Hello, and thank you for joining us for Unlocking Opportunity in the Metaverse, brought to you in partnership with Microsoft and Publisys Sapient. We are excited to have you be a part of the conversation. We encourage you to vote in polls and submit speaker questions through Slido by clicking the Join the Conversation button located at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, or by going to slido.com from your mobile device and entering the event code #UnlockingOpportunity. Please join now and vote in the poll for our upcoming panel conversation. Now, please welcome Arthur Phillip, Chief Growth Officer, Publisys Sapient.
Welcome. I'm Arthur Phillip, Chief Growth Officer of Publisys Sapient, and I'm excited to be here today. I have the honor of welcoming you to today's event, Unlocking Opportunity in the Metaverse. The Metaverse is defined by Gardner as a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality, providing persistent and immersive experiences. But I like how Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist, described it as the fourth wave of computing. After mainframe computing, personal computing, and mobile computing, we elevate to ambient computing, where people live in a digital ecosystem rather than simply accessing it from the outside. So for the sake of discussion today, we're going to take a broad definition of Metaverse, encompassing Web 0.30, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, virtual and augmented reality, marketplaces and commerce, decentralization and independence, and importantly, communities, social media, identities, and DAOs. That's a lot, but we're going to have an action-packed session for you. The last two years have produced very strong indicators that the Metaverse is poised to expand significantly in the next several years. The pandemic absolutely accelerated the inception and acceptance of the Metaverse and changed perceptions about the art of possible, with more examples every day of the physical and virtual worlds coming together. For entertainment, for gaming, collectibles, even currency, trading and transactions, the benefits of the Metaverse are very clear. But what about for business? It's no longer a question of if, but where you should be investing and how you should begin your journey. Make no mistake, history's going to look back at the next 20 years as the most important evolution in industry and in society and driven by these fundamental new technological mediums, the social changes, the lifestyles, and the many shifts that get created over the next two decades. Let me put this in recent historical context. We're barely at the dial-up internet stage of this new paradigm. What took 12 years before to get from startup internet access to the iPhone is now going to get compressed in record time. The underpinnings of all the digital transformation work that people have been doing for the last decade, the development and the adoption time are going to be compressed into a fraction of what we've never experienced before. Now, the economic predictions alone are staggering, 5, 10, $30 trillion. You're going to see a lot of numbers tossed around over the next decade. But the biggest financial and analyst firms all agree this is here to stay. The traction is taking place. And I want you to think about this. How much of the world's $94 trillion GDP today, the global economy, can be attributed to digital? You can't break it out. You can't separate it. You can't say that it's even less than a quarter of that economy. So think about what the metaverse and the next evolution is going to look like. Look at some of the recent developments. Facebook's whole future is now staked on meta. Look at the adoption of cryptocurrencies just by nations and states over the last year. And then look at DAOs, collective decentralized groups coming together, recently made a bid at an auction for the United States Constitution. We now see DAOs coming together, surpassing corporations to provide labor for specific projects in different parts of the world. Think about what that's going to do to the labor market. At Publicis Sapient, we see the metaverse as a fundamental part of your own digital business transformation. The activation of a special medium that needs to be innovated from a strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data perspective. So for companies, it's no longer just about enabling consistent experiences across online and brick and mortar. It's also how to extend your brand experience into the metaverse itself. Your growth potential right now is magnified like never before. The opportunity to create entirely new products and services and experiences, as well as transact in new digital services and currencies is right upon us. Doing business in the metaverse is going to require new rules and creative thinking about how people interact. Experiences in the metaverse are going to be more exploratory versus transactional. It's going to require new skills leveraging virtual and augmented reality, even behavioral and social sciences. I want to leave you with this, the education of employees, consumers, and ultimately society is going to be critical as we undergo this cultural transformation. So much of the world is going to need to be acclimated to this new way of working, learning, shopping, traveling, banking, and more. Don't underestimate the generational implications as we all stare down the war of talent. And I'll ask you this, how many of you have personally experimented? How many of you have put on a VR headset through Oculus or have been on a Discord or have a Twitter avatar set up? Do you have your own Coinbase or Binance account with digital wallets? Have you bought an NFT? One of the best ways to learn about all of this is to jump in on a personal basis. Chances are you're going to be soliciting help from somebody in the Gen Z era. Today's discussion is going to give you a lot of food for thought as you pursue the avenues to get started in the metaverse. You're going to leverage and have an opportunity to leverage emerging technology and create new customer experience and hear from some great speakers. I want to thank you for joining us today. We've got some tremendous speakers ahead and some robust conversation lined up for you. Let's get started and I'll see you in the metaverse. Now for our opening conversation, transforming customer experience through emerging tech, please welcome Ashley Haynes Gasper, General Manager and COO, U.S. Business Applications and Industry Clouds, Microsoft, and interviewer Rich Karlgaard, Global Futurist and Editor-at-Large, Forbes.
