times larger than those services were even at their peak, and that’s partly because they reimagined fundamental premises. Skype was designed to speak to traditional telephony systems. WhatsApp does that, but Snapchat does not. Slack has no interest. In fact, it’s organized around enterprise APIs. Of course, Instagram reimagines it as a picture-centric medium.

The third category or companies which do port over and indeed grow because the TAM (technology acceptance model) in the digital economy has grown, Disney is not of the digital era but it’s larger and reaches more customers because of it. Apple was reinvented in mobile and is larger because of it. Facebook was threatened by mobile and, of course, predated it, but it reached 2 billion daily active users last quarter because of the lack of constraints that mobile offers in contrast to PC.

The last two categories, however, are my favorite. The first are those companies which are displaced in their core business but grow because of growth in what used to be their side arms. Microsoft is the classic example. Microsoft has never had a smaller share of computing operating systems than it does in 2023. At one point, market share was as high as 96%, including mobile. Today, it’s less than 10% in the Western world and 5% global. Yet Microsoft reached new highs because of its horizontal services which no longer reached just 100 million Windows users, but potentially billions of mobile users across multiple different operating systems. IBM is more valuable than ever, even though it has been decades since it held the dominant position in computing devices for the average person.

The last category are the new entrants who take advantage of this new platform and the new generational shift to displace some of the aforementioned companies. Right now, we see that most classically is Google in the PC era, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, TikTok in the social and mobile and cloud era. Right now, we’re making hypotheses as to what the new metaverse services and platforms will be.

Kornik: Matthew, if I could ask you a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario for the metaverse future, I guess what I’m asking is what could go right and what could go wrong?

Ball: When we talk about what could go wrong, there are really two different questions. One is to talk about the impediments to actually constructing the metaverse. The internet was commercialized after it was established and indeed, it was established around the premise of exchange. That is what the internet is. The term comes from internetworking. Really, we had a fleet of standards and protocols which supported myriad different use cases. The idea that AT&T, Telefonica, IBM, Verizon, Comcast, China Mobile can all exchange an email with the same structure, none of them actually managing the global system for email, is remarkable. Of course, many of these companies try to have their own de facto networking standard.

One of the things that can go wrong is not that the metaverse doesn’t happen, but the various for-profit initiatives and endeavors mean that where it is established, it’s limited and therefore, while we talk about the internet and the software layer on top of it, it’s perhaps possible that there’s very little commonality for the metaverse. This pollyannish ideal of an interconnected 3D simulation is not possible, just the limited exchange of information with highly siloed and comprehensive but for-profit kind of islands within it. You’ll see that from the 70s through the 90s, there was an expectation that’s what the internet would be, we’re very fortunate the internet was not, but that doesn’t mean that history will repeat.

The second thing that could go wrong is to understand that there are many downsides with the internet as it exists today and the metaverse will challenge many of them. Most of us are dissatisfied with the role of algorithms, the contribution of the larger social platforms to our state of mind or well-being or happiness. I would certainly say that data rights and data security aren’t what they need to be. More broadly, we still contend with harassment toxicity, mis- and disinformation, and radicalization on the internet. Going to a live shared, more global, 3D-immersive experience will not make those problems easier. It will make them harder, and it will also deprecate some of the best practices that we’ve established over the last decade.

In addition, some of the virtual reality and extended reality devices and technologies that we envision will produce very severe challenges. Right now, many of us contend with the fact that Siri listens to everything that we say, but Siri doesn’t see inside your home. It doesn’t see your tax returns. It doesn’t see your children running through the home. Trying to figure out how we progress, how we regulate, how we figure out what the requirements should and shouldn’t be, that’s going to be a real challenge, and I do think that there’s a way in which we can fear that outcome.

But if you ask me what can go right, look, the internet has been not perfect—far from it—but I would certainly argue it has done far more good than ill. It has certainly given voice to billions who lacked one before. It has made the global economy more competitive and fostered greater openness. But we discussed earlier that many companies may be displaced by the metaverse. That means their business models, their philosophies, and their leaders will as well. It’s very hard to affect change midcycle because of the entrenched leadership, but to the extent in which we’re dissatisfied with the metaverse as it exists today, I actually think that the swap to a next platform, plus the learnings we have as consumers, developers, users, governments, affords us a rare opportunity to reset the internet as we know it today to be a better one in the future.

Kornik: So interesting. Matthew, last one for me. Envision, if you could, 2035. Let’s go out more than a decade. Can you give me an example of something that perhaps I haven’t thought of that will just blow my mind?

