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NEW DELHI :
Paul Daugherty is Accenture’s group chief executive for technology and chief technology officer. He also heads Accenture’s Cloud First initiative and has incubated new businesses such as blockchain, extended reality (XR) and quantum computing.
In an interview, Daugherty, who has a degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, speaks about Accenture’s understanding of the metaverse and Web3, and explains how artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, the metaverse, and Web3 are shaping the world of business. Edited excerpts:
Has the pace of AI adoption increased post-covid?
According to our research, before covid, digital leaders who were adopting new technologies like Cloud AI faster outpaced others by a factor of 2x. When we did that same research after covid, we found that these digital leaders who comprise the top 10%, had widened the gap to 5x. We saw another category of LeapFrog(gers)—another 15% of companies that were rapidly innovating to adapt new technologies like AI. Roughly 63% of companies started adopting AI for the first time during covid, which drove a lot of innovation. Yet, only about 10% of organizations are really adopting AI at scale. So, there’s still a lot of room to cover.
What’s Accenture’s vision of the metaverse, which you have christened as the Metaverse Continuum in your Tech Vision 2022 report, and what role does AI play in it?
There are all sorts of definitions of the metaverse, and some of them are crazy—about alternative worlds and realities and things. A lot of these definitions are very consumer-focused. What we’re doing with the metaverse continuum is talking about a definition that’s very grounded in business. We do believe the metaverse will impact every part of every business, and companies need to start acting now.
We should talk what’s happening with the future of the internet, which you referred to as Web3, which is enabling this new capability and looking to create worlds that bridge the virtual and real. We say Metaverse Continuum because we believe it’s not just about the consumer; it’s about the worker, and it’s about extensive continuum of the roles we play as people across the enterprise. It’s a continuum from not just the virtual, but also the real.
We’ve been talking about the way you use AI to create the experiences in the metaverse to do digital twins to create digital humans like we’re doing for museums when we create intelligent guides.
A lot of people think the metaverse is just about gaming and headsets, and I think that’s going to mislead people into missing the opportunity.
But people and businesses talk about the metaverse and Web3 in the same breath, giving the impression that these are interchangeable terms. What does Accenture think?
Sometimes, Web3 is used in almost a political context by some in the crypto community. I’m not using Web3 in that sense. Web3 is the new set of capabilities that are enabling in, one sense, the Internet of place—shared virtual spaces to collaborate, and the internet of ownership—the ability to use blockchain and other technologies to invert the way that ownership works and create unique, differentiated protected digital identities for objects and products that people use.
Given all these complexities, what should be the approach of enterprises that are seeking to adopt Web3 and having a presence in the metaverse?
I think the challenge for every company is that every new technology adds on but doesn’t eliminate something from the past. With the metaverse, you need to think big because you need to embed, envision the possibilities. But then, start small in a focused way to understand how to apply it.
So, think big, start small, scale fast is the approach I would recommend from a company perspective. We made a big entry into our own enterprise metaverse called the Nth Floor. It refers to the virtual environments we have created to bring Accenture people together to meet, collaborate and learn.
So, 150,000 of our employees will be onboarded with a virtual reality headset over the next year. The results we’re getting are tremendous. People are engaging in new ways. They’re sharing experiences that they wouldn’t have before.
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