🧊 CorpVerse Series #3. Consumer Metaverse. The Work Dream

The Metaverse beckons and seduces, awakening in you either the fear of missing out (FOMO) or the hope for exponential growth in a new continent of opportunity. But for now, all this is tales from the Internet and experiments for the Kunstkammer. Neither you, technology, nor your future employees are ready for a real transformation. But everyone wants to try because Mark and Tim are already there!

Perhaps you are ready for a compromise - one day from the metaverse?

🔮Insight. First leaks from the Metaverse

First public leaks of recorded "in-Metaverse" confidential conversations and meetings.

It had to happen once. Some very confidential and unsuitable for public usage internal discussions are leaked to the public. Obviously, they were made in one of the Metaverse worlds.

A scandal erupts, both inside and outside. Internal security services claim that it is exactly what they predicted when their top managers began using consumer metaverse apps without proper security audits (we will discuss it later in the Virtual Spaces block). But nobody listened then.

PR services blur the issue ensuring that there are enough speculations that this is all fake and staged. No one could prove that these are real avatars, as you can't see the faces behind them, and the voices could have been edited. And in general, the villains wield deepfakes at a penny price, and any advanced "schoolboy" can do this.

But this is an important signal for a broader audience. The mass consumer now realizes there are some new experiences that are way beyond the Zoom they used during the pandemic. This is cooler. And there is drive!

⚗️Experiment. Hiring Avatars

Potential employees can talk with AI-avatars of the leaders and hiring managers of advanced companies (e.g., talk with Apple's Tim Cook) on their corporate career pages.

One not-so-distant summer after the next WWDC, Tim Cook invites you to chat with him personally on the company's website (but not before Apple offers its own metaverse concept). There, of course, not Cook himself is waiting for you, but his avatar. He is savvy, knows how to joke, speaks in the voice of Cook, and transmits to you the radiant philosophy of Apple, after which you will not only buy a new iPhone but also send a CV. And as a consumer, troll, or journalist (!) you are happy to just challenge artificial intelligence with inappropriate questions.

Eventually, for companies positioning themselves as technology leaders and visionaries, the ability to speak with their CEO and key employees and executives directly from the corporate website will become the norm. The same technology will be used for new employees' onboarding. But not in your company, regretfully.

⚙️ Practice. Inverse Hiring

Advanced companies offer interactive courses and core competency training from their "metaverses" on career sites for free.

You can't build the Metaverse if no one knows how. Tech leaders are taking matters into their own hands (as they already did with clouds and AI). They create courses and run certification programs to design and develop the Metaverse experiences.

This goes hand in hand with the realization that part of the onboarding process, including value courses and core skills training, can be done directly on the careers site, effectively turning the process inside out.

Free upskilling with built-in match checking is the perfect combo to push your future employees to understand a new topic and change employers.

And all these are the best courses, especially good from within the Metaverse.

🚸Risk. Metaverse is the new remote

Job candidates consider hybrid metaverse-enabled work mode as an employer advantage.

Your potential candidates, in addition to the question of remote work, unexpectedly for you, begin to clarify whether it is possible to work from the meta (short for the Metaverse, not the Meta Platforms Inc.).

But there's a caveat: your recruiters think they're asking about a different meta. And, in one case ("meta" as meth), they suspect that they are junkies in front of them, and in the other ("meta" as a company), they sent a CV to the wrong company. Your HRs send a denial to valuable assets, but maybe, just maybe, they are not so wrong.

You would not be very upset, as you are not ready to work in the Metaverse yet. You haven't gotten out of your mind. And didn't relieve after the post-Zoom syndrome.

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📧 This is Human Spectrum Lab, a newsletter about Exploring the Human Spectrum and Shining through the Future.

In this series of posts, I share pieces from the Corporate Metaverse report (v2) written by Constantin Kichinsky and based on the original research on the topic done by Constantin Kichinsky, Aleksei Kalenchuk & Ekaterina Filatova in 2022.