Ball: Well, I can’t speak to what you haven’t thought of, but I can tell you that the category that I am most hopeful about is education. Education is a really important category for a few different reasons. Firstly, its value is self-evident but it’s worth highlighting that not only is it a substantial portion of the U.S. economy. You’ll note that it is actually the single sector of the U.S. economy which has seen the greatest cost increase since the internet was formalized in the early 1980s. Costs are up about 1,400% to 1,500%. In contrast, healthcare, which many consider to be an albatross on the economies, up half as much. It’s still crippling 600% or 700%, but education is twice as bad. That’s because, for all of the benefits of the internet, it hasn’t meant that we can actually teach cheaper than ever before. We don’t teach faster than ever before, and we don’t teach more effectively a larger number of students than ever before. If we want to solve for cost creep, we also need to find a way to change that dynamic. I’m further hopeful that we can finally start to address some of the longstanding hopes for what the internet might bring, which is not just better cost. It’s greater quality and broader reach.

Today, your access to education is primarily limited to the wealth of the school board, the geographic availability of that school board, and the teachers which happen to live there, and that we’re talking about a primarily American concern. Certainly, if you will live abroad in developing markets, really none of those three things are even questions, and we know that just on-demand video on YouTube or digital multiple choice does not really close that gap.

When I think about the metaverse, the idea of virtual classrooms with nearly infinite zero-to-no-cost marginal goods and experiences that have a sense of presence—you can see your teachers’ eyes; you can look to your right and see your peer; you can dissect a feral cat or a dog or an elephant while also going Magic School Bus and traveling in circulatory system. Test physics on the moon and Mars. Go into a volcano as it erupts into the atmosphere, and then be dispersed as particles to understand its impact on the climate. We’re talking about some things that we don’t want to do. Dissections, certainly of some animals we don’t want to dissect, ethics around that, but more importantly, just the availability of these resources. I think idea of making more personal, lower cost, immersive experiences that untether us to resources and geography, that’s what matters to me the most, certainly.

Kornik: Yes, fascinating. Matthew, you’ve given us a lot of think about here today. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate the time.

Ball: My pleasure. This is a lot of fun.

Kornik: Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. For Matthew Ball, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.

It's a brave, new, immersive world, with media and metaverse expert, Luke Franks – audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource looking to the future to examine big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today we're exploring the metaverse and its impact, and I'm excited to be joined by Luke Franks. Luke is an advisor, speaker and presenter who has fronted shows for ITV, BBC Radio One and Sky, as well as branded content for the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Spotify. He hosts the hugely successful and I might add outstanding “Welcome to the Metaverse” podcast where he interviews some of the brightest metaverse minds each week. Recently named one of the top metaverse thought leaders and content creators worth following, Luke's insights have been featured on Vice, the BBC, Talk Radio, and in The Athletic. I'm so happy to have him here with us today. Luke, thanks so much for joining the VISION by Protiviti podcast.

Luke Franks: Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Joe Kornik: Luke, I’m turning the tables a bit on you here as I know you're usually the one asking the questions. Let me just start by saying I absolutely love your podcasts and your takes on the future of internet culture, Web 3.0, and the metaverse. I've spent a lot of time listening over the last several months to your “Welcome to the Metaverse” podcasts. I've learned a ton by listening and you're obviously a big believer in the metaverse and its almost unlimited potential it seems. It’s impacting nearly everything we do so let me ask you why. Why do you believe in the metaverse? Why do you think it's sort of a can’t miss?

Luke Franks: Yeah. Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it. Yeah, we’re at a really interesting time I think. What's really happening here is a combination of trends that are all colliding at the same time or about to and we're also at a point where I think there's enough evidence, enough kind of network effects to sort of confirm this fundamental shift, and that's happening in a couple of ways. I think the first is a move towards a more immersive experience of the internet. So from primarily kind of a 2D experience that we're all familiar with on websites and scrolling on our phone and that kind of thing to a more 3D experience in immersive worlds, probably as avatars as we go explore these new places and spend more time there and socialize there. We'll talk about more of that in a second. So there's the experience kind of shift that's happening, and then there's also this native kind of digital ownership layer, which is really crucial to what's happening as well, and that's kind of the Web 3, the blockchain, this sort of NFT component that's in its early days really as well.