Ashley, great to see you. Now you have a fascinating business background. It features both range and depth. You've been a CEO of several businesses and a CEO in charge of P&Ls. Tell us how this led to your position at Microsoft and particularly what you've learned about customer experience along the way.
Thanks so much, Rich. It's so good to see you and to be with you and the team today. I just want to thank you for having me. I'm super excited about the conversation that we're going to have because experience, both employee experience and customer experience, I think are an existential priority for companies today. As you referenced, my background gives me a deep heart space for unlocking breathtaking experiences through innovation. Throughout my career, I've done this running services businesses. I've done this as a chief marketing officer. Now in my role at Microsoft, I'm deeply privileged to bring that frontline experience to our customers to really help them transform how they're thinking about experience in their organizations to help drive things that we all love, incremental revenue and margin expansion. To say the past two years have been a thing for CMOs and CEOs and CXOs and service leaders, I think would be an understatement. There's just been such a tremendous amount of both top line and bottom line pressure, and it's been a deeply challenging time. I think it's also served as a catalyst for innovation across sectors from curbside pickup, contactless shopping and retail to the adoption of telehealth and healthcare. The case for this intersection of experience and technology, I think has never been stronger, and I'm really looking forward to digging into that with you today.
It wasn't that long ago that customer centricity was considered the sole domain of retail and online commerce. Sales and marketing were always critical for B2B business success, but it just seemed like customer centricity was optional. You think that's changed and in a big way. Explain why.
I think it's simple. Our customers are demanding it, and I think the strategy is really about how we get to one. I think experience can no longer be thought of in terms of separate touch points on a customer journey. Experience has historically been thought of in organizational silos. Marketing did their thing. Sales did their thing. Service did their thing. Supply chain, their thing, and it's disjointed. I think it's frustrating for customers, and I think the past two years in COVID have really put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence. We see it all the time. Marketing's defining campaigns to drive top line revenue that sales may not be incentivized to sell, that service doesn't have the capacity or the ability to serve, and that supply chain can't fulfill. I think today, more than ever, customers are really demanding that connection across organizations with heightened expectations for digital experiences that really require organizations to pivot to human-centered tech transformation. This is the core of a single experience, and I would tell you we're not just seeing it in B2C, we're also seeing it in the B2B space as well. We really have to put the human and that end-to-end journey at the center. It has to be part of the DNA of an organization's culture, and it has to be the connective tissue across all lines of business, marketing to supply chain to sales to service. I think the second thing is that organizations have to have an end-to-end connected data strategy that really unifies customer insights and is able to be accessible to every employee that is impacting that customer experience. You've got to democratize the data, and a company's success really depends on its ability to attract new customers and keep existing ones happy. In this digital age that we're living in, that really requires a deep knowledge of that goal, and then we look at business processes and KPIs that drive those financial levers, and then how technology can help move them in the right direction. It's data-backed with our customer at the center, and this approach really enables our customers to realize the value of their investments and grow over time. And I think about a customer like Toyota Motor North America, 14 sales regions, 14 manufacturing plants, 1,500 dealerships, more than 36,000 direct employees, and more than 30 million vehicles built in the United States. TM&A is on its own digital transformation journey, and they take advantage of Microsoft Azure services, D365 Remote Assist using HoloLens, you referenced HoloLens earlier, our Dynamics 365 customer voice solution, Teams, Microsoft 365 to really drive their business forward, fueling those customer insights, employee productivity, and operational efficiency to deliver better service and experiences to their customers. And like Microsoft, Toyota is mission-driven, and the heart of their investment is the company corporate credo, the Toyota Way, which really emphasizes the principles of respect for people and continuous improvement, and they measure business outcomes around accelerating operational efficiency, hybrid work, ultimately empowering employees to deliver rapid value to the business and the customers. And it's a great example of human-centered strategy that really harnesses the power of data and technology, putting that experience at the center.
