The Future of Onboarding, with Accenture’s Paul Daugherty

ELISE HU:
That’s Paul Daugherty. He leads all aspects of technology at the consulting firm Accenture, which has nearly 700,000 employees worldwide. Accenture worked with Microsoft to build a virtual campus called the Nth Floor. This year, Accenture expects to use the Nth Floor to virtually onboard 150,000 or more of its new employees. Here’s my conversation with Paul.

ELISE HU:
Paul Daugherty, hello.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Hello, Elise. It’s great to be with you.

ELISE HU:
Given what you do, let’s talk a little bit about metaverses, just for folks who are catching up. What is a metaverse, and how do metaverses matter to business?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And if you back up and look at it, a metaverse is really a shared collaborative space where people can come together and interact. That’s the simplest definition of it. I think gaming is kind of a foundation of what you could see evolving in the metaverse as it develops. But what we talk about is it’s really, in some ways, an extension of the internet. The internet we think of as search and social media, and all the capability that we access, e-commerce… and what you get with the metaverse is extension to Internet of Place, which is a shared collaborative space that you can hang out in, like we’re doing with our employee metaverse. And also an Internet of Ownership, so you can have unique ownership of digital artifacts. People talk about non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrencies and the like—digital currencies. Those are all part of what’s enabled by new technologies that are available in different ways, digitally.

ELISE HU:
How will the metaverse, as y’all are using it, change the way companies operate? Or how could it change the way people work?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Well, I think it will be a massive change. In fact, if you think about the last 10 years having been the digital decade, when companies started going digital and building their digital foundations, I think the next decade is going to be an even more profound transformation. Some of that, and a lot of that impact, will be driven by how companies adopt metaverse capabilities and how consumers adapt to using metaverse capabilities over the next decade. Our view on this, and when you think about what the metaverse is, it’s not just about the gaming, it’s not just about the virtual worlds that you hear about today. Those do play a role, but we really think about it as a metaverse continuum, and we use this word continuum to reflect the fact it’s not just about the consumer, it’s how you use it—a metaverse at work. It’s from the consumer to the worker to every role that you play as an individual. It’s also not just about living in headsets 24 hours a day, with the heavy headsets on. It’s also about enabling 2D experiences on mobile phones and laptops so it can be inclusive of people who either can’t or don’t have access to the headset and other capabilities. And it’s also really powerful when you think about the metaverse, not just being what you do in the virtual world, but how the virtual world connects with the real world. That’s why things like digital twins and manufacturing become really exciting, and people use and interoperate with digital twins of machinery or factories or aircraft in different ways, and then connect that to changing the way that real-world things operate more effectively. So that’s a continuum in the way of extending the view of how you think about the metaverse. We think it’s really critical to understanding how this is going to evolve and have really massive impacts on us as individuals, us as workers, as consumers and companies as they look at the future.

ELISE HU:
Let me have you unpack that example of a digital twin. Let’s say I worked in a fulfillment center or something. And you were saying that my avatar could test out, virtually, the functionality of, say, a production line or how much time it might take to fulfill an order or something, and then learn some lessons that you could then transfer into the physical space that the physical person never actually did.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Yeah, exactly. I’ll give you an example. There’s a utility company we’re working with, dealing with a lot of issues with forest fires that were impacting electricity lines, which is something we’ve all heard about and read about. What they did is they modeled and simulated the environment where these fires were happening, used satellite imagery to predict where the fires would happen, and run simulations again. That was their digital twin of the landscape and such in predicting and anticipating where fires could come. And then they’d use this to also train workers from a safety perspective more effectively. So the workers were trained on more safe working practices, the managers and engineers could better locate where the fires were likely to break out, and then once something really happened, the workers were better prepared and the company could respond faster. And I think that’s a great example that combines a lot of technology—it combined augmented reality, it combined satellite imagery, it combined artificial intelligence from a predictive capacity, and put it all together in a solution that’s adding real value making work safer, saving lives, and keeping their customers better served.