So we’re certainly not there in that full vision yet, there’s plenty of work to do and there will be still and there has been obviously lots of failures along the way, plenty of volatility, skepticism. All very normal with kind of big technology technological shift like this. I see it really is as not dissimilar to the adoption of the internet the first time around. A new kind of fundamentally game-changing technology that went through these cycles, these human cycles of fear and greed, boom and bust, but ultimately sort of completely changed all of our lives in varying degrees. So I think that's where we are now. We can kind of dive into that a bit more detail as we go.

Joe Kornik: I'm curious though when it comes to its overall sort of global economic impact, the forecasts are sort of all over the map, right? They range from somewhere around $1 trillion US all the way up to like $15 trillion by the decade’s end. Where do you see the metaverse in terms of its global economic impact by let's say 2030?

Luke Franks: These huge numbers get thrown around obviously a lot. It's kind of hard to quantify, but it's to do really with the scale of what's happening here. So if we look at some evidence, what's happening in a new sort of parallel digital economy and what the next generation is growing up with as well, they're native to it. So Roblox is a good example. Roblox, for anyone who doesn't know but I'm sure plenty of people do, is a virtual world. You go in, you choose an avatar, and you go and explore various kind of mini worlds and mini games and kids are going there to kind of socialize and hang out, all the things that—when I grew up with the internet, I would wait on MSN over an evening waiting for my friends to come online and sort of chat to me. Now kids are avatars and hanging out and socializing and playing in these virtual worlds. If you're a parent, you'll probably know because your kids will be asking you to buy Roblox vouchers so that they can go and buy digital fashion items for their avatars in these worlds. Things that they care about. They care what they wear and look like there.

But yeah, if we look at some evidence, Roblox has about 50 million users a day which is pretty wild. That's a big number. The most visited experience has been played 30 billion times now just recently, which is very well when you think that the most watched YouTube video has been watched 11 billion times, so the next generation are already in this virtual world hanging out there and going back to play with their friends there. As I said, kids massively value their digital identity there. $1 billion plus is spent per year on this for kids buying kind of fashion items and this sort of thing. Over half of all US kids play Roblox every week. So that's what one example of what's happening. Fortnite is another kind of a blend of game play and social virtual worlds. A good example there when we’re thinking about like the scale of this digital economy, is virtual events that happen there. So there was a geek, a rapper called Travis Scott did a virtual show as an avatar there. Twelve million people attended because it was rolled out across the globe at various different times and he reportedly netted about $20 million from those performances, which was the equivalent of doing about 10 back-to-back physical arena shows for him as an artist, so you can begin to understand this kind of scale of digital assets and experiences around the world in these virtual worlds.

So next generation are growing up natively to all of that. They understand that straight away. If we're thinking about the sort of transition of these stages of the internet and where we're going, people talk about Web 1 as to sort of read-only layer of the internet, the kind of you'd hit a website and get back information. People talk about Web 2 as the sort of read-and-write layer where we were able to edit and send information and have things like social media and Wikipedia. This kind of group knowledge on the internet that we could edit. Now we're going towards what people are calling Web 3, this sort of ownership layer in these digital assets at scale. So yeah, that's the key thing, it’s the scale of where these valuations are coming from because it's a pretty big shift.

Joe Kornik: Right. You talked a lot about gaming there. Clearly I think gaming has been the big winner so far on the metaverse or the big entry point for most especially from a generational standpoint, right? The metaverse has really grown. Obviously with VISION by Protiviti we're focused on how business leaders and people much older than those people essentially playing games, or at least most of them, will be using the metaverse. So I'm just curious, are there business lessons to be learned from the success that gaming’s had in the metaverse? How do you sort of see that from a business leader’s perspective? What can they glean from the success of some of those companies you just mentioned?

Luke Franks: Yeah, 100%. I think a lot of this does come from gaming roots, right? Gaming is the biggest entertainment industry on the planet. Bigger than music and film put together. Interestingly as well, the average age of gamers is around 31, so there is this younger Gen Z generation growing up native to it, but there's also a slightly older generation who spend a lot of time playing games as well. When we look at the metaverse, now your brands can fit in there. I think there's also an interesting distinction between gaming and gamification as well, right? We can take some of the things that work in gaming and kind of bring them into this new more immersive world. I'll use Roblox again because there’s a lot of evidence there, but a company brand that has done really well—Nike has built Nike Land in Roblox and it's really interesting because you can go and experience a whole world. They've brought their brand in. It's kind of a sports-themed universe, sort of Nike Disneyland, if you like, where you can go and play, socialize, you can go and collect coins, and there's little gamification mechanics inside that world that keep people coming back, that's why the stats are so big in that world. People want to come back and they want to unlock these things and kind of level up and stuff like that.

