 Last, but not the least, we're going to end our day with a keynote session on our digital future by Andy Hood, BP Emerging Technologies, WPP. Andy founded the creative research and development team at AKQA, which operates where creative UX technology and strategy meet. And he continued to lead them and lead the team until moving up to WPP this year. You know, for 20 years at AKQA, he worked with a huge range of clients, including Nike, Xbox, Ferrari, H&M, Barplays, and many others on many award-winning projects. Mr. Hood, hi, I hope you're well. Hi there. Thanks very much. I am indeed. And thanks very much for inviting me to host this session. Right. Hopefully, we can all see this. So hey, everybody. And again, thanks for inviting me to host this session. It looks like it's been a brilliant event for everybody. I'm sure it has. So I am Vice President of Emerging Technologies at WPP. And in that role, to be honest, the technology itself, the workings and engineering of it is much less interesting to me than the possibilities and the impact that it has, the problems it solves, and the behavior that it changes and creates. Now, change can be unnerving. And some emerging technologies can make people quite anxious. I'm actually very positive about the possibilities that emerging technologies present. And I couldn't do this role if I wasn't. And I'm very fortunate to be working in a big company who prioritized that and who prioritized the collaboration between big companies who have enormous amounts of really deep knowledge in wildly different areas. And that's never more true of how it is actually in India, where collaboration even recently between such entities as Ogilvy and WaveMaker and GroupM serve to make the whole of WPP much greater than the sum of its parts. Now with all that in mind, what I want to talk about briefly today are two major themes which are quite nascent right now, but will play an ever-increasing role in our digital future. And they are, one is digital humans, and the other is the metaverse. And I'm pretty sure that you will have read and heard and seen an enormous amount about both of these things, their huge, huge subjects right now. So this is a digital human, and a digital human for our purposes is an animated avatar that you actually have a conversation with. And she can talk to you in a relatable, authentic human voice. She can see you through the camera and therefore with facial gestures respond emotionally to you. She can understand and speak any language. She could be anybody, for example, this guy. And he can be always on, everywhere, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, which is a really powerful new thing. Now this may seem to be very high tech, almost sci-fi, you see these things in films. But actually everything I'm talking about today is entirely device agnostic. There's no tech barrier and certainly no behavioral barrier preventing people from interacting with these things. This report by Group M and E4M that talked about the fact that 99% of people are using their phone to access the internet, that's actually resulted in an increase in voice search of 270% in the region and a rise in Hindi voice search of 400%. So clearly this behavior of using your voice to speak to your devices and interact with their services is something which is exploding and only going to get bigger and bigger. So that's the how. But the first thing many people think of when they're imagining having conversations with digital humans is won't that be strange, won't that be awkward, why would you do it? But actually the interesting thing is that it's been shown that there are conversations that people will have where they will be far more honest and open with a digital human than they will be with a real one, particularly in more sensitive subjects of health, finance, etc. And the awkwardness wears off very, very quickly. If you remember the first time you used voice with your phone and how strange that felt, but how quickly you move past those barriers. And there are some examples of digital humans playing a role already in interesting areas. This is Ella and Ella is part of the New Zealand police force assisting the concierge team as part of an upheaval of their service delivery. Now Ella obviously can deal with a lot of inquiries at one time with stressed people and with her empathetic responses this helps can calm things down and deal with a large volume. This is Maya and Emma they're from Maryville University in Missouri. They have a huge influx of new students each year and Maya and Emma help guide those students in filling out documentation, in career planning, in financial advice, all of these kinds of things that people want help with and they want help when they need it like now. This one this is Mia and as you can see this being delivered entirely through mobile and Mia works for a company called Madeira Residential which is a real estate company and this is customer service which is an area we've become used to seeing chatbots in. And Maya deals with those kind of repetitive low level questions that can otherwise take up a lot of people's time and that people get frustrated with. Maya can deal with all these, this huge volume, leaving the real people at Madeira