How the Metaverse Future Can Fuel Your CX Present

Recommend

The world of now is always slowing down the world of the future. Brands and enterprises want their strategies on a sound footing before dedicating the time, process, and people to realizing them. Which means experiments, like the metaverse, may have to overcome some obstacles before seeing investment.

Many technologies, when taken individually, fail to bring compelling value for the risk. When Meta, formerly Facebook, says the metaverse is 5-10 years out,¹ it begs the question, “Why would we invest in an area that won’t see returns for possibly a decade?” But you don’t have to bet the farm on a metaverse future. We see many new experiences using metaverse technology that can deliver business value today.

To start, the focus should not be on “the metaverse,” but new customer experiences. You should instead be asking yourself, “How do we create compelling experiences and offerings for our customers?” If customer delight is your goal, then you should look at technology as an enabler, not as an obstacle. And layering technologies together makes the delivery of delightful experiences easier, not harder. Key to these new experiences is immersive, Web3, and generative AI technologies.

Immersive Technologies 

Immersive technologies are quickly becoming the channel of choice for CX. Being able to jump in and be immersed in the experience appeals to all our senses—auditory, visual, tactile—and is a cornerstone of our metaverse future. But virtual reality is only one way to be immersed. Mobile phones support mixed reality, and web browsers can support immersive experiences. The bottleneck then becomes content. How do you create and manage the content required for next-gen CX—and do so in a profitable way?

A great example of how immersive experiences are redefining an industry is in fashion. New immersive platforms, like one that recently launched called OpenFashion, “where most of the videos, sounds, image, and text are created using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, and more,”² are proliferating. From DIY fashion using textual prompts, to Metaverse Fashion Week, and virtual models, fashion companies are leveraging generative AI to rapidly create content that enables richer experiences. Immersive experiences will become more commonplace in the fashion world as generative AI makes it possible through a tapestry of user generated content.

Generative AI

Generative AI, as a technology stack, has only recently evolved beyond a gimmick and into a platform. The value of this technology lies in its ability to create content. Tools like ChatGPT have shown they are best leveraged to augment people and accelerate content production. Being able to configure tone, context, and textual output at the speed of prompts means that immersive experiences can be created at a business value cost. What it isn’t good at is providing finished, quality content. Also, any content it generates cannot be copyrighted. While this technology drives efficiency, it’s best suited to a small team of highly qualified staff that are prompt engineers. But how do you monetize it?

Generative AI is great at creating new and differing perspectives that humans cannot do at scale. A novel example of that is a drug discovery platform called Pharma.AI. Creating and evaluating different combinations of compounds as test input data allowed a team of researchers to create a new cancer drug that showed promise all in under a month.³ While it doesn’t provide the expertise to test the drugs, generative AI gives medical experts the tools to accelerate drug discoveries and synthesize data into analysis.

Web3 

Web3 has finally stepped out of the hype cycle and into reality. For enterprises, it’s not about changing the internet—it’s about monetizing experiences. Digital experiences can only exist if people are willing to create them. Enterprises will only develop and sell digital experiences if they can charge them without the risk of piracy. By leveraging Web3, customers can enjoy the experiences, and enterprises are assured of the ownership of their digital offerings.

Almost everybody has heard of NFTs (non-fungible token), but what they may not be aware of is that tokenization is foundational to Web3. Tokenization is when a token stands in for sensitive data, replacing its value. A token can stand in for almost any asset, such as currency, intellectual property, trading cards, and art. It’s also a powerful concept to enable cooperative commerce.

One company, Xange, is using tokenization to create a sustainable future. By developing a method where carbon credit providers can offer their credits for purchase in a trusted model, they’re leveraging blockchain to reduce the impact of climate change.⁴ One of the greatest challenges in the ESG domain is greenwashing, or faking carbon credits. This lack of trust in the marketplace is inhibiting many enterprises in purchasing carbon credit. With Web3, a trust model can be easily created and monetized to support the most challenging commerce models.

A Metaverse Future, Today 

While the “metaverse” may not be around the corner, metaverse experiences are achievable today. These three technologies—immersive, generative AI, and Web3—are the building blocks to the future of CX. Future forward brands are already turning them into business value.

To find out how, watch this interview on Web3.

¹ “Meta says metaverse may take 5-10 years to fully come to life,” Fionna Agomuoh, Digital Trends, April 20, 2022.

² “OpenFashion Launches as the Newest AI Fashion Platform that Uses Generative AI,” The Ritz Herald, March 20, 2023.

³ “AI develops cancer treatment in 30 days, predicts survival rate,” Brooke Steinberg, New York Post, March 20, 2023.

⁴ “Utility-Based NFTs: Solving Real-World Problems in Carbon Markets,” ripple.com, September 1, 2022.

Written By
Shawn Ennis

Director, Digital Edge

#ArtificialIntelligence
#DigitalTransformation
#CustomerService