So for a brand that’s looking to sell their product, whether it's natively digital or whether it's something that starts digital that they can then also link to a physical item as well or whether it's a marketing play or whatever it is, think about these gamification kind of loops and hooks, and customers spending more time in a brand world is a really attractive thing. It’s a way to kind of really engage people in a new way. There’s lots of kind of interesting examples there. H&M have done it well recently, allowing users to go and co-create with some of their items, digital fashion items in this world. Chipotle did kind of a maze in Roblox as well, so people had to kind of unlock things. Even kind of legacy artists as well, people like Elton John are beginning to reinvent themselves in this new explorable world for a new generation and a new audience. So yeah, it's a big opportunity thinking about it in that way.

Joe Kornik: Yeah. So interesting. I think one of the most exciting aspects of the metaverse is sort of the emerging technologies that enable it and all the new things happening. You mentioned some of them there. When you look at it, what are you most excited about?

Luke Franks: At the minute, a lot of the experiences are on devices that that we know, right? So on a desktop computer or on a mobile. That's where people are. Everybody obviously has a mobile in their pocket, so being able to kind of interact with these worlds in a familiar way is where we are now. We're seeing more consumer VR headsets begin to roll out. So Meta’s Quest 2 has been the one that's been there that’s sort of triumphed where it's been actually making its way into homes. It outsold Xbox in 2021 for the first time ever, so we're beginning to see that finally VR sort of have a piece of the pie in a consumer way.

There's rumors around Apple releasing their mixed reality headset, so the kind of augmented reality layer of stuff I think will get really interesting next year where it’ll be a headset, but you'll be able to see the physical world as normal. It kind of adds layers of reality on top of that, which I think is interesting, so they're kind of happening slowly and that's growing as well. AI has really come into the public consciousness recently with things like ChatGPT because it's so tangible. You can go and use it and that’s a whole separate conversation on its own, but yeah, we're at sort of 0.001% of what AI can do and how it's revolutionizing sort of workflows. If you've not played with ChatGPT, just Google it and go on it and you can ask it anything. It's like having an assistant that has a hive mind of all the knowledge in the world and you can begin to get it to think about SEO for you or come up with a business plan and then you have the art tools where you can create these incredible art pieces and things like that.

I think that all plays into this bigger trend of more immersive worlds that we're shifting to. If we think about going into these worlds, we're going to need the content there and users will build some of that and AI tools will help build that. We're going to need a lot of content. It’s going to need to be immersive and fun and constantly kind of updated and AI has a role to play there as well. So that's all happening. I think it'll be interesting if Apple do drop their headset soon. That may be the next inflection point. If Facebook changing their name to Meta was the first one, perhaps the Apple headset is the next one.

Joe Kornik: Well Luke, you certainly spend more time in the metaverse and these virtual spaces than I do and probably more than most people I know. I know you own digital real estate and NFT horse racing stable and lots of sort of rare digital sneakers so I'm fascinated by this. So for the skeptics among us, including I think plenty of business leaders, and there's a lot of skepticism out there in the business community, help us make sense of that. Are those just sort of cool things to own? Are they investments? Are they just for show? Should businesses be buying digital assets? Should I be buying digital assets?

Luke Franks: Yeah, understandably a lot of skepticism and for good reason as well. Even when there was a big technological shift as I say, greed comes in as it always does for these kind of cycles and we get way ahead of ourselves and things need to correct and go back to a phase of building actually good things with good utility that people want to use, and that's kind of the phase we're in now after kind of the massive hype. In terms of the investment and the NFT side of stuff, where there’s understandably a lot of skepticism, I think it's like any investment really. You have to spend a lot of time doing deep research sorting out the wheat from the chaff of which there is a lot of but understandably and totally agreeable, 95% of it is probably nonsense at this point, but understanding what assets have significance and potential value, why the creator or company’s story is important and relevant and might have an asymmetric return in a digital-first economy if that's the way that we are seeing this trend go. So some of my bets. Yes. Some are for fun, like the horse racing stable thing is, I think it was run where you can own and breed your horse and go race it online. It's kind of ridiculous but kind of interesting and the DNA of each of the horses gets passed down to the child one. It’s mad, but it's fun and interesting and cool. There’s a whole art scene as well, so I have something called a Chromie Squiggle, which if you Google and you look at you'll think, “What is that?” but has a place in the history of generative art on the blockchain proving the uniqueness and using a certain technique. It was one of the earliest ones. So like lots of art, it’s disruptive and weird and people criticize it at the beginning, especially in a big art move, but if it has relevance and historical significance, well maybe that's a bet. Then we talked about the sneakers and stuff like that and that’s kind of a bet on the culture.