Last question, and I'm going to need a pretty quick answer for the sake of time, but it's a big question, there's a lot to unpack. You've been in charge of P&L, which means you're sophisticated by finance and measuring investments in technology and what kind of a return do you get. Something that we've discovered over the past two years is that most companies are willing to keep the pedal to the metal on technology investments, but they are demanding a more rapid return on investment in tangible KPIs. So what's your advice for creating a roadmap so that you can go into the future and really invest robustly in customer experience technologies and neither underspend nor overspend and make everybody happy?
I think the short answer is you partner with your technology solution providers like Microsoft. That's what we do. We partner with our customers, and it's a little bit of what I mentioned earlier. What's the customer trying to drive? Top-line revenue, operating efficiency, and then you work all the way down to balance sheet, to business process, to KPI. Ultimately, the technology is an enabler of whatever the customer is trying to drive, so the customer has to define the ROI. It's our job to show up and deliver it.
Well, Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, thank you so very much for spending a robust 15 minutes with us. I wish we could have doubled or tripled with it, but we learned a lot today by your presence.
Thank you so much, Rich. I appreciate it.
And now for our panel discussion, taking the leap, how to get to the metaverse. Please welcome AJ Dalal, Group VP, Enterprise Data Strategy, Google Assistant, Roxanne Iyer, VP, Global Consumer Engagement, Clinique, Christina Wooten, VP, Global Brand Partnerships, Roblox, and moderator Rich Karlgaard, Global Futurist and Editor-at-Large, Forbes. Panelists, let me start by asking a question of all of you. What are some reasons to invest in the metaverse now? And I realize it might be different by industry. It might be different by who your customers are and their willingness to take leaps. But I'll start out with you, Roxanne.
Sure. And hi, everyone. It's good to see you again, Rich. You know, I'd say there's so many reasons to do it. My top two would be it's where consumers are. And it's hard to deny that. If you look at where Gen Z is spending most of their time, the ever elusive Gen Z, it's where consumers are spending so much of their time. It kind of reminds me of the early days of social media, right? Consumers are there. Brands are still catching up. And so I think that's one of the main reasons that it's really hard to ignore because we're seeing time spent and engagement, you know, at a very different level on these platforms. And the second I'd say is leadership. It's the early days, which means it's, you know, it's an exciting time to get in. And if you're a marketer, this is kind of a marketer's dream where, you know, your competitors are still not there. The industry is still catching up. You kind of have a chance to step in, take charge and forge a path forward. So those would be my big two reasons.
Yeah, just, you know, ripping off of what Roxanne said, it's about where reaching your audiences, where they are building community. So just like on other social platforms, you know, you're building community and engaging with your audiences and then immersive 3D experiences. You're also creating memories and moments, you know, for your audience. So rather than them seeing something or them reading something or clicking onto something, they're experiencing it with their friends. So you have that fun memory, you know, with your audiences. And then I would also say that it's about collaboration and working together with communities and on different platforms. So if you are a brand and you want to stay relevant with Gen Z and other audiences that they want to have the brand listen to their opinions and feedback, collaborate together and give that real time feedback and collaboration. I think that that, you know, that's really important for brands if they're trying to stay relevant with their current consumer and fans, but also their new audiences as well.
Well, Christina, I want to follow up on that. Do you think this interest in the metaverse, which has been building and really building to a crescendo over the last several months, is it due largely to what is possible because of the confluence of, you know, unlimited compute power available in the cloud, incredible end devices like iPhone 13s, or is it mainly a demand side phenomenon having to do with generational change? And I'd like to have your thought on that and then also AJ's and Roxanne's.
Yeah, I mean, and with Roblox specifically, as our technology improves, you know, and we're able to give more tools and technology to our community of, you know, nearly 50 million people every day come to Roblox and we have developers and UGC creators who are creating the content, who are creating the digital fashion. If you enable them with the tools and technology, it's really the limitations are endless, you know, like there are no limitations. They can create anything that they can imagine. So it's really about enabling that community.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's really kind of three big things I'd highlight. Number one is diving into this space allows us to separate the hype from reality, diving right in, testing, learning, exploring with the consumers and the creators within a metaverse. Number two, it allows you to reduce risk. So one of the things that we've done at Sapient is dove right in and develop an NFT marketplace and a metaverse experience for us to understand what it takes to deliver that type of experience and technology and figure out the value that we can give to our clients and consumers.
Let me ask you a follow up on this and I'll get to you, Roxanne, about you mentioned the word hype, I believe. In the Super Bowl just played and in the National Football League playoffs, it was a Salesforce ad and Matthew McConaughey was the spokesman. I guess Mark Benioff has a big budget. And anyway, Matthew McConaughey during the ad said, we don't have to go to Mars or the metaverse, which to me culturally says there is now a little dose of skepticism about the metaverse in the water. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a good thing because I think it allows us to make a transition to real discussions with real benefits as opposed to just sort of futuristic prognostications about the metaverse. But I'd love to hear your thought about that.