ELISE HU:
How is Accenture using a metaverse for employees?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
So we got into this a little while ago. We’ve been doing research in metaverse-related areas for a number of years, probably about 15 years back to some of the very early, clunky virtual reality experiences. So we’ve been at this for a while. We saw an opportunity a few years ago to look at it differently, especially with the onset of COVID and the pandemic. And what we did is we created Nth Floor. Think of the floors in the building, the Nth Floor is our metaverse. It’s above the other floors. The Nth Floor provides you with access to a lot of virtual spaces. We have some spaces which aren’t real, which are spaces that we created. One example of that is One Accenture Park that I’ll come back to in a minute, which is where we onboard our employees and where our employees go to learn. We also have digital twins of our real offices. In fact, I just hosted a meeting with our board of directors. It was a metaverse meeting that we hosted in our digital twin of our New York office, and we went and visited there. We have our research labs in Silicon Valley and southern France and around the world, digital twins of them. So we can take clients—when you can’t travel, you can enter the metaverse, enter our Nth Floor, and visit the lab and see everything you would have seen in the research lab if you traveled there in person. So by the end of this fiscal year, which is several months away for us now, we’ll have onboarded over 150,000 employees in One Accenture Park with a metaverse virtual experience as a part of that.

ELISE HU:
Does Nth Floor look like a bunch of the Accenture offices in one place, or is it more expansive than that?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
It’s more expansive than that. We have both available because sometimes you want to be in the replica of the physical space, like if I want to go see our researchers and some of the research that they developed in a certain lab. But the core of our space is that we have purely virtual spaces. If you go to One Accenture Park, for example, it’s a virtual space. That’s our training ground. We have lots of different rooms and sections you can go through to learn about different things, where people can congregate and meet, and it’s not a replica of any real space. It’s completely reimagined virtually. We have a virtual waterfall, we have a beach, a beach environment, all sorts of different environments where people can go that are entirely virtual. And we also have our offices. Because sometimes people want to say, ‘Well, hey, I’ve never been to San Francisco, but I want to see what that office looks like.’ So you can go to the digital twin of that office. So people go there to learn about Accenture, they learn about the culture, they learn different specific training that we offer through the metaverse. And there’s real science behind this, which is why we went down this path. It shows that immersive learning has a 33 percent better retention rate than any other form of learning. And the data that we’re seeing from the training and learning that we’re conducting in our metaverse, it’s validating that we’re seeing better results.

ELISE HU:
What gave you the idea to try it for onboarding?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Partly COVID. You know, when COVID hit, it didn’t really slow our business or slow our rate of growth. In fact, the technology activity picked up and we had a need for even more people. So we were faced with this challenge of, we need to continue hiring people at pace, and we hire well over 100,000 people a year. We wanted to do that in a way that was distinctive and unique, gave the people a great experience, that built our culture and reinforced our culture with the people, it built connections for them. And we took what I’d say is a phygital approach to it, a physical and digital blended approach. So when a new employee joins Accenture, they receive a box at home, and it includes the headset that they’ll use for the metaverse, but it also includes physical items for their workspace and such, so they can feel part of the company and have real artifacts as well as what they’ll experience digitally. Just one great anecdote I’ll share with you is, I was with one of our new joiners just a little while ago, and she was sharing with me that when she got this box that I talked about with the headset, she was kind of nervous, you know, do I really want to use this thing? What’s this going to be like? And her colleagues encouraged her and she said, ‘I’ll try it and see what it’s like.’ And she did. And she told me just how phenomenal it was as a new joiner with our company. She went to One Accenture Park, met people from other countries, in Europe and in Asia, got to know them and now they go back and meet regularly in our Nth Floor.

ELISE HU:
I assume you get to create an avatar.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Yeah. People tell me my avatar looks a lot like me, which I say, that must mean that I look a lot like a cartoon character because they still are pretty cartoon-like. It’s really interesting to see people go through the process. They love building their avatar, they love customizing it. Then when they take that first step in the metaverse, you start engaging with people. You can see how they get the sense of what the possibilities are.