There’s a company called RTFKT as it’s stylized, which got acquired by Nike at the end of 2021. They are really pushing the forefront of all these trends that we talked about, this kind of gaming culture, people valuing digital assets, and sneaker culture in this kind of new breed of internet culture there, so there’s some historical releases there. Nike, we're going to move in this space. They had a plan to release something called crypto kicks sneaker. This was all part of what they wanted to do, but kind of RTFKT, this company came along, did it first, and so Nike acquired them in the end. We’re starting to see kind of digital sneakers linked to physical ones as well, so you can kind of connect them and see your physical sneakers story through the digital side of stuff as well. So it's these two things coming together, so that's kind of why where my bets are. They’re few and they're concentrated.

Yeah, that’s my view, is that there's some asymmetric returns here but as always, all the standards are things apply of not financial advice and all the rest of it, but that's kind of my approach from that.

Joe Kornik: it's so interesting. So shifting back to business leaders because I really think they are confused about where they sort of are in this point in time. They're being asked about the metaverse, they're probably making decisions about investments in the metaverse, both capital and resources, time, infrastructure. Clearly the metaverse was hot, then it was not. There were some layoffs. There's been some investment, probably not a ton of return so far. So what advice would you give an executive trying to figure this all out?

Luke Franks: I think if you really want to get ahead, spending some time if you can to understand the technology and how it works at a basic level is really important because once you understand what's happening here and—I can give the very quick example of how I explain NFTs to people—is generally, if you think about a physical item that we all agree is valuable. So if you take the Mona Lisa for example as an art piece and you ask why that is, “Why is that valuable?” It’s kind of valuable for three reasons. The first is that we know who the creator was. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most famous creators or artists of all time. That story is important there. We also know that that piece is scarce, right? There's only one Mona Lisa that was ever created in the world. We also know who owns that now—the Louvre in Paris, right? We have kind of three criteria therefore what we agree on has physical value. Blockchain, on a technological level, is for the first time ever enabled that same criteria in the digital world so we can now prove who created something, the fact that it's unique and scarce, and track the ownership now, so that's kind of the revolution.

The reason why people got so excited about this was like, “Okay. We can prove value in the digital world.” That doesn't mean everything is going to have value because if your story is not important, then so what? But understanding a technical level is helpful I think because it kind of clicks the pieces together.

I think then go and experience the culture with an open mind if you can. Talk to your kids or young relatives about what they value and why. Why do they want Roblox vouchers for their avatar, and through different generations it might be hard to understand. It’s hard with music moving maybe from physical CDs or cassettes into digital music. Feels like you're not holding anything tangible but those shifts happened, right? It's happening again here as well. So spending a bit of time in the culture and understanding what people value in the space with an open mind I think is important.

hen think about what your product or your service might look like in a more digital and immersive setting. How can you offer that in a way that doesn't alienate your current customers but might be exciting and new and open new avenues in the digital world? Once you've done all of that, then I think you're kind of positioned to make a smart decision about where you fit. I'd say move quickly but thoughtfully and get educated first I think it is the way, especially in this phase now. The hype is kind of moved on a little bit, so it’s a good time to just get educated now and begin to research and plan.

Joe Kornik: Yeah. I think that the danger is thinking, perhaps on some level, too far ahead, right? There are things that could be happening in the short term. Are there short-term business/short-term gains that could be had in the next 18 months or so rather than thinking about the metaverse is something that's a decade or a decade before we see the full impact of 3D and all this sort of various things that come along with that?

Luke Franks: Yeah. I think we've been through some of the evidence that's there. If your product or service fits in that and you maybe don't want to go fully deep into the whole blockchain space of releasing your own NFTs and you need to understand why you would do that, you need to understand that you'd be building a community around this stuff that's tradable. If you're not ready to kind of go there, maybe you dip a toe in the centralized options that are there. These virtual worlds, maybe do an activation and experiment with it for a few weeks and see, “Do I get that engagement back? Has it been helpful? Has it sold products?”—whatever it is, and maybe try it there temporarily without going to spend millions by buying land in one of these worlds that's in a very early phase. So I think going to the place where the evidence is to experiment is probably a good thing. If it was me and I'd be hiring somebody into, or getting somebody in to go through this, and through the education, and through what's happening, and through the culture of the space just to make sure it's not running away from you, but you don't have to put all your eggs in your basket and make some outsized bet if you don't fully understand why I think is the key thing here.

