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.

The Economist’s Dexter Thillien: Key findings, forecasts on the metaverse future - video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti Interview. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource looking to the future to examine the big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today we're exploring the metaverse and I'm excited to be joined by Dexter Thillien, the Lead Technology and Telecoms Analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit to discuss the metaverse and its impact on global business, including some key findings of research the EIU conducted on the topic. The EIU is the research and analysis division of The Economist Group, providing actionable insights and helping to identify opportunities, trends and risks for business leaders in a complex global environment. Dexter, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dexter Thillien: Great to be here.

Joe Kornik: Dexter, you specialize not just in the metaverse of course, but in sort of a unique space, the intersection between technology, strategy, industry, and geopolitics even. Now, the metaverse means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and we can certainly talk about some of those other definitions or Web 3.0 or XR, AI, 5G, blockchain, but let's start narrow if we could. How do you and how does the EIU define the metaverse and sort of where do you see it fitting into that strategic space going forward?

Dexter Thillien: So we actually have a pretty broad definition of the metaverse. We kind of define it as being an online immersive world leveraging external reality, which can be augmented or virtual reality. You will also be using a lot of different technologies, so we're talking artificial intelligence, we're talking cloud computing, we're talking edge computing, digital twins, the most advanced form of connectivity, so just 5G and fiber, and even crypto-based technology if we start to talk about Web 3.0. So we’re kind of looking into it as a way of the new paradigm in terms of what it is in terms of technology and new ways of doing things to kind of being far more online and new ways of using the internet. So it's kind of a very, very big and it's also something that's going to be used, as you mentioned, not just for consumer, but also for enterprise and obviously, policy makers will look into it as well with greater scrutiny than they might have done in terms of other technology in the past. This is a big paradigm, potentially a very, very big shift, and this is what we're looking into even though it's still a fairly niche technology right now.

Joe Kornik: Right. I know the EIU has recently published some research on the metaverse about its potential impact, investment, usage and how it differs from some of those other technologies, for instance, Web 3.0. What were some of those takeaways and key findings from that research that you could share with us?

Dexter Thillien: Yes. So the metaverse is one of our main key themes for 2023. So we released our “Industry in 2023” white paper, in which we’re the part on telecoms and technology and we’re going to see that [Unintelligible] AI, semiconductors, as well as consolidation in the overall telecom sector.

As I said before, we don't expect it to become a mass market technology in 2023, but we do expect investment to continue to flow. What we highlight for 2023 is kind of the move towards great [Unintelligible]. It has been the metaverse [Unintelligible], so that's going to be a very important development there, potential use cases on the enterprise side, and obviously as well the difference between the metaverse and Web 3.0. While we're seeing the overlap, they’re distinct concepts. Web 3.0 is obviously based on decentralization, and this is ownership around different users, and this can happen outside the metaverse and we've seen it with finance and also de-fi, so decentralized finance; whereas the metaverse can be centralized potentially, so the different types of metaverse is possible. So we're trying to highlight the differences because sometimes they tend to confuse a fair amount of people.

Joe Kornik: I'm just curious, I know that research is a little more near focused. In Vision, we like to look 2030 and beyond or even a decade out, which is difficult to do with something like the metaverse. Do you have a time frame on when you think that the metaverse will be sort of a big game changer for businesses? I mean how far out do you think we need to look for something like that to happen?

Dexter Thillien: I think it’s going to be during the decade it becomes a major technology or major new paradigm. I think for me, it’s important maybe to look back in terms of where we see the metaverse fitting in terms of the evolution of technology and internet. So if you think of the PC era, late 90s-early 2000s, we had dial-up, broadband for kind of a broadband connection, which has created a boom as well as a bust and kind of a lot of different application and companies coming to the fore. So Amazon, Google, and Facebook were created during that first era.

The second era was probably smartphone and mobile connectivity, so in the 2010s, 4G, 5G coming in and led to the creation of kind of apps that we're using everyday—Uber, Instagram. If the metaverse has some of these proponents, say, is becoming kind of that third stage or like kind of third evolution of the internet or technology, so this is a vessel to use of external reality and if it's on par with the previous two, you can see that the impact would be enormous. What we're seeing right now, which I think is very important, that a lot of companies are investing quite a lot because nobody really wants to miss out. Nobody wants to be left behind. Even though it might take a bit of time. It might not happen in 2023 even in 2024-2025 or be towards the latter part of the decade, nobody wants to miss out.

