It’s crucial to have the right metaverse technology to engage consumers and best-in-class data science capabilities at the backend to understand the metaverse.
Every few years and with the pace of technological change, we see a new tech trend take the world by storm. The latest is metaverse, with Facebook unveiling its vision and changing its name to Meta to reflect this new virtual world. Based on a Bloomberg analysis, the metaverse market will reach nearly $800 billion by 2024. With such potential, the tech giants, including Microsoft, Apple and Google, are investing big sums to capitalise on this new market opportunity.
While still in its infancy, many different ideas of what the metaverse will eventually look like. However, one thing for sure is the vast amount of data that will be produced as a result of this virtual world. Businesses already have many data sources that require processing and analysing, and the metaverse is only set to increase this. There will be a bigger emphasis on having data scientists power a data science strategy to accurately analyse and manage this data explosion and derive actionable insights to propel the business forward.
Defining the metaverse
Metaverse is a merging of virtual, augmented and physical reality that will blur the lines between online and real-life interactions. It will become a place where people can work, shop, play and be entertained. But the metaverse is not just for entertainment purposes; it can also be a practical environment for accessing services. For example, at the recent Arab Health 2022 event, the UAE’s Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) launched the world’s first Metaverse Customer Happiness Service Centre to provide a more accessible way to access customer services. Yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The metaverse has the power to revolutionise how industries operate and how we live our daily lives. It can bring innovation to customers, develop deeper connections with people worldwide, and provide businesses with a new revenue stream. The possibilities can be endless, but only if a business has the right infrastructure to harness it.
The data science challenge
Having the right metaverse technology from a consumer perspective is important, but as an organisation ensuring you have the best-in-class backend data science capabilities to make sense of the metaverse is essential.
From gaming to attending your favourite concert in the virtual world, all these experiences will require and create huge volumes of data. Data science enables organisations to build AI/ML models that can quickly and accurately analyse large datasets and identify the most interesting insights that a business can leverage to serve customers and improve products and services.
A strong data science strategy can help tackle the issues of siloed data, unmanageable amounts of data sources and uphold the privacy of customer data. This same strategy can also help organisations be more readily prepared for the future and address the rapid innovation of the metaverse. Other recent innovations, such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and the issues they faced regarding regulation, can serve as a guide to potential business implications that organisations may come across down the line. We can expect to see similar regulatory frameworks being brought in fairly swiftly around the metaverse to ensure businesses comply and process data appropriately, amongst other things.
However, developing an effective data science strategy requires dedicated specialist data scientist teams. And while there is a growing demand, research from QuantHub found a shortage of 250,000 data scientists to fulfil job roles. The metaverse will no doubt continue to expand. If organisations cannot tap into data in near real-time, it will be challenging to keep up with competitors.
The data cloud is key to unlocking metaverse potential
To overcome this hurdle, data cloud solutions are being heralded as a means for organisations to rapidly build effective data science models and applications without a team of experts. An effective data cloud can easily collect and analyse first and third-party data into a single source of truth, increasing near real-time insights and reducing the manual labour required to manage the influx of data volumes. It can also process structured, semi-structured and unstructured data while breaking down data silos and unifying insights to learn from the metaverse to help predict future outcomes.
Having the right tech infrastructure can also aid businesses in establishing the correct processes so that data scientists don’t have to duplicate entire datasets. This reduces potential issues around security or compliance while maintaining fine-grained controls to ensure only the right users and applications have access to the data in hand. While we may not know exactly what’s to come with the metaverse, having the right platform will enable companies to react and be flexible in their approach.
Metaverse is only just kicking off, but more and more organisations across the UAE will begin to explore new and innovative ways of leveraging the metaverse to transform the way citizens view and engage with the world. By analysing the data generated from the metaverse thanks to a dedicated data science strategy, organisations can put themselves in a favourable position amongst their competitors and better understand and service their customers as they capitalise on the virtual world. While the metaverse has the power to foster connections, grow relationships and expand businesses, it will undoubtedly come with a huge learning curve for businesses. This is the time for organisations to adequately prepare for the metaverse and ensure that their data science approach is simple, modern and effective to make sense of this new world and tap into new business opportunities.
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