Accenture Leads the Enterprise Metaverse Charge as Meta Revamps Horizon

Accenture, one of the early adopters and experimenters in XR, has spent the past few years exploring how AR/VR/MR can positively influence business operations. Most recently, highlighting a success story with industry leaders, Meta to create an enterprise-ready Metaverse service.

Accenture started its Metaverse journey in 2019 when it launched its multi-user virtual campus, the Nth Floor, which aims to enhance training enthusiasm, improve knowledge retention, and streamline the employee onboarding journey.

Across the development of Nth Floor, Accenture cultivated an internal network of over 1,300 XR enthusiasts ready to adopt the Meta portfolio of Quest devices and Horizon applications. The internal champions also provided peer-to-peer technical support and a social networking community for knowledge sharing.

The company’s immersive pilot, One Accenture Park, built within the Nth Floor framework is receiving widespread acclaim, such as securing the Brandon Hall Gold Award for Technology Excellence for two consecutive years; reflecting the pilot’s achievements including 50,000 active users across six countries, a 4.7/5 rating for its onboarding experience, and 33% increase in learning retention compared to traditional video-based training.

Is the Metaverse for Enterprise Coming Back?

Going forward, Accenture plans to expand its suite of mixed reality services, including Meta products, and capitalise on the potential of the metaverse, as reiterated by the firm.

The Nth Floor led to significant scaling efforts, with over 175,000 employees now utilising the virtual space annually, facilitated by deploying 60,000 Meta Quest headsets.

This comes at a timely point for Meta, which is revamping its efforts to build its Horizon Metaverse platform following its monumental rise in years past.

Meta launched a $50 million Creator Fund in February to attract news services, brands, and developers to its Metaverse platform. Although this amount may seem minor compared to the billions Meta has already spent, this ongoing investment reflects a renewed commitment to the Horizon Metaverse platform. This could signal a fresh opportunity for Meta’s vision of online interaction.

The Horizon Metaverse primarily targets consumers and gamers, and enterprise-focused solutions like Workrooms have been closed for several years. However, Meta’s continued investment and efforts to encourage brand exploration in Horizon indicate that dedicated XR (extended reality) advocates should pay attention to these developments.

Additionally, Meta’s Creator Fund will focus on smartphone-based content this year. The company emphasises the importance of cross-device interoperability among mobile devices, a crucial growth area for XR technology and services in the broader market.

Meta said in an official statement:

By investing in mobile content, we can reach a lot of new people who don’t yet own a Quest headset and ultimately grow the pie for everyone. That’s why, as part of our $50 million Creator Fund for creators of mobile and MR worlds, we’re also announcing our first creator competition of the year with a focus on mobile.

Fresh Horizons for Meta

Moreover, earlier this year, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “This is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse,” following the $100 billion spending landmark.

Zuckerberg explained:

The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing — and this is the year when a number of long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.

In closing, Zuckerberg explained that Meta is accelerating its efforts towards building “some awesome things that shape the future of human connection. As always, I’m grateful for everyone who is on this journey with us.”

Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, informed Meta employees that 2025 will be significant, “the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs.”

On the metaverse and Horizon Worlds, Boz explained that the service’s mobile application “absolutely has to break out for our long-term plans to have a chance. ” Also, remarking, “If you don’t feel the weight of history on you, then you aren’t paying attention.”

Boz added:

This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure-We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet.

Speaking on the billions Meta has invested in XR, Boz reflected that “we live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.”