Accenture places Metaverse “core to success for enterprise”—yet investment lags

Accenture has named the metaverse one of the five key forces of change every enterprise must harness to succeed in the coming decade. Its innovation roadmap places the metaverse at its heart, with a heavy focus on the role of digital twins to accelerate and enhance product and service development focused on sustainability and resilience.

While we applaud the ambition, HFS Research data in Exhibit 1 suggests Accenture’s big bet leaves it facing a massive education job if it is to take the majority of enterprises with it in the near term.

Exhibit 1: Only a small minority of CEOs, CIOs and CTOs rank metaverse and Web3-labeled investments among their top three investment priorities

Sample: HFS Pulse H2, 2022, n=98 Global 2000 CEOs, 104 Global 2000 CIOs and CTOs
Source: HFS Research, 2022

Accenture started its education mission by showcasing its metaverse-focused Technology Vision at one of Europe’s biggest tech events, Web Summit in Lisbon. Accenture Technology Innovation Global Lead Marc Carrel-Billiard set out an innovation roadmap to move organizations from their current use of information technology toward “Science Technology,” a new era heralded by next-generation computing, robotics, and intelligent digital twins. Science tech companies will embrace all these and explore new horizons in materials and energy, biotech, and space-to-Earth innovation.

Virtual worlds so real you can smell the reality

The metaverse is strategically important throughout the roadmap to science tech. Through digital twins, Accenture sees the digital and virtual worlds coming together in a continuum of combinations from mostly physical to mostly digital and all stations in between. The Accenture vision includes digital twins so realistic that a remote user could engage with metaverse versions of machinery, feel the buttons they push, see, hear, and even smell the responses to what they do.

This level of simulation offers a high-pace and relatively low-cost way to iterate best-fit solutions, designing-in energy and material-saving sustainability and resilience through testing digital twins long before any resourcing is committed in the physical world, as Accenture Europe CEO Jean-Marc Ollagnier pointed out in his discussion of the industrial metaverse with Siemens CTO Peter Korte on Web Summit’s main stage.

A digital twin for you—and a digital twin for the planet

The importance of metaverse to the journey to science tech is illustrated by Accenture’s vision for digital twins of ourselves as part of its biotech vision and of a satellite-scanned digital twin of the entire earth, generated by the 4,000 satellites currently orbiting the globe, in space-earth innovation.

It is also one of five key forces Accenture has identified that enterprise leaders must harness in the next decade, alongside total enterprise reinvention (every part of the enterprise, industrial processes and supply chains included, must digitally transform); talent; sustainability; and the ongoing tech revolution (intelligent products and services, digital twins, cloud-based platforms, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing, must lead to further waves of innovation).

Four metaverse trends from virtual to physical and across humans and machines

Marc Carrel-Billiard calls out four metaverse trends enterprise leaders should stay close to:

• WebMe: New modes of digital experience push us to live more of our lives virtually. The metaverse, and the Web3 technologies underpinning it, will deliver a persistent 3D environment with a sense of place. To move from work to a social platform will be as simple as crossing the street. Forget friction.
• Programmable world: The next version of the physical world is the programmable world. Customers will choose what they see and how they interact with what they see. The global roll-out of 5G and AR glasses will herald an era of personalized and automated experiences that enterprises must be ready to shape.
• The unreal: With environments increasingly filled with “passably human” machines, we will encounter more deepfakes. Enterprises must help customers question what is real and if and when that distinction matters. A better question may become, “Is the experience authentic, and how do you prove it?”
• Computing the impossible: Quantum high-performance computers will allow enterprises to make a step change in tackling the biggest challenges. What if predicting the stock market, or any risk, was suddenly much easier? What if your greatest data challenges could be overcome? That day is hurtling toward us. Enterprise leaders must find partners and talent now or face being left behind.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders should demand solid business cases before committing to a metaverse-centric future.

Accenture must be careful not to get ahead of its customers. While its ambitions are visionary, they must co-exist in a world in which we are still seeing the basics of cloud strategy going awry as failed business cases drive some enterprises back to on-premises solutions. In that context, enterprises should demand solid business cases before committing their future to the metaverse. We look forward to seeing, hearing, and experiencing the case studies that realize the ambitions.