Key Takeaways

• Through 2027, fully virtual workspaces will account for 30% of the investment growth by enterprises in metaverse technologies and will “reimagine” the office experience. “If the investments in the metaverse go heavily toward reimagining the work experience, then we can change what it means to collaborate at work.”
• By 2025, organizations that remediate documented gender pay gaps will decrease women’s attrition by 30%, reducing pressure on talent shortages. “Pay is a major driver of attrition, and true equity reduces toxic work culture. Look beyond moral arguments to systems and processes.”
• By 2025, without sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) practices, AI will consume more energy than the human workforce, significantly offsetting carbon zero gains. “AI is a double-edged sustainability source, and it will be critical that CIOs are able to measure gains versus losses.”
• By 2026, citizen-led denial of service (CDoS) attacks, using virtual assistants to shut down operations, will become the fastest growing form of protest. “Virtual personal assistant capabilities make activism easier against organizations.”
• By 2025, shareholder acceptance of “moonshot” speculative investments will double, making them a viable alternative to traditional R&D spend to accelerate growth. “Speculative technology investments are a must-have. IT can champion the ‘moonshot’ culture.”

Learn about five additional top predictions in the Gartner press release “Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2023 and Beyond.”

Key Takeaways

• Six trends driving metaverse technologies that could benefit your organization:

1. Gaming
   
2. Digital Humans
   
3. Virtual Spaces
   
4. Shared Experiences
   
5. Tokenized Assets
   
6. Spatial Computing
   

• Gartner predicts that by 2025, the serious games market will grow by 25% due to the impact of metaverse technologies. “Enterprises will adopt “serious games” — gaming technologies, experiences and storytelling for training and simulation of specific work tasks and functions.”

• “Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that have similar properties as digital twins. Organizations are already planning on using digital humans to act as identified digital agents within metaverse environments for customer service, support, sales and other interactions with current and potential customers.”

• “Virtual spaces engage multiple senses and provide participants with the ability to immerse and interact with the space.” Gartner predicts that by 2025, 10% of workers will regularly use virtual spaces, up from 1% in 2022.

• “The metaverse will move shared experiences out of siloed immersive applications and allow for more interactive opportunities to share experiences across applications, consumer events and services.”

• “In metaverse experiences, most tokenized assets will use non-fungible token technologies (NFTs). The new features and functionalities enabled by the metaverse will inspire new ways to not only compete and monetize virtual products and services, but also to acquire physical (real-world) goods.”

• “Spatial computing will allow organizations to get more out of physical and digital assets by surfacing related, “unseen” digital information and content anchored to people, places and things.”

Key Takeaways

• Economic downturns offer opportunities: 70% of companies don’t regain their pre-recession growth levels in the 3 years following a recession. Only 5% of companies consistently achieve profitable growth above their competitors coming out of a recession. 
  

• “IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies, compared with just 4% in 2020.” 

• Three actions for CIOs to solve talent shortages:

1. Implement a human centric work design: 66% of employees say that if they can work flexibly they will stay. 

2. Upskill managers to enable sustainable performance: IT employees rank respect and manager quality as the no. 2 and no. 3 attrition drivers. 

3. Adopt an agile learning culture: Growth opportunities increase employees' intent to stay by 6%. 

• Manage speed: Create a prioritized list of trade-offs you will make in your budget with a narrative about why, match your cloud strategy to your digital ambition, while paying attention to shifting pricing changes, and move to agile funding models to focus on value creation. 

• Optimize the workforce: Create a digital culture which will attract and retain talent, implement digital more effectively by integrating technology delivery with the wider business, and improve enterprise workforce productivity by exploring all automation opportunities. 

• Accelerate digital: Explore all opportunities to reduce operating costs through digital acceleration, develop a future vision of the customer to accelerate the right digital investments for the future, and narrow the metrics you use to measure and manage digital initiatives to the few that align to outcomes.