Yeah, well, first off, that was a great Super Bowl, a great ending. That commercial was fantastic. And when we think of disruption or generational opportunities, I think when we look forward or look back five, 10, 15 years from now, we're going to realize that this was a monumental moment in history. And with that comes great amounts of skepticism and they come hand in hand and it's expected. If we go back in history and look at the early 90s when the Internet first came about, everyone was skeptic around scale, dial up, is there value? If we go back to the early 1900s around the automobile being released, there was worry about sickness, motion, oxygen. And I think in terms of the answers that I gave before is in terms of skepticism and the hype, I think those go hand in hand and it's what really drives our path forward.
Okay, great. I am going to get to you in a second, Roxanne, but I see the poll results have come in and you recall there are three questions. Number one, where's your company? Well, the question is, where's your company in the metaverse, in its metaverse strategy? Number one, the most aggressive, we are actively implementing metaverse projects, 19%, so one out of five approximately. Number two, we are in the strategic planning stage, but haven't yet launched a project, almost half, 45%. And number three, we are taking a wait and see approach to the metaverse. Roxanne, thinking about that, those results, do you think they represent, they say a lot about maybe what companies are being represented here? That is to say companies like Clinique and Roblox have invested aggressively because they have the kind of customers that are really willing to go along with that. Whereas maybe, you know, harking back It could be incredible. And so that's what we're also looking at is where is that, what is the consumer not talking about or where are there spaces for us to play in that we do in the physical world that could translate really well into the digital world as well. And so those are all the kinds of decisions that we're making today. And that starts to, you know, it's starting to impact the products that we put out, the marketing strategy overall, the research and development that we're doing. So we started to test the waters a few months ago, but there's so much more to come.
Well, I love your optimism. I love your way of looking at what some people might see as a limitation, the fact that you're, though you're strong with women, not so with men yet, you see it as an opportunity. And it sort of goes to, again, this is why it's so valuable to watch these YouTube videos with these panelists, because they're just, it's unbelievable things you will learn. And one of the things I learned about you, Roxanne, is that you're an advocate of joy and optimism in product marketing, which seems to me gives you this spirit of abundance and expansive opportunity rather than little sort of crab, little walled off analytical way of looking at market expansion. How do you bring though, joy and optimism into the metaverse and virtual customer experiences?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's the foundation of Clinique. Our purpose is to bring a daily dose of optimism for skin, for your life. If you're a Clinique user, and I hope you all are, if you think about all of your favorite products, right? Black Honey, a beautiful lip gloss that looks different on every different skin tone. We even have a fragrance called Happy. And so we want to make sure that if we're translating our mission from the physical world into the digital, that nothing changes and that continues to be our mission. When we did our first initiative a few months ago, our way of winning our NFT, we didn't sell it. All we did was ask consumers to share their stories of joy and optimism. And that was our way into giving out our NFTs. And that continues to be a big focus for us. As we decide our roadmap into the future, I think staying true to your brand mission is going to be so critical so that you don't lose yourself in the metaverse. And so if ours is, you know, our purpose is great skin for all and bringing joy and optimism to the world. We want to make sure that that is our focus and that really helps us prioritize where we're going to go next as we think about our future roadmap.
How do you connect all of those wonderful thoughts and high-mindedness to results? In other words, how do you measure what you're doing in this new area? And, you know, as numerous books and history has shown us that you won't always get the great return from the early investments into a disruptive space. But if you neglect that disruptive space and somebody does finally get it, then you'll find yourself way behind if you didn't. So how do you convince upper management to invest in this space, even if maybe the returns are a little nebulous? Or how do you show returns that show that you're making progress?
You know, a lot of arm, and I completely agree with you, it's really hard to make the case for an ROI and you shouldn't in this space. I think, you know, an environment of just learning and being where the consumer is a huge, you know, learning opportunity. And that's how we approached our way in. It was purely to learn what the consumer was doing, to see if our current consumer was interested in this space and wanted to engage with us on it, but also for leadership, because we knew that we had the chance to get in and speak to our consumers before the rest of our competitors did. So that was our intent going in, simply to learn and to see if we could lead. We actually got a lot of learnings out of it. We saw lifts in search, we saw lifts in our loyalty go up, we saw earned media and earning media impact that was significant and higher than what we normally see on the product side of things. So although we didn't go into it with an ROI lens or with hard metrics, you know, we're pleased with how it ended up, but that's gonna be our way of thinking as we go into this space. It's simply to learn, to see how our brand mission can translate as authentically as possible in the metaverse and to see if we can continue to lead.
