Now is the time to start planning for Metaverse: Accenture’s Paul Daugherty

(Illustration by Suneesh K.)

It is time for enterprises to start thinking about planning for an active metaverse with pandemic changing the way enterprises and customers look at experience as businesses moved digital, said Paul Daugherty, Group Chief Executive – Technology & Chief Technology Officer at Accenture, on February 18.

Speaking at the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum on February 18, Daugherty said, at the back of the pandemic, there are new realities emerging as enterprises accelerate their digital initiatives. “So we need to reframe our thinking and think very differently about some aspects of technology than we have before.”

One such aspect is re-imagining experience and metaverse could play a key role here. Accenture has already built a virtual campus called One Accenture Park, where new hires onboarded can virtually meet in digital avatars. The employees can connect, conduct meetings or just have parties in the virtual world like they would do in person. This was done in partnership with Microsoft’s Mesh, which will be rolled out in its videoconferencing platform Metaverse.

“It is about bridging the virtual world into the physical world, the real world. So you could be working in the metaverse and you could be controlling a factory, equipment and supply chain and such. That's why I think this potential is just so vast that again, and it's about reframing our thinking,” Daugherty said.

On the topic of the need for a different way of thinking, he said that apart from experience, where metaverse could play a significant role, artificial intelligence, data, architecture and strategy.

Metaverse is a buzzword this season. JP Morgan in the report titled, Opportunities in the Metaverse, revealed metaverse will likely infiltrate every sector in some way in the coming years, with the market opportunity estimated at over $1 trillion in yearly revenues. It also became one of the first bank to have a lounge in the metaverse.