Metaverse and Meta Risks

For years, the metaverse has been the realm of futurists and science fiction. Recent shifts in business strategies and technology investments show that the metaverse is no longer a distant reality but likely the next frontier for social interactions, commerce, and business engagements.

Advances in connectivity speeds, 3D reconstruction, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, cloud technologies, and semiconductors and graphic processing units are all helping to drive the integration of the physical and digital worlds.

This new digital world will bring up existential questions for customers such as:

• Who am I?
• Where am I?/What is my world made of?
• How do I interact with my world?
• How is my world governed?
• What do I need and want? How do I get it?

Each of these questions will bring new risks that the companies supporting the metaverse must confront. Companies should use those customer questions as a framework for identifying potential risks and exposures. Risk leaders should question how their products and services interact with the metaverse and how they might be affected by new risk scenarios. Such as:

• Will our avatars experience mental anguish, and to what degree?
• What legal framework will be the groundwork for the metaverse, and who will be responsible for oversight and enforcement?
• How will data be governed and protected?
• What loses could occur through an outage, coding error, power failure or other digital business interruption?
• How will digital currencies be protected in the metaverse?

Listen to this session from the 2022 Technology Risk Forum today to learn about the metaverse and what technology clients may expect in this not-so-distant future.