ELISE HU:
I’m so curious about what you’ve learned. And I’m sure a lot of our listeners are, too. What has worked really well when it comes to using an immersive experience like this for onboarding, and where you’re improving for next bands and cohorts of employees.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
So we’re having really great results at this stage, but you really do have to provide a lot of curating and guidance to people on how to use it, and everything from how to use the technology, how to create your avatar, things we were just talking about… but also social norms in the metaverse. Like, you shouldn’t walk through people, as you can do that in the metaverse, or you shouldn’t congregate too closely to people there. There’s behaviors that are natural to you in physical spaces that you have to think about and transport into metaverse spaces.

ELISE HU:
Oh, interesting.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
And you get a sense of that over time. And people, you know, you adapt to it and learn over time. So we’re giving people guidance and some of those things. What are some of the social norms? How do you go up and talk to somebody in the metaverse, for example, which is one of the really powerful things. You can walk up with location-based sound, you can walk up and talk to an individual and have a private conversation. Even if you’re in a shared space… How do you do those sorts of things? So there are social norms about it. Other lessons learned are the way you develop content for it, make it engaging. The quality of the content matters, the quality of the words you build, the degree of interaction, the experiences. So we’re really focusing on experience designers and the world builders who really understand how to make that happen. And I’d say the other thing is that it is, cognitively, it’s a drain to use the metaverse. If you’re in the metaverse for 20 minutes with the headset on, fully immersed, it’s tiring, it’s physiologically tiring. And it does use more of your brain capacity and energy because you’re focusing on things that aren’t familiar to you, you’re processing a lot of visual imagery. And so you have to take that into account. We advise people to keep the experiences short at this stage. When you take the headset off, drink a glass of water, take some time and refresh and re-ground yourself. And as the technology improves, all those aspects will get much better and people will be able to use it more seamlessly. But those are some of the initial learnings that we’ve had.

ELISE HU:
You’re saying that, as we go forward, metaverse experiences and the physical experiences are likely to meld a lot more. So what role, especially since you’re thinking about it for Accenture, what role would a place like Nth Floor play going forward if you just projected a year or two years, three years in advance?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Well, I think what we have to do is also picture where the technology is going. It’s going to create even more immersive opportunities. If you think about the option to engage customers in the metaverse, that’s something we’re working in many industries on, in the banking industry, and retail, and many other industries. Looking at, how do customer interactions change when you could have a metaverse briefing session, you could have a metaverse sales session, a metaverse design session with a customer. Those sorts of things are starting to happen and will happen with increasing frequency as we go forward. And then when you add in the augmented work, I think that’s where the biggest opportunity is going to be for businesses as you go forward. It’s going to be the blending of the completely virtual with the augmented work, the digital twins that we talked about earlier, to create these seamless experiences that bridge the real world and the virtual world.

ELISE HU:
Paul, in addition to your very busy job, you’re also the co-author of a new book called Radically Human . And one big takeaway from the book is that we are entering this new age of AI, which we’ve talked a lot about. But in this new age, technology is really human-centered or human-led. I’m curious, how is that different than the way things are now?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
I think we’re entering kind of a third era in terms of how we think about people, humans, ourselves, and technology. If you think back not too many years ago, and even with the way subsystems work, we were optimizing around what a machine could do, what a computer could do. And we spent millions of dollars in change management and different training and things to try to force people to use systems the way they needed to work. Think about green screens on mainframes or regimented PC-based systems and even web systems that work that way. That was the machine-driven approach. My prior book was titled Human Plus Machine , and there we were talking about the opportunity to blend the human and the machine together using AI and other technologies, where you created a more symbiosis-type relationship between the machine and the human. And I think that’s where we are today. We have our smartphones in our pockets, they make us smarter and we can remember things better. We use AI hundreds of times a day—directions and shopping assistants and all sorts of things. But I think what we’re talking about in Radically Human is taking that to the next level. And a lot of people fear some of the new technology. When you think about digital humans, for example, human avatars that can provide guidance and advance the applications of artificial intelligence, the new GPT transformers and technology that’s enabling amazing new capabilities like WALL-E, which is a new transformer that just came from OpenAI that can create amazing, realistic images with very little guidance. Our point is not to fear that technology, but to apply it in the right way, because the more human-like the technology capability, the more radically human potential it enables in real people. And the more human-like tools that we have as individuals to use, the more productive we are. The more you can do, the more you can achieve. That’s the point we’re making in Radically Human . How do you apply innovation and technology and the more human-like capability of technology to create breakthrough levels of innovation, of satisfaction, of enjoyment, depending on the experiences you’re creating for people.