Joe Kornik: Sure. You mentioned those conversations. I'm sure they're happening in in corner offices right now in C-suites and at the board level about steps they should be taking. So what is your advice to business leaders? What should they be doing right now to prepare for that inevitable future?

Dexter Thillien: I think overall, business leaders should be ready to use technology and apply digital transformation solutions. I think we've seen since Covid, so since 2020, it has become a matter of when, not if and I'm very biased because I'm a tech analyst, but when, not if digital transformation will happen and this will occur because eventually every company will become a tech company. I think the metaverse is one of the ways business leaders can transform the company, both internally and externally, but I think it's important not to maybe look at the metaverse as kind of a new shiny technology to be using or try to be kind of ahead of the competition, but to understand why they want to use a metaverse. Just think of outcomes as opposed to technology.

In my view, a successful digital transformation process, you can have the metaverse as part of it. It's about knowing what you want to achieve as a business as opposed to using a specific technology. So if you want to use a metaverse for a specific goal and it’s a critical goal for your business, start looking into it and see how you can apply it to your technology, for your company internally with your employees, so you can apply it externally with your client, but if it's just using the metaverse to put out a press release saying, “Company X is using the metaverse. Look at how advanced we are,” but there's no kind of plan behind it, that's probably going to end up in failure. So knowing what you want to do, the right outcome, and looking at what the metaverse can do, that's the way for me for businesses to think of the technology right now.

Joe Kornik: That's interesting. I think that's one of the big questions around the metaverse is how will it be used? How will it be utilized? Who will be the winners and losers? So when it comes to how businesses will use the metaverse and again, we can look a decade out or more or however long you think before it really becomes a game changer for business, what do you envision?

Dexter Thillien: Yeah. So if we’re seeing the metaverse, as I mentioned, that kind of surge power sway of the internet to do certain [Unintelligible] internet, you can see the implementation is going to be huge. So just an example, maybe you can split it between consumer metaverse, enterprise metaverse, and industrial metaverse. So consumer, or you buy and sell, or you attract new clients, especially younger demographic which are probably going to be using kind of virtual reality or that type of reality a bit more, social interaction, any types of event and entertainment you can think of. Gaming is obviously a big one. In terms of enterprise, about collaboration, training, and education within the company—very, very important. In terms of industrial, kind of maybe operational improvement and kind of development. So maybe a few examples, just the things we’re seeing. In terms of education, we're seeing kind of a fair amount of different schools or different universities looking at augmented reality/virtual reality as a new way to teach different topics.

That kind of leads into training. We think kind of using virtual reality for ongoing training development. So in healthcare, we learn to do specific surgery using a virtual reality handset. You can relate to travel. It can relate to defense, manufacturing, anything you can think of. Digital twins, which is a kind of a virtual replica of the digital asset, again, multiple applications in many, many sectors. We're seeing increasingly metaverse real estate happening, so this is obviously to highlight new product and services to a new range of different users, so the younger demographic targeting there, and a couple of companies specific example of what company have been saying looking in terms of the metaverse.

So Accor, which is a big hotel chain headquartered in France, they're looking at the metaverse as a way to being able to visit the hotel before you go, visit a specific room, look at what’s around the hotel and all the different amenities, so kind of a new ways of doing things with much more virtual, much more immersive as opposed to reading them on the screen or seeing them in the video. You also have Disney. So Disney has a big streaming service with hundreds of millions of users. It also has parks, which also has tens of even maybe hundreds of millions of visitors coming, kind of the metaverse can be the bridge between the two so people that can’t really visit the park physically, they might be able to visit the park virtually at least for certain amenities there.

So there's a lot of different ways and because it's a very, very new, I'm sure I'm going to miss a lot of them and again, if you go back maybe 10 years in terms of what we're doing with smartphone now, what we thought we would be doing with smartphone 10 years ago and not for other things that we couldn't even think of could happen. If it does become that mass market technology, that kind of new paradigm in terms of the internet, there's going to be an awful lot across the board—internal, external, consumer, enterprise, industrial. A lot of new ways of doing things going forward, so it could be a very, very big change for other companies and companies will need to know what to do and we need to implement those changes as well.

