A few years ago, the word "metaverse" sounded like science fiction. Today it appears in board papers — not because executives have taken up gaming, but because the underlying question is a practical one: how will people connect, train, sell and collaborate when the screen stops being the only interface?
Beyond the headset
The consumer framing has done the technology a disservice. The business cases that are working today are unglamorous: distributed teams meeting in persistent shared spaces, technicians training on equipment that would be dangerous or expensive to practise on, and customers examining a product configuration before committing to it.
What these have in common is that the immersive element solves a specific problem — distance, risk or uncertainty — rather than existing for its own sake.
Where leaders should start
Start with a process that is already expensive and already suffers from being remote. Training is usually the strongest first candidate: the costs are measurable, the safety benefits are real, and success is easy to evaluate against your existing programme.
Treat the first project as an experiment with a defined budget and a clear decision point. The organisations getting value from this are the ones that scoped it narrowly, not the ones that announced a strategy.