With the metaverse predicted to nearly double, potentially reaching $783.3 billion by 2024, it’s not a surprise that businesses across industries are looking to invest.
In fact, several new startups are opening virtual headquarters in anticipation of the Metaverse dominating the future of work. Gerald Martinetz, VP of Applied Intelligence at Mindbreeze explores further.
Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the last decade has seen a digitization boom. But the rise of the Metaverse is expected to bring digitization to a new level, far beyond that of Zoom meetings and Slack chats. The Metaverse eliminates the need for a formal workplace, enabling digital working versions of ourselves to interact with one another in a virtual sphere.
Even if you are in the tech world and have excellent knowledge of what the Metaverse can be, one may still be a little unclear. Perhaps, a productive and accurate way to see the Metaverse is as a digital twin of our reality, enabling businesses to transact and interact virtually to optimize digital projects.
While this virtual world of work will allow ultimate flexibility, it will also exacerbate many challenges organizations face today with remote and hybrid work, such as collaboration across teams and time zones. To address these challenges and ensure the Metaverse is a valuable workspace for all, businesses should utilize tools that generate a holistic view of their corporation within the digital space. Seeing holistic views of what is going on inside your company can not only enhance your current business processes, but also prepare you for the leap into the Metaverse when the time comes.
Digital Twins and how the Metaverse Compares
Digital twins are virtual representations of physical objects and processes, serving as counterparts to real-life things. These twins provide little use without being exact, so they are continuously updated from real-time data and machine learning. In maintenance, a digital twin of a machine part is often created, enabling professionals tasked with fixing it to have insights into different components and functions of the piece – avoiding reworks and leading to more efficient labor.
While the Metaverse is still in creation and undergoing construction from the ground up, digital twins are designed from an existing entity. For companies and processes to go into the Metaverse, digital twins of what already exists will have to fill the space.
This is where access to data and information come into play. If the Metaverse truly becomes our new reality, companies need to have their data sorted on customers, company processes, employees, and more. It would be a shame to enter a new reality unprepared for a customer meeting.
Holistic views of customers give customer support and experience teams insights they never had before. Connecting data from internal and external sources ensure support teams are equipped with knowledge from every interaction or touchpoint a client had. Today, this is highly beneficial when a customer fills out a support ticket and the support desk is tasked with resolving an issue in a timely and efficient manner. All necessary knowledge on the problem and the customer history is in front of the support desk’s face in a matter of seconds, leading to expert solution finding and happy customers.
In the Metaverse, this could look slightly different. It’s important to note that nobody truly knows how the end product will look for business interactions. That said, if the avatar of a customer visits your virtual headquarters with a problem, your support team best be prepared.
In this scenario, augmented information will prove very useful in enriching content within the Metaverse. Augmented information adds modified existing data to a dataset, giving machines more to learn from. With an AI-powered solution, such as an insight engine, all digital entities in the “new” reality can be updated in real-time, enhancing the benefits of operating inside the Metaverse.
The Key Takeaway
Today, there are countless technologies on the market – many of which people had trouble conceptualizing until they saw it. If the world of business is heading towards the Metaverse, companies should begin conceptualizing what it will look and feel like as best as they can. Starting with digital twins to represent entities throughout your organization could be highly beneficial to serving your customers in the Metaverse.
About the Author
Gerald Martinetz is VP of Applied Intelligence at Mindbreeze.