Joe Kornik: Sure and the possibilities seem endless and I'm going to ask you about that in just one minute. That's going to be my last question, but my second to the last question is about skepticism because there is quite a bit of skepticism about the metaverse out there. So I was curious to get your opinion on that. Is it warranted? What are some of the potential pitfalls of the metaverse and are there things we should be worried about or things that we should be pumping the brakes on a little bit about the metaverse in terms of whether it's cyber or some other potential pitfalls?

Dexter Thillien: Yes. I think it's right to be skeptical. I prefer to call it realistic. In terms of potential issues of any technology because nothing is ever perfect and always positive. I think for the metaverse I probably can highlight four different ones, which I think are worth looking at. The first one is hype. So very often in the tech world we tend to over hype the technology saying it’s going to change the world and sometimes it never actually does or sometimes it actually takes a bit longer than expected. There’s a famous quote which says that, “We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.” So for instance, if you look at blockchain, I've been hearing about blockchain for the past 10 years. Ten years ago it was going to be that huge new thing that everybody was going to use. It hasn’t really happened. There's some very interesting use cases happening, but it hasn’t become that mass market technology so maybe the metaverse has some very, very nice use cases for certain areas, but doesn't become that kind of mass market technology, that mass market paradigm we're expecting right now.

The second would be kind of a lack of standards in interoperability. So if you want to be an early adopter and if you use a standard that's going to become very obsolete very quickly, that's an issue because you're investing into something that basically stops existing very, very quickly. And you can also have potentially your creation of multiple metaverses according to the modern uptake, if you have systems which are way too different, not standardized, not working with each other.

That kind of leads to a third point, which is regulation. Regulation because technology is not geopolitical and strategic, so if you talk of geopolitics, lack of standards. If you have different standards between different countries, that’s kind of an issue, but also strategic, policymakers, politician regulators are scrutinizing the tech sector even more. So issues relating to ethics, to the competitive landscape, to content will in my view be looked at much more closely than they were in the past. So that's something to look into as we develop the technology.

And I think probably a fourth one, you mentioned cyber security, its always going to be an issue with any kind of technology going forward, but I think—and the final one I want to add—is sustainability. Climate change is the issue of today and if you're talking about the mass market metaverse, it's likely to be using far more data and far more energy, and that could potentially lead to a backlash if the use cases aren't made in terms of the positivity or if the use case is a bit frivolous. People would say, “Why are we spending so much energy and so much data to do that when climate change is an issue?” So for me those are the things to kind of look into and to make sure as we develop the metaverse that those issues are being resolved and solved after.

Joe Kornik: So, Dexter, last question for me like I mentioned is about a future world. So if you could take me to 2035 let's say—and there's been a lot of projections and forecasts about what the metaverse could be, its economic impact or the type of jobs or whatnot—I'm just curious to see your overall thoughts. If you could take us to 2035 and tell us what kind of world will we be living in in terms of the metaverse and its impact on our daily lives and specifically our businesses going forward.

Dexter Thillien: So I think if the metaverse becomes from what we expect it to be, we’re more likely to be living far more virtually than we are right now. That doesn't mean 24/7. I don't think we're going to the world where we're going to have a headset any time we’re awake during the day. I think that’s going to be probably a bit weird and probably going to come far later. I think again, it's important maybe to look at the past and try to understand what the future might look like. So I mentioned those three stages earlier and I want to focus mainly on the second one in terms of the mobile revolution in 2010. So we got the first iPhone in 2007. The first 4G network became available around 2010. It was still not very clear where it was going, but this has become ubiquitous and I think if you look at the iPhone, which I think for me it's always something I look into in terms of development of technology or far technology or important technology can be—the iPhone with a revenue of about $20 billion between 2007 and 2009, so doing quite well, but not super high. $30 billion in 2010 starting with 4G, $60 billion in 2011, $85 billion in 2012, and now we're talking about $200 billion in 2022. So this is probably the best case scenario for the metaverse.

There's a drive towards that goal, but this is kind of the best case scenario so we’re kind of going into world the same way that the iPhone or smartphone has become ubiquitous, the metaverse and having augmented glasses or headset that you're using at home or at work to do meetings to do training or to learn or even to watch content. Instead of watching Netflix on the screen, you're watching Netflix on the headset. This is kind of the best-case scenario in terms of where the metaverse, so living in a far more virtual world, far more opportunities to do things, far more kind of 3D as opposed to 2D. So this is where we're going. If you look at the iPhone, which is kind of the best case scenario, again, we've seen the growth going from $20 billion in the first three years to $200 billion a year in just over 15 years, which is not that big of a period of time. So this could potentially happen with the metaverse if everything falls into place.

Joe Kornik: Thanks, Dexter. So a game changer or niche product?

Dexter Thillien: For me, I think it's probably more likely to be a game changer than a niche product because everybody is looking into it. Everybody's looking to invest into it. There's clearly demand in terms of—the first version of the metaverse is happening in terms of gaming which are very successful especially with younger demographic and it’s going to be the one driving it in 10–15 years’ time. The people who are teenagers now are going to be the consumers of tomorrow, within that timeline and they're going to be doing - living in terms of the virtual world that maybe people from my generation which [Unintelligible] smartphone. So I do think we’re probably more likely to become a game changer because a lot of investment, lot of potential demand, and companies are going to want to try to either retain their strength and retain their position in the market or some new ones are going to try to become the new big companies or the new big tech companies from the 2020s and 2030s. So I would say game changer.

Joe Kornik: Thanks for those insights, Dexter, and of course the insights from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Always great to hear your thoughts on the metaverse. Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. For Dexter Thillien, I'm Joe Kornik. We'll see you next time.

Customers will lead companies into the metaverse, says Coupa VP for Africa and the Middle East - podcast 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 and examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide.

Today, we’re exploring the metaverse and its implications for business, and I’m very excited to welcome longtime technology expert, Julie Tregurtha, to the program. Julie is Area Vice President for Coupa for Africa and the Middle East, where she heads up a team responsible for the promotion of Coupa, a software company based in San Mateo, California. She has been a leader in the IT industry for more than three decades and resides in South Africa. Julie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Julie Tregurtha: Thanks, Joe. It’s lovely to be here, talking to you today from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m really excited about this conversation we’re going to have.

Joe Kornik: Right. Julie, you’ve been a leader in the IT industry there in South Africa for over three decades now, so there’s a lot about technology that I’m curious to drill down and ask you about, specifically about the metaverse. There are many implications to the metaverse, right, and there are technologies that will enable it. We’ve heard a lot about them—Web 3.0, XR, AI, 5G, blockchain, etcetera. The list goes on and on. Which ones are you most excited about as we start to move into the metaverse, and why?

Julie Tregurtha: Joe, I think you’re right. There’s a lot of different aspects to the metaverse from a technology perspective and, actually, all of these pieces have to come together because it’s not going to be underpinned by one thing. It’s going to be underpinned by so many different pieces and elements. It’s hard to pick one that I think is, for me, most exciting but I think the one that maybe we just relate to the most is the XR piece, extended reality—everything from what we understand as reality today through the spectrum of augmented reality and  virtual reality, and I think along with that, the devices and the hardware and the capabilities that you’re going to have through different XR technologies that are really going to open up this new world of the metaverse to us as consumers. Maybe that’s the piece that I found most intriguing for me to get excited about.

5G network, it has just got to be there and it has got to work, but it’s not something that you’re necessarily going to touch and feel. It’s more an enabler, so perhaps that’s why I feel that the XR piece is the most interesting. Having said that, all of these aspects have to come together, work together and, obviously, reach the right technology level that they need to be at in order for the metaverse to really become something that’s real.

Joe Kornik: Right, and that’s interesting because XR, certainly, there has been a lot of advances over the last several years. There has been some—I think as those devices get smaller and more user-friendly, we’ll probably see a lot more adoption. I think we tend to think of them from a gaming standpoint, but I’m more curious about how you think businesses will use the metaverse and particularly maybe they’ll be using XR, I’m not even sure, but what are some of the ways that you think strategic business leaders will be leveraging the metaverse?

Julie Tregurtha: I think it’s really exciting. We’re right at the beginning of that journey. If you have a look at the metaverse up to now, it has certainly occupied a bigger role in the consumer space. Companies that are starting to experiment and invest in this are very much consumer-related businesses—FMCG, retailers, big brands. Those are the first movers, but it’s definitely, in my opinion, not going to end there, and I think that irrespective of the industry that an organization plays in, I don’t think they can ignore what impact this is going to have on their market, their customers—whatever those customers look like and how they behave and interact with those customers—but they’re going to have to consider this. I think that there’s so much opportunity. I think there will be so many use cases across different industries that will emerge. They’re not necessarily known yet. They’re not necessarily documented. Nobody has necessarily put those out there yet, but I think as we move more and more into the space that the use cases will come out that we maybe don’t even think about today.

The one that I think as well pops into my head because it’s cross-industry is training. If you are trying to train using this type of technology internally to train users, train your employees in something, and it could be anything, whether it’s putting together the components of a product that you created or if it’s in a healthcare industry and you want to practice how to do a heart transplant, it doesn’t matter. I think there’s going to be a lot of cases where the metaverse can be used for training, education, learning more of how the world operates in a particular business.

Joe Kornik: I have to say when I talk to business leaders, there is a lot of—maybe not a lot— but there’s a fair amount of skepticism out there about the metaverse and its overall impact, and I’m just curious your thoughts on that. Is that warranted? I’m just curious when you think about if you’re talking to business leaders that are a little bit more skeptical about the metaverse, what do you say to maybe ease their minds?

Julie Tregurtha: My view is I don’t think it’s warranted. I don’t think it’s warranted, and I say that because I’m fairly comfortable that this is going to be a wave that is going to come. It is definitely going to come and it’s definitely going to impact and affect everyone in terms of the way that we operate in our world. Yes, it’s complex. It’s very undefined. You look for a definition of the metaverse today and you come up with so many different things. It’s vague. It’s confusing. There are very few people that really, that even ask me to understand this whole world. It is actually quite overwhelming.

I think that’s where the skepticism is coming from. It’s more based on a lack of understanding and a fear perhaps than based on any justified view that this is just really going to remain something that is going to be out there but it’s not going to affect me. I think that it is coming, and I think if you have a look at some of the big organizations that we know have a massive impact on all of us—Apple, Meta, previously Facebook—these organizations are investing, Microsoft, they’re all investing a huge amount of money in this wave.

It is maybe still regarded as hacked. There are views that it’s a metaverse bubble. It’s not going remain out there as just a peripheral thing. I really do believe that the—maybe we don’t know what the full impact is going to be today but it is absolutely going to be part of our future world.

Joe Kornik: That leads me to my next question. I was going to throw around some of those global economic impact forecasts, right, for the metaverse for, let’s say, 2030 and beyond. They’re all over the map, everything from a little under a $1 trillion to all the way up to $15 trillion, depending on which particular study you look at. Would you categorize on the scale of the metaverse being sort of a nice complementary niche platform for some companies to take advantage of versus all the way to a revolutionary game changer for global business by 2030 and beyond, where would you fall on that spectrum?

Julie Tregurtha: I believe it’s going to be a revolutionary game changer. My caveat is, in your question, by 2030, I think that is the piece that I wouldn’t necessarily hang my hat on. I do believe it’s going to be a revolutionary game changer, but I think it might take a slightly longer timeframe to get there to that point than 2030. For many, many years, the way that we discovered and purchased and consumed goods and services was through physical interaction. It was visiting a store, picking up a product, touching and feeling it, attending an event, or booking a service, and that was the way we did things. Then the internet came around and e-commerce platforms started to pop up and rival the offline world.

Then what happened was we got hit by COVID. COVID really changed everything and if you look at—and I’m mentioning this because I think it comes back and touches this, why a revolutionary game changer. If you look at what happened with COVID and how it changed so many different elements of our lives, physical stores closed and the only way that you could really purchase anything was on an e-commerce platform and it became the sole portal to purchase and to get goods delivered. Social engagement was restricted to telecommunications and social media networks, and obviously, COVID also changed the way that we work. Companies had to switch over to Zoom and Teams overnight from being office-based, face-to-face, and onsite.

Other industries, the entire entertainment industry came to a massive, just at complete standstill. And even manufacturing industry, factories were closed and plants shut down because they laid off workers. You think about the changes that we’ve gone through and how those things managed to create a drastic shift in the way that we do things. Now, the world has semi-returned to normal and yet I’ll bet you that most people are still engaging with the e-commerce portal to do their shopping. They’re still working on Teams and people are not back in the office full-time. The adoption of this technology was kind of all forced, forced because of circumstances. We had to find a way to keep our lives and our world running, even though we were all locked up into our homes. I think the metaverse really points to the next kind of generation of that, the next creation of an alternative solution to the way that we operate to really enhance how these technologies have impacted our lives by taking them to the next level.

Joe Kornik: Right, and you’ve mentioned several sectors and you’ve mentioned some service lines like supply chains and from a sector base, we’ve heard manufacturing, we’ve heard healthcare. We’ve heard some potential success stories. Do you have any thoughts on what sectors you think have the potential to be the most disrupted or transformed by the metaverse?