Well, on the spirit of disruption, I have to ask you this follow-up question because it's such an important one. You advocate more or less blowing up the organization every 18 months simply because the technology is moving so fast, consumer tastes move so fast, and all of this is a new space. Can you unpack that a little one? And then I want to get AJ and Christina's opinion on sort of the organizational challenges of going into this space and maybe how you have to shake things up.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, my team is focused on consumer engagement, right? So I have to go where the consumer is. And there's oftentimes where I think relationships are changing, the agencies and the partners we work with are changing and should change. And so I really believe that as we're seeing significant seismic changes happen and things are moving so quickly and 18 months seems like an eternity in this space, as our consumers continue to change, I really believe that you need to have an org that is flexible, partners internally, whether they're directly on your team or across the rest of the org that are able to pivot and move. And we're fortunate that we get to work with and meet with new partners every day that are willing to be flexible and partner with us. I would say that we don't have most of the answers internally, we're constantly learning from everyone that we meet and connect with. And so that ability to listen, to learn, to pivot, to change is really critical to getting this right. And so I'm a huge advocate of organization flexibility, particularly in larger organizations where moving through some of this can take a lot of time.
Christina, you're really a native as opposed to an immigrant in this digital augmented reality space, because that's what Roblox does. What have you learned at Roblox would be really valuable for consumer packaged good companies like Clinique or other consumer companies or even B2B companies? It seems like for those in the audience, if you can find the kinds of companies out there that are already doing these experiments, you can learn from them and accelerate your own learning. And Roblox is one of those companies. What have you learned at Roblox that is valuable for everybody else?
Yeah, and like Roxanne was talking about, it is very early days when a lot of brands are learning. Roblox is learning as well. What's working well? What are some best practices that we can put forth for other brands to learn from? I think when you think about Roblox, one, self-expression is so important. Your online identity and how you are represented, you can either be yourself and mirror what you look like in the real life, you could be something completely different. And as you think about enhancing your online identity, fashion and beauty are so important to self-expression. And then I think that as Roxanne's also speaking about as being authentic, coming onto the platform in authentic ways. So when we work with brands, we make sure that they are educated on the platform. What's already going on? How are people interacting with one another? And then introducing them to the developer community because our developers and UGC creators are really the ones that have been creating these experiences for many years. They know what's working well. They know how you can authentically come onto the platform. And so by connecting brands with our community, it's always an opportunity for them to learn, know how that they can translate their brand values to the platform in authentic ways. So I think that us together with brands and developers and UGC creators, we're all constantly learning and iterating. But I think that the key to success is really understanding the platform, how you can come authentically and benefit the experience that user is already having.
Well, watch Roblox and what they do is my recommendation. AJ, I have a question for you regarding sort of the urgency of the matter. And then we'll go to audience questions. We have a number of them coming in and they're terrific. You and I know enough of technology history to know that for decades, the governing factor of how fast digital technology could evolve took place at the semiconductor level and we defined it as Moore's law, this rate of progression that for decades is actually pretty predictable. And now the smartest people out there believe Moore's law has been superseded because of the confluence of all of these technologies reaching viability all at once, cloud, edge, artificial intelligence, blockchain, high degrees of bandwidth, 5G bandwidth, and other technologies all the same. So if the underlying rate of metabolic evolution in digital technology is accelerating by a factor of let's say two to three, as some people think, that really creates a heck of a lot of urgency because when you compound that rate of growth, the world changes awfully quickly. How do we tackle this problem of how urgent should we be when thinking about this rapidly evolving space called the metaverse?
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think there's kind of two parts to this answer. So number one is one of the things that we approach is really around people, process, and capabilities. So number one is within the organization, look at, you wanna enable your people to be able to come up with ideas that embrace and leverage some of these technologies that define value for the business as well as for your target market. It could be a consumer, it could be another B2B. Number two is you wanna embrace this technology and reduce risk and take it to market as quickly as possible. So you can validate the experiments in the metaverse, so stay tuned. On behalf of Forbes, I'm Rich Karlgaard. Thank you very much for watching. That concludes today's event. Thank you to all of our wonderful speakers and to our event partners, Microsoft and Publicis Sapient.