Joe Kornik: Last one for me. Now I am going to ask you to sort of think a little further out if you could. Give me your vision of this space whether we call it Web 4 or Web 5, I don't know what's going to be called a decade or more from now. Let's go out 10 years. What do you see in this space or in the metaverse in 2033?

Luke Franks: Yeah. Huge question. I think anyone who says they know is lying because nobody for sure does know. I think we'll probably see the metaverse adopt, in a similar way to how we saw the internet adopt the kind of first time rounds, except much faster because when the internet was adopting, we didn't have the information rails of the internet, right? So we're moving faster and all the technological shifts are happening in a short amount of time and AI is going to supersize all of that and make everything faster than before. It doesn’t mean there won’t be volatility and we won’t get things wrong along the way, but I think it adopts this experience of a more immersive internet and digital assets and people caring about adapts more is going to adopt, first with the younger generation and the early adopters who are already here and that's already happening, and then gradually through the older generations to a lesser extent exactly like the internet did.

But I do think the dawn of AI can't be overstated really. I think my big predictions is that it's not really going to fit into the models of society that we have now. It's probably going to reorganize it in ways that we can't fully imagine yet. I think it'll be a lot of controversy, a lot of misinformation, a lot of volatility, but also loads of positive outcomes that humans are bad at predicting as well. We always jump to the kind of the fear and crave safety with any shift as well, but I think there is lot of good will come from all of this. That is happening now as well.

Those that learn about it and—adapt now have the most upside potential for sure—but in time I think the digital economy will become more valuable than the physical economy because of that scale that we talked about at the beginning. It’s just unrivalled, right? You can't possibly recreate that in a physical way, so the scale of digital assets being sent around the world with no physical product that's needed to ship them and it's tradable on an open marketplace all the time, I think that will happen in time. But ultimately yeah, I hope that our digital lives will be will be richer, more social, and immersive. There'll be better experiences. It's not about replacing physical reality, it's about replacing the hours on end of scrolling on the screen on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever you do, replacing that with a with a richer, more social experience, right? We’ve seen the trend towards less unnecessary work travel and less physical goods. That can be a good thing. Hopefully we’ll have richer digital lives and hopefully richer physical lives in a more sort of sustainable way as well. Or I think AI will destroy us all, so time will tell. We’ll see. [Laughter]

Joe Kornik: Well on that note, Luke, yeah, I think we'll wrap it up there. Thank you so much. This was fun. So enlightening. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Luke Franks: Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it for having me on and it's been really fun.

Joe Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to check out all the metaverse content we have at vision.protiviti.com. Also you should certainly look in on Luke's podcast, Welcome to the Metaverse. We have a link to it in his intro and bio and in the show notes as well. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

How we’ll work in the metaverse with futurist Jennifer Vessels, CEO of Next Step - video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, a global content resource looking to the future to examine big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the metaverse and its future impact, and I’m excited to be joined by Jennifer Vessels, a futurist, transformation advisor, CEO of Next Step, and founder of the Executive Growth Alliance, an innovation ecosystem of top companies. Jennifer has worked with Adobe, Cisco, Google, Genentech, G.E., Novartis, and many others where she advises executives on how to leverage the latest digital, technological, and societal trends, including Web 3 and the metaverse, to become future-ready. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jennifer Vessels: It’s great to be here. I’m looking over to our discussion.

Joe Kornik: Yes, me too. The idea of future-ready is what VISION is all about, so I’m really excited to talk to you today about the metaverse and how companies can leverage it to become future-ready. I’ve read all sorts of forecasts, and I’m sure you have as well about the metaverse and what it all means to the global economy over the next decade or so. What do you think ultimately will be its impact and when will we see that impact?

Jennifer Vessels: I believe it will have a significant impact in the next one to eight years, in particular, and part of that comes from just looking at the way society is evolving. If we think back 30 years ago at 1992, which seems like a long time ago but really 30 years is not that vast, at that time that was really the beginning of the internet as we know it and what I would call Web 1 that allowed us to communicate with people in minutes as opposed to days or weeks to send communications. That evolved over 10 years to Web 3 or the World Wide Web, which is basically what we’ve been using over the last 20 years that has, I believe, fundamentally changed  the way business works. It certainly changed the way each of us as individuals live, shop, access entertainment, travel, experience one another, and we really saw that during the pandemic that the World Wide Web was our lifeline.