Julie Tregurtha: Joe, I think that it’s going to fit all industries. I think any industry that thinks they’re free from being affected by the metaverse is going to be naive in their thinking. I do think that the B2C type of industries are going to land up looking at this first because, again, it’s “Where does their target audience hang out?” If you have a look today at where people are hanging out, it’s quite extraordinary already how many people are visiting some of these metaverse worlds and how many hours are being spent, perhaps not by my generation but certainly some of the Gen Z and even the Gen Alpha, the next generation. In fact, it’s quite scary I think how much time is being spent there.

I think that the B2C, the organized, there are industries like FMCGs, the big brands, the retailers, if they want mindshare, brand awareness, they want to find subliminal ways of reaching their target audience, it’s already happening. They’re already doing this. Samsung has bought land in Decentraland. J.P. Morgan has opened a virtual bank, and there are other examples. I think there are definitely industries that are going to go there first and go there early.

I think the entertainment industry is going to be looking at this in a big way. Fascinating that Justin Bieber did a metaverse concert in 2021 and attracted 10.7 million viewers. I think it’s definitely the entertainment industry and events industry which was so badly hurt by COVID, so I think for them, it’s not only a way maybe to recover but also a very interesting way to reach a much larger audience than what they were traditionally if they were trying to do just a Madison Square Garden concert.

I think there is then the opportunity in the corporate space and I think if you have a look—I mentioned J.P. Morgan, so FSI, financial, banking, insurance—those organizations are often quite forefront of adopting technology. They’re often quite pioneering. They’ve got the pockets, deep pockets to look at how to invest and how to better service their customers. Maybe it is more around trying to create a far better service-oriented environment for an experience for their customers.

I think the other one which is really interesting, I mentioned healthcare from a training perspective, but there’s talk about Philips as an example, creating their own corporate metaverse, which really becomes a destination for patients to go and get access to virtual healthcare, and I think that’s really interesting. That is really exciting.

Joe Kornik: Right, and Julie, thanks so much for all this great information. I have just one more question for you. I just want to wrap up by asking you to look out into the future 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, as far as you want in terms of when you think the metaverse will really be making a major impact on all of our lives. Paint me a picture of what’s possible. What am I missing, like what aren’t we thinking of?

Julie Tregurtha: I think the view 10, 15 years out is a scary one and it becomes a controversial one because you have this potential vision where people sit in their homes, in their lounges, with their virtual reality headset on. They go to the office, their virtual office, and they sit in a boardroom and have meeting with a team but they actually don’t leave their lounge. When they want to buy something, they go to the virtual mall and they go and try on clothes and check out the new latest coffee machine and experience the latest set of golf clubs and then pick which one they want to buy. They don’t even have to go on holiday because they can go and choose to walk the Great Wall of China or go up the Eiffel Tower or go look at the Niagara Falls and they don’t even leave their lounge. If you want to really be extreme and, as I said,  controversial, that is a view of the future. I think the movie Ready Player One encapsulated some of that, where really we all live in a virtual reality. We all live in an alternate universe and we actually almost want to leave our reality because maybe it’s not that great.

I think that is a—do I see that happening? Not for me, because I wouldn’t want that and I think for me, it’s really important to still embrace reality and have physical contact with people and things. But I think that is a scary view out there because I think the possibility could exist that you maybe never have to leave your lounge, and that is a scary possibility and that starts introducing so many other very, very tricky conversations, psychological and mental and physiological impacts of the metaverse on the human race.

I’m hoping that it maybe doesn’t get to that extreme. I’m hoping that it really becomes—as smart phones didn’t stop us talking to each other face-to-face, it was revolutionary and that it created and connected the world and not only telephonically but from a social media perspective, but it didn’t necessarily replace our face-to-face contact. I’m hoping that maybe the metaverse—it’s going to alter our world but hopefully enhances it—doesn’t replace some of those really cool things which are essential to being human. That’s what we’ve got to hold on to.

Joe Kornik: Absolutely. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Julie Tregurtha: Pleasure, Joe. Thank you for having me and thanks for the opportunity to have the conversation.

Joe Kornik: Absolutely. Yes, this was fun.

Thank you for listening as well. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to check out all the great metaverse content we currently have online at vision.protiviti.com. I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.