ELISE HU:
Paul, a question for you. With this new era, how do you see your own role as a leader in technology changing?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
I think there’s a couple of things. One is, I think if you’re a leader in technology—or any leader generally—but if you’re a leader in technology in particular, I think you have an obligation to help others imagine the possibilities of technology. Technology is changing so fast, we have to make sure we’re articulating and helping people understand, and educate and imagine the possibilities. Another is this trust point. I think as a leader, you need to think about what’s the right way to do it from a trust and safety and privacy perspective. So we’re doing this in a way that’s creating a future that’s good for us. We want to make sure we don’t repeat some mistakes maybe we made early in the last wave of digital where there were concerns about privacy and misuse of information and such. How do we make sure we make the transition to the future in a way where we’re creating the world that we do want to live in?

ELISE HU:
That makes sense. And if you’re running a business, how do you think this shift is going to affect your company in concrete ways? What do business leaders need to start thinking about?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Yeah, the way I explain it to the companies that I talk to is, do you want to wake up in a future where the rules and the way that the virtual worlds and things work that we’re talking about were designed by your competitors, which is what happened to many in the last wave of digital transformation that happened, or do you want to be involved early and explore and imagine how this might all come about and be one of the ones shaping what happens? And I think that’s the choice that companies need to make. It might be fine to sit back and be a fast follower and say, hey, I’ll wait for all this stuff to happen. But I think the risk then is that others will figure out different ways of doing it. Just like Amazon figured out a different approach to commerce. And just like the sharing economy companies have figured out new ways to disrupt existing industries. That is happening again with the technologies we’re talking about. And the obligation that every leader has is to decide how you want to be part of that future rather than let it happen to you.

ELISE HU:
And for those who are worried about how much it would cost to implement, what do you say to that?

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
You know, that’s something you always have to look at in terms of the way that you can build a business. And there’s a phrase I use with clients: You’ve got to start by thinking big about what the possibilities are and imagine the future, but then start small, prove the value, but do that in a way that scales fast—the right technology infrastructure, the right financial. So think big, start small, scale fast is the general advice that I give companies on how you approach a future like the one that we’re looking at now.

ELISE HU:
That sounds like one that’s going to be changing even faster and even more dizzyingly than we’ve already experienced.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
There will never be a time of slower change than we see right now. And I think that’s the other real imperative in the time we live in, is learning, and as an organization creating a learning culture within your company, because things are changing fast. And if your approach is, I’ll go hire the people I need tomorrow when things are different, that’s not going to work. You need to figure out how to create a learning environment, the learning platforms, learning culture, so that you’re bringing people along with you. And I think the winners in the future, I think are the ones who are going to figure that out. And that’s why experiments like we’re doing in the metaverse and using that in different ways for training, learning, I think are just part of exploring all these different angles on how we can create that kind of capability.

ELISE HU:
Accenture’s Paul Daugherty. Paul, thank you so much.

PAUL DAUGHERTY:
Thanks, Elise. It’s been a pleasure.

ELISE HU:
That was Paul Daugherty, who leads all aspects of Accenture’s technology business. And that’s it for this episode and this season of the WorkLab podcast from Microsoft. We have covered so much ground in Season 2, from hybrid work all the way to the metaverse. From mindset training to mentoring. Thank you as always for listening, and we’ll be back again in a few months for Season 3. In the meantime, check out the WorkLab digital publication, where you’ll find transcripts of all our episodes, along with thoughtful stories that explore the ways we work today. That’s at Microsoft.com/WorkLab. And for this podcast, please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produced this podcast. And Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor.