It was headline news at the start of the year: technology group Meta would be shifting its focus away from the metaverse — the grand vision for which the company specifically changed its name from Facebook to Meta.
And yet, at ERGO Group — with our dedicated metaverse division and the industry's first Head of Metaverse — that's precisely what we're working on. Why?
The metaverse represents the idea of an interoperable ecosystem of virtual 3D worlds, where the boundaries between platforms largely disappear. As a user, you can move seamlessly between digital applications just as if you were stepping from one room into another. Taking digital assets along with you as you go is just as easy.
Underpinned largely by core technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, blockchain and artificial intelligence, the metaverse is not one single technology. It is an ecosystem of technologies, which, when combined, create an immersive and interactive space for users to move around in.
Insurers will find potential use cases at every stage in their value chain. In product management, for instance, we might see entirely new forms of product development and configuration. Sales and marketing departments could use the metaverse to raise awareness of risks and how to protect against them in innovative ways, and offer an immersive experience of insurance products. As for human resources, the digital space has the possibility to become a virtual learning and training environment.
These are just a few examples of the potential that such digital spaces hold. At ERGO, we recognized this potential and, back in 2019, we started exploring in detail how we could harness it for our company and the insurance industry as a whole. We have extensively explored virtual and avatar-based worlds, gaming environments and extended-reality headsets, and have implemented the first concrete use cases.
In collaboration with the creative and media agency Jung von Matt NERD, we launched the award-winning ERGO Tinymap app for the Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. Here, users can choose from six scenarios relating to road accidents, burglaries, health and economic crises to learn more about the associated risks and relevant types of insurance in an engaging way.
We have also integrated VR headsets into our day-to-day working lives. For instance, ERGO provides basic training courses in a virtual reality environment, with over 3,000 staff having completed such training since mid-2023. Staff have the opportunity to test the technology for themselves using the VR headsets for meetings, trainings, workshops or events in a virtual environment.
Another example is our Reskilling Academy, which we have set up recently and which we are also extending to the digital environment. After all, AI is fundamentally changing the world of work.
While AI will largely automate simple, repetitive tasks, we offer our staff interesting development opportunities and prospects in new areas. In this regard, the Reskilling Academy is a strategic lever to equip staff with the skills to perform new roles and simultaneously develop the expertise we need at ERGO for tomorrow.
Our aim is not merely to respond to trends in the short term, but to proactively anticipate them wherever possible, while also grasping how to engage new, particularly tech-savvy, target groups in the long term. This includes how to raise awareness of the implications of everyday risks and how to protect against them.
Even with all this progress, the big question remains: Is the metaverse dead, as online memes and cartoons repeatedly claim? Are we backing the wrong horse?
Two thoughts.
It may be that Meta's vision of the metaverse was not the one that won out in the end. But when Zuckerberg penned that vision, the world was a different place to what it is today. For other platforms in the market, Meta's change of direction was more or less irrelevant. Roblox, for example, has around 380 million active users a month; Minecraft has around 60 million and Fortnite around 650 million. Other companies, such as Google, have adopted a different strategy and have even developed their own extended-reality operating systems.
Second — and more critical — we should move away from the original concept of the metaverse as an isolated monolithic platform accessed using VR headsets. Instead, we should expand our perspective to include extended reality and immersive experience. Meta itself has stressed that it is not abandoning virtual reality altogether; rather, its development focus is shifting to its extended reality business, particularly AI wearables.
Other players such as Google, Samsung and Lenovo are also active in this market. AI has reshaped the entire landscape. The bottom line is this: waiting to get to grips with the topic would be a mistake; the time to act is now.
After all, if you want to be in a position to proactively harness technology trends to generate value, and scale them up as soon as the market is ready, you have to identify and get a grasp of them early on. Among other things, digital worlds are set to transform the way insurance services are designed, offered, experienced and managed in the future. Insurers ought to be better prepared for this scenario. Because the future is coming, even if it takes a different shape to the one everyone expected.