Through the last five years, a new infrastructure has evolved, building on what we have today but progressing to Web 3, a new evolution that allows for more immersive experience, not just reading, not just looking, but experiencing. That takes everything that we’ve learned through gaming, takes the AI capabilities that have been developed, takes what we know about human behavior, and brings it into a whole new level, which is what I find is referred to as the metaverse where we can interact through digital tools in a new way. That is built on this Web3 infrastructure, which is a redesign of the internet using cryptography, using very advanced algorithms to allow people securely to be able to digitally connect, interact, transact, and conduct business. That I believe will become more and more prevalent in all organizations over these next one, five, eight years such that when we get to, let’s say, 2030, the metaverse-type of environment will become an integral part, possibly the entire part, of many organizations, industries and the way we work.

Joe Kornik: You described yourself as a future-ready innovator and a futurist and you’re exactly the type of person that we need, that we should be talking to for this particular topic, the exact type of person that we need to offer us some insight as to where this is all going. How will we work in the metaverse? What do you think is possible? What do you see businesses doing to enhance their brand in the metaverse?

Jennifer Vessels: One of the things I am most excited about with the concept of the metaverse is the fact that it will reduce borders. It will allow people anywhere in the world to have access to others anywhere in the world in order to explore, to research, to develop. There is a concept in use today in a lot of advanced corporations of a decentralized autonomous organization or a DAO. Think about IKEA as an organization that is developing future-ready textiles based on sustainable products. They can now not only have people working in Sweden, but easily have people that commit on a shared contract with shared ownership in the Philippines, in Africa, in Poland, in Turkey to develop new capabilities. The concept of the metaverse and Web 3 will allow a more secure way of interacting with people outside of the borders of location or even corporations. These can be new ways of extending the concept of a skunk works, let’s say, allowing for more diverse values.

Now, that also brings up a number of questions around governance that honestly have not been fully explored or any standards developed of, what are taxation requirements? What does ownership mean? There are a lot of these questions that need to be explored but I think will fundamentally change the way we look at how we do business with one another.

The other aspects are just around areas such as, for example, education. Education up until today is still a very traditional way of having either students in K through 12 or adults coming into a corporation, sitting into a room and listening to people talk about what you should do. Through Web 3 and metaverse types of applications, people can experience. On-the-job training can be done from one’s living room before they start the job. They can be experiencing and role-playing and dialoguing and working with a digital twin of the kind of equipment they will use. Children will go to school from wherever they are, experiencing what it was like to be in the world of the dinosaurs, to live through periods of apartheid, so it will fundamentally change our understanding because we will have a different level of experiential education for people coming into the workplace but also in the workplace itself.

The other area that I believe will fundamentally change is the concept of finances. Today, in our capitalistic society, everything is about an exchange for money. As we move into metaverse Web 3, the type of exchanges that we do are more towards tokens, which could be a bitcoin. It could be this concept of an NFT, a non-fungible token that allows you to exchange a representation of something. Maybe there are ways that we can leverage tokens that go back to sustainability. I think over time, maybe 10, 20, 30 years, that our concept of value and how we exchange value for products and services can evolve in whole new ways by getting out of this concept of dollars versus euros and borders and structures. It’s a much more open, embracive and diverse way of exploring and working together.

Joe Kornik: What other industry sectors or disciplines do you think will be most enhanced by the metaverse?

Jennifer Vessels: I think across all sectors, the customer engagement will be broadened significantly because as customers, we will have access to anything, anywhere. The financial sector will shift completely, where banks, as we know it, financial institutions will need to embrace a new role of helping people redefine wealth, helping people redefine their options and transactions. Education, we talked about. Manufacturing will evolve. We’ve just only begun to start a tiny little bit on things like 3D printing, but think about the ability to be able to have anything you want created wherever you want it. Heavy industries such as oil and gas, some of the sea exploration, even farming—concepts where we used to have people go out on the platforms in very dangerous conditions, we can minimize that today by having digital twin so people can be in a safe, secure environment while controlling the fertilizer that’s going into the ground or the type of pumping that’s happening in the subsea station.

