The metaverse may seem like a scary unknown entity to businesses, but it doesn’t need to be. It starts with a bit of openness and experimentation, writes Nevellan Moodley, head of financial services and technology at BDO South Africa.
The world is transitioning from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. In more layman terms, we are moving from the familiar digital Internet, to the Internet of Value, where we can essentially monetise our identities. And the portal through which this will mostly be done is the metaverse.
What’s the metaverse? Simply put, it’s an online space for people and businesses to exist in. Think the film Ready Player One (2018), or the popular web platform Second Life. The metaverse is a rapidly growing portal where people can work, play, build businesses and create an entire online existence. It’s nothing short of a new dimension of human life we are going to grow increasingly familiar with.
Monetising the metaverse
For anyone looking to capitalise on the metaverse, there is massive opportunity. It begins by thinking of the metaverse in the same way we saw the internet. Simply having access to the internet doesn’t make money, but how you use it can lower your operational costs, or allow you to offer new products or expand your brand and in turn increase revenue. The metaverse will operate under a similar principle.
It largely comes down to assessing your digital strategy. From there, a business can ask how the metaverse will help enable or accelerate their digital strategy in order to achieve a desired outcome, be it lowering operational costs, increasing customer ‘stickiness’, or generating a new stream of revenue.
Once a strategic approach has been decided on, a business can begin thinking about how to use technology to achieve those goals. At the moment, there’s a lot of opportunity because the space remains largely unexplored. The most important thing in this environment is to be agile and adaptive.
The best way to think of the metaverse is as an extension of your existing platform. There are going to be so many ways in which the metaverse will be used to further the experience of a company. From potential products to services, the metaverse will be a way to enrich these offerings.
There is also going to be great business opportunity from a hardware point of view. At the moment, accessing the metaverse virtually remains a barrier to entry as headset technology remains prohibitively expense. But there was a time when the same could be said for cell phones, and over time, price came down and now Africa has the highest penetration rate for that technology in the world. Once innovation in hardware, particularly chip manufacturing, reaches scale, the opportunity to drop the cost of that hardware will take place incredibly fast.
Where to start?
It begins with experimentation and observing what’s taking place in other countries. This means finding a safe space within your organisation that’s open to exploring possibilities without the need for immediate, concrete answers. There should be room to fail, because everyone is still trying to figure the metaverse out and solutions are only going to come through trial and error.
For this reason, metaverse exploration should be in the hands of R&D department. When new technology emerges, younger companies tend to replace older ones, often due to red tape that prevents the bigger firms from innovating. But avoiding risk here can often be to a company’s detriment.
At the moment, most businesses involved with the metaverse seem to be operating in isolation. I believe, going forward partnering will become important and in the future we’ll see the metaverse precipitate a convergence of various different businesses into a single industry.
The waves of change are going to keep coming. The best thing we can do is to be ready for them and enjoy the ride and the way to do that, as a business, is to remain agile.