Welcome to the metaverse: pathways to unlock value

The metaverse promises to change the way we live, work, and consume content and goods. If we step back for a moment, what exactly is the metaverse?

CGI sees the metaverse as a digitally-enabled world, where organisations and communities interact in real time. It’s a persistent, collaborative environment where people can come together to learn, work, shop and share experiences.

Gartner predicts that metaverse will begin to mature in around seven years, from 2029 onwards. For Gartner, the current emerging metaverse state leverages existing technologies to create metaverse experiences, whilst a mature metaverse is interoperable, enabling experiences in new virtual economies¹.

For us, this means we’ll move from many individual metaverses built around specific use cases or audiences, to a joined up metaverse that as individuals we’ll exist within, move around, and will complement our physical world.

What does this mean for organisations? How can we harness the metaverse, building a pathway to value in the short term whilst ensuring benefits at scale as the concept matures?

Emerging metaverse use cases

In the short term, we’re seeing our clients adopt a number of metaverse use cases enabled by existing technologies:

• Training and collaboration environments for employee experience and knowledge sharing, enabled by digital collaboration tools.
• Virtual healthcare for proactive remote monitoring and improved citizen outcomes, enabled by the internet of things (IoT) and digital twin.
• Smart places for operational efficiency and positive net zero outcomes, enabled by a range of emerging technologies including IoT and Advanced Analytics.

Business cases for these use cases are typically built around factors such as training adoption, reduced employee attrition and increased efficiency of people and assets. Alongside the business case, key outcome measures include improved citizen and employee experience.

Building longer term pathways

Longer term, organisations should consider defining their ambitions for the metaverse. Is it to attract new audiences and build communities, unlock new revenue streams, drive margin improvements or simply to add another channel of engagement? Align ambitions to your organisation’s strategy and transformation programme and build an associated outcome-driven roadmap to track progress and benefits.

Welcoming new joiners to our CGI Meta Hub

Like many organisations, CGI in the UK is building our pathway to the Metaverse. Our Meta Hub is a collaborative environment based on our 20 Fenchurch Street, London office. It’s currently used to bring together new CGI employees – our members - from across the UK into a single virtual space to share key onboarding information and meet leaders from our business.

We’re planning the next steps of our metaverse pathway based on the positive experience of our members coming together in our Fenchurch Meta Hub. Building the metaverse to improve employee experience at scale, gamification of learning and associated digital rewards and joining up global Meta Hubs to attract a truly global audience to your organisation are all steps you can take too.

It’s an exciting time to be looking at your organisation’s metaverse journey. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss and explore how we can help build your organisation’s pathway to the metaverse.

Sources

1 https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/metaverse-evolution-will-be-phased-here-s-what-it-means-for-tech-product-strategy