It will fundamentally change I think the way we all interact with one another, with business, with finance, and with the planet, but one thing that I do want to point out is, while I talk about these changes with technology doing more and more for us, I believe it’s going to make the concept of people and the value of people even more important because technology is that platform. It is the foundation of the park. The swing sets and the tools on the playground, they are the tools that in order for us to experience and evolve, we as people need to develop our unique skills of communication, of problem-solving, of understanding how to leverage these tools, understanding how to bring people into the environment. I believe there is an increasing role of need for high people skills while we relegate some of the more mundane, some of the more dangerous, some of the more challenging fundamental physical processes to the technology.

Joe Kornik: Right now, business leaders I know are struggling with, as they think about the metaverse, all of them are sort of being confronted with the metaverse and being asked about the metaverse or where their business is going in the metaverse. I’m curious, your thoughts on how business leaders should be investing in people and resources, how they should measure ROI on those investments. Where should they start and what should they be worried about? What are the red flags that they should be looking at along the way?

Jennifer Vessels: The biggest red flag would be to sit on the sidelines and wait and see, which is, I think for a lot of people, the first tendency. The best thing that a leader can do is to indeed lean in and embrace the concepts, not only research and listen to a webcast and interviews but actually start trying something. Get a pair of 3D glasses, whether it’s Quest or Oculus or whatever it is. If you have young people in your life, they’re using those kinds of tools. They’re in gaming. Jump in and play with them, begin to experience. Set up a digital wallet. It doesn’t matter which type of bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but the experience of setting that up, go into a Web 3 application and purchase. For a small amount of money, purchase an NFT, sell it to somebody, just to get the experience, because this is the kind of environment that you need to embrace. It’s immersive. You’re going to learn by trying.

I find in the companies that do lean in and are in a good position to start using and leveraging this technology, the leaders are experiencing and the leaders are also encouraging their team members to take time, to take time each week to try something different. Encouraging lunch-and-learns, web sessions, let’s experience and let’s explain and let’s work together on what we’re learning because this is a whole new world and the only way you can get there is to go through.

Talk to your customers. Talk to your customers about what they want. Are there areas where you could possibly start doing some immersive training with those new hires? The digital natives that are coming into the workplace now, anyone under the age of 35, they’re going to demand access to these kinds of tools, so start with them. And that can be in on-the-job training. It can be in marketing to those folks. Talk to your marketing teams about creating an NFT that could be used in some of the social media outreach, a great way of engaging the younger consumers.

Start small. Start small, try something, explore, experiment. I believe the next one to three years is going to be a very exciting time, a time when we’re all learning and learning together so that in five to 10 years, we really have that opportunity to embrace and use what we’ve learned to move forward in a whole new future-ready society.

Joe Kornik: Jennifer, I have one more question. You’ve been very generous with your time today, so I appreciate that. I think it’s a fun question. You just referenced the one-to-three-year window get us ready for the five-to-10-year window. I’m wondering if you could even go out further than 10 years and take us out a decade or more and tell us something about the metaverse and its overall impact.

Jennifer Vessels: Well, considering the speed of technological growth when we look at things like AI and the ChatGPT and a lot of these technologies, I would say in another 10 to 15 years, let’s say in 2035, 2040, we will look back to these conversations and say, “Wow, we were very, very antiquated.” At that point, I would envision that we will be able to reach anyone, anywhere. Travel will be redefined completely. We will have access to experience the beach even in the midst of massive rainstorms. It will be a special experience to go and be in a physical environment. Our work will be completely redefined. It will not be a nine-to-five. We will work when we feel we need to, when we feel it’s part of our mission, when it’s part of our passion. We will no longer measure ourselves by exactly what’s in our bank account, but by what our impact is on the planet and we will have access on a global basis to the right resources, whether it’s healthcare when we need it, whether it’s education for our children, whether it’s new opportunities or new research capabilities that will be available to us.

Now, there may be some people that choose to stay in only the old physical environment and that’s okay, but for those that really want to embrace, I believe, will be able to have a much freer, much more integrated, much more sustainable in many ways because our work will be giving back to society and creating more value for the world but also involving the planet because that’s becoming more and more apparent that our society and the way we involve one another has to give value not just to us but on a broader scale.

Joe Kornik: Right. Well, it will certainly be a different world and I can only think that will be a better world.

Jennifer Vessels: I certainly look forward to that.

Joe Kornik: Thank you, Jennifer, for joining me today.

Jennifer Vessels: Thank you. It has been wonderful to be here and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our dialogue, and I look very, very forward to seeing you again somewhere in the physical world or in the metaverse over these next decades.

Joe Kornik: It might be our avatars meeting up for a coffee somewhere in the metaverse [laughter]. Thank you for watching. For Jennifer Vessels, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.