Hello and welcome and thank you for joining us on Disrupt TV. My name is Vala Afshar. I'm the Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce and your co-host for the next hour. We welcome you to follow us on Twitter at Disrupt TV Shows and Ray, myself, our distinguished guests, your questions live using hashtag Disrupt TV. It's my pleasure to introduce my co-host. The CEO and founder of Constellation Research. He is the best-selling author of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants. Ray is a regular television business and technology news contributor for Fox Business, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, and Wall Street Journal. He's a global sought-after keynote speaker and, in my humble opinion, one of the top futurists to follow on Twitter at RWA and GZERO. Welcome, Ray Wong, to Disrupt TV.
Hey, thanks a lot. I'm here with my co-host friend, Vala Afshar, the Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce. He's also the author of The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence. I normally have the book with me. Executives around the world pay attention to every one of his inspirational, insightful tweets. When he's not hosting, keynoting, or leading events at Salesforce, you can find him speaking on business TV outlets such as Bloomberg and posting insightful analyses on ZDNet. But, you know, it's not about us. It's about our awesome co-hosts and awesome guests that are here. Who do we have today to kick it off?
Ray, it's a privilege for us. Our first guest is Arthur Philip, Chief Growth Officer at Publicis Sapient. Arthur leads the global sales ecosystem, business development, and operations for Publicis Sapient, new and existing clients, partners, on clients across the entire group, and collaborates with teams across the organization to drive multidisciplinary expansion. Arthur has over 30 years of experience in technology and software services and has built and led and grown global teams and functions of HCL Technologies, Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Unisys, and IBM. Some companies I think most of our audience are familiar with. No idea who they are. Most recently, Arthur was EVP Global Head of Sales Transformation and Marketing at HCL Technologies. You can follow Arthur on Twitter at Arthur Philip, F-I-L-I-P. Welcome, Arthur, to Disrupt TV.
Hey, thank you, Vala. Thank you, Ray. And thanks for getting my last name right there. Perfect. Great to meet you guys. It's been quite a while, right? I think last time we were on stage was right before the pandemic and, you know, probably somewhere in the snowy mountains in Switzerland. But it's awesome to see you guys live. Thank you so much. You know, it is amazing. And, you know, the hot topic of the day is metaverse, right? We define it as a $20.7 trillion market by 2030. We're all talking about it. We're all defining it a little bit differently. It's all starting to come together. We're kind of at the middle of this definition phase, and we're just about to figure out what it's all going to be like. How do you guys define it? How does Publicis Sapient think about it? You're big in terms of shaping what that definition is about. But more importantly, like, how are you guys thinking about it and what does it mean for your clients?
Yeah, and first of all, you know, what I'd say is you said $27.3 trillion opportunity. I would actually urge people to take a look at the overall global GDP, right? $94 trillion today growing to $110 next year. The reality is that the metaverse is going to have impact in all kinds of, you know, nuanced ways throughout the entire global economy. First of all, Publicis Sapient is a leading global company. We were born about 30 years ago at the outset of the Internet era. We've helped thousands of companies really work through and build their overall digital business transformation footprint and evolve for, you know, the era that we're in today. And when I look at the metaverse, it's really a fundamental part and extension of everybody's digital business transformation. In many ways, it is all the different disparate technologies and foundational principles that people have been working on for 20, 30 years starting to converge together. You know, VR and AR have always been off in the distance as a potential and a future, but there have been so many advancements. And one thing I'll say is the pandemic itself, you know, when you combine people that most of our lives were reduced during a two-year period of time to a two-dimensional arena. You know, we sat at home. You know, the only differentiation was your voice, what you were wearing that day, and what your background was. But we were all stripped of many of our social, you know, opportunities, many of our interactions, many of the things we got to do outside of our homes. And that forced the technology to get even more integrated to evolve and actually changed a lot of behavior, right? It drove acceptance beyond gaming. We saw gaming as kind of the opportunity for the metaverse to evolve. But once people got into a sphere where their work, their life balance, their interaction with family members was all dedicated to online, their shopping, their interactions, really their livelihood, that started to put the metaverse into a second gear. And one way I describe it is it's really a collection of virtual shared space opportunities, and it's ambient computing coming together. You know, from a Pueblos de Sapien perspective, we look at it a special way. We have something that we really espouse and bring to our clients, an accelerator we call speed. And first of all, we love speed because it's fast and it's nimble and it's agile. But for us, it's about building companies' capabilities and culture and foundations around strategy, around product, around experience, around engineering and data and AI. And if companies can embrace all five of those, you know, you take a look at any one of those individually, but you start to bring all of them together, integrated, and now you've got an organization that's powerful, that's strong, that's nimble, that can really take digital to the next level and jump into the metaverse.
Arthur, what are you seeing on the rejection side in terms of what's happening as objections to the metaverse? Is it hype? Back to the original question there.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the first thing, the demand right now, the interest is massive, right? And it's not just the marketing department and the CMO's arena. You know, it's all the way up to CEOs that are wondering, hey, what's going on? A lot of their point of view, and CFOs as well, comes from the fact that there's just a lot of, you know, understanding right now about what's going on in the whole fintech arena, in the blockchain arena, the opportunities with currency, with alternative and decentralized currencies, and what kind of strategy should you have. But product owners, service owners are looking at it and saying, hey, we've got to do something. We've got to establish our presence. We've got to get a brand out there. The first thing people are asking us about are, you know, how do I educate my team, right? How do I start to build culture and capability? And for us, that's what speed is all about, helping companies have the culture and capability to succeed, not just, you know, one time in a one-shot effort or in some type of gimmicky way, but to build for the long term and for the future. Secondly, people are saying, you know, what kind of use cases apply to my industry, my business, my geography, my specific customer set? So working through use cases, really getting in there, getting out of the whiteboard and kind of into the laboratory and testing things out is really critical and important where we're helping clients right now. And, you know, the third thing I'd say is we're stepping back and really helping people with their strategy. So what do they want to do today? You know, six months from now, which is a lifetime away, two years from now, how do they have the infrastructure? How do they build experiences? How do they create long-term collaborative relationships with their client sets? And really use this as an opportunity to expand customer bases. That is one of the absolute, you know, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, there is no doubt that loyalty, the opportunity to grow and to hit an entire new segment of the marketplace around the world has never been higher. And you can look at, you know, I was just I was down in Miami two days ago. And, of course, the Bitcoin conference is taking place there. You have, I'll tell you what, you have people from every corner of the earth that transcended, you know, into Miami, all parts of Asia, all parts of Africa, all parts of Latin America, and from countries that many corporations, you know, have barely scratched the surface doing business. And now it's all virtual and online with tens and hundreds of millions of people that are transacting in a digital manner, that are buying NFTs, that are getting excited about the space, that are using augmented, you know, I mean, think about Axie Infinity, right? Which is, you know, that's one of the many different companies and platforms that came up, you know, giving people in third, fourth, fifth world nations an opportunity to game and to actually earn tokens and income, you know, just from participating in the Axie Infinity environment. Zed horse racing, right? Which everybody looked at and said, wow, that's crazy. All of a sudden, you now have people selling virtual horses for six, $700,000 that are earning tens of thousands of dollars a