Gartner is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, US. Anushree Verma, Director Analyst, Gartner articulates how Metaverse can directly impact multiple industries including retail, manufacturing, education, and banking.

What sorts of impacts Metaverse technologies could create in the business world?

The metaverse will evolve across three overlapping phases: emerging, advanced, and mature. Each of these phases will be defined by distinctive influences across technology, market, and product or service characteristics.

Gartner defines the metaverse as “a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. The metaverse is persistent; providing enhanced immersive experiences.”

Metaverse will displace many device-dependent interactions while creating new types of interactions and business models across multiple applications. Metaverse will also have a direct impact on multiple industries such as communications and media, retail, electronics, semiconductors, manufacturing, engineering, education, and banking. It will also have a direct impact on product and service marketing, branding, and sales roles in the organization, as the metaverse is the next frontier for online interaction.

Mature metaverse solutions will enable new markets and economic models. The initial business models we expect to see as the metaverse evolves will be analogous to current ideas (e.g., “do what you know”). Examples include building businesses around artificial scarcity with virtual possessions, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and virtual real estate. Despite this, the new features and functionalities enabled by the metaverse will require and inspire new ways to not only compete and monetize virtual products and services but also acquire physical (real-world) goods. Adding elements such as persistence, collaboration and interoperability will enable new efficiencies to share digitally anchored information across organizations and individuals and open a degree of procedural transparency. For example, using AR for the frontline workforce.

What merits the business leaders can foresee towards the adoption of Metaverse?

Business leaders need to augment their digital transformation strategy by exploring virtual world product development, brand placement, customer engagement, and financial flows. Business leaders understand that this is the tip of a very big monetization iceberg. As programmable digital technology drives fundamental shifts in the way economic activity is conducted and the type of monies used, the involvement of machines to facilitate, augment and transform consumption will grow.

Gartner predicts the phased evolution of Metaverse until 2030. How do you think enterprises or businesses, that aspire to adopt Metaverse, leaders deal with these stages?

The way to deal with each stage is going to differ. For example, in the emerging stage, they would focus on high-value use cases such as gaming, wayfinding, AR VR experiences etc. For the next stage, we do have consortia to work with standards and form protocol groups since no single organization will build the Metaverse. Enabling persistent, collaborative, decentralized, and interoperable content is also expected to transform current business models. Mature solutions will be an iterative process and create innovative solutions based on a diverse set of trends and technologies (such as spatial computing, AR and VR experiences, AI, blockchain, and IoT).

Speak on the different aspects of user acceptance for the emerging Metaverse technologies

There is a lot of hype around Metaverse and those that are “meta-aware” mostly have no opinion or are concerned about what the metaverse might evolve into. There are a few high-value cases right now as mentioned above. This is in the very early stages of development, and there is a need to maintain a cohesive society as a basis for consensus governance that must be embedded while developing the metaverse. Otherwise, it could be detrimental to society.