CMSWire: Is the Metaverse Making a Comeback in Agentic Commerce?
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.
What failed as consumer hype is reemerging as infrastructure for AI agents, autonomous transactions, and machine-to-machine CX.
It is easy to make predictions, and even easier to critique those that others made in the past. Case in point: Gartner predicted in 2022 that by 2026 (yes, that's this year), 25% of the population will spend nearly one hour per day in the metaverse.
The premise of this largescale adoption, which McKinsey predicted would generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, relied on a massive behavioral shift: that humans, represented by avatars, would migrate their social, professional and economic lives into 3D environments accessed via (at the time, and currently still) expensive VR and AR hardware.
We all know what happened: today, the metaverse is a "ghost town" with few human users, and (it can be assumed) many disappointed investors, entrepreneurs and others. Yet, despite the false (and costly) start, the metaverse may have its own second life (no pun intended).
While the consumer-facing metaverse never achieved mass adoption beyond gaming niches, parallel advancements in artificial intelligence began to repurpose the infrastructure built for human immersion into a metaverse for machines, namely those agentic AI systems we've all been hearing so much about. Thus, the primary users of this newer interaction are autonomous AI agents interacting within a Spatial Web governed by shared standards, where the "user" is software, and the "experience" is high-frequency, autonomous commerce.
Thus, the metaverse is still here, is ripe with purpose, and it no longer requires direct human interaction. Instead, the metaverse has found its audience in the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) machine economy. The complex 3D environments and spatial protocols originally designed for human sensory immersion are now serving as essential training grounds for autonomous AI agents, which require semantic, spatial and mathematical representations of the world (inherently provided by the metaverse) to navigate, negotiate, and transact effectively.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.