Residential to deal with the things that they actually have expertise and knowledge in. It's got a more nuanced conversations. Really my favorite one of these is Florence, Florence is part of the World Health Organization and helps people get rid of their smoking addiction. And the key here is that a conversation with Florence is a judgment-free conversation which is a really important thing when we're talking about things like addictions, a lot of these things carry like a certain maybe a sense of sensitivity, maybe shame with them. It's true to be open and honest can be really, really helpful and Florence has been successful enough that at the start of the pandemic when there were so many myths and theories about COVID-19 and let's face it there still are that Florence was deemed as a great way to debunk those myths basically to clarify the situation because there couldn't be a question that you would be too embarrassed to ask Florence because of that judgment-free conversation. So there's real power here to reach a lot of people in an interesting way. Actually at WPP we use the artificial intelligence behind digital humans to elevate and to upskill the tens of thousands of people. It's a big organization about 130,000 people at WPP and we're dedicated to upskilling those people. So here you can choose any topic to do with AI and whatever language you want to have that conversation is and a video is generated of someone talking you through. It looks a bit like this. Next up, strategy and creativity. Across WPP, our teams use AI to enable and involve creative work that wins hearts, minds and awards. Wonderman Thompson's the next Rembrandt was a masterpiece in the creative application of AI. To help ING celebrate its sponsorship of Dutch art and culture, Wonderman Thompson used artificial intelligence to create an entirely new Rembrandt painting or remaining faithful to the artist's vision and craft. Now, obviously this video goes on and there are many, many videos like this with different digital humans. And the beauty of this is that the digital humans can be swapped in and out. New languages can be added. This digital human could say that and repeat the same video and narrate it in Spanish or Cantonese or Mandarin or English or Hindi. So, you know, there's a lot of scale and a lot of reuse that comes out of this. We can even personalize these videos. So digital humans, there's an enormous empowerment to having this 24 seven access to open information. This is democratization of expert information. Being able to have those conversations with empathetic responses and a judgment free environment is also very powerful. We've already seen that voice behavior is already well established and only going to grow. Intriguingly, there are actually digital people everywhere and you've become so used to it that you're kind of almost immune to it. So the digital de-aging of people in Marvel films through to actors actually being recreated entirely from the past in certain movies. Music artists like concerts featuring holograms of artists who passed away like Tupac or Ronnie James Dio and then the digital influencers who exist everywhere on social platforms. And then the conversational technology behind these is rapidly increasing in sophistication. This is happening all the time. We're really at the beginning of this movement. Let's take a quick look at that. So we used to chatbots and voice assistants that sound the same and say the same things to everybody. It's one conversation at scale, but that's not how we are as people, is it? As humans, we change what we say and how we say it depending on how we're talking to. Now, AI can actually start to build a picture of your character and personality as it's talking to you, which enables it to start to adopt a tone of voice for you as an individual. Using the camera, basically being able to analyse your emotional state and respond accordingly. Now, it can sound uncomfortable, but actually this is only enabling a digital human to behave in exactly the same way that you all and I do all day, every day. How about how they sound and the voices? We're used again to hearing that artificial voice that we've become accustomed to, that Siri kind of voice, but that's changing too. This is a famous coach from the NFL, Vince Lombardi. He did a passionate speech at the Super Bowl last year, a kind of an inspirational rallying cry, you know, stick together in these dark times kind of thing. It was powerful. It was absolutely his voice. There was no actor involved. But Vince Lombardi died in 1970. So how has this done? Again, this is artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence doing voice cloning, which is where an AI is trained to be able to say new things in an old voice. Just to show how accurate this can be, this is done using Microsoft's custom neural voice. This is a human voice. Four walls is so good, laughing out loud. And this is the synthesised voice. Is version three, the JPEG version, that would be fantastic. As you can see, there's not a lot to choose between those two. And it, again, it's not just English. Here is one example of voice. And here is its twin. Now, I actually can't remember which order those two are in. That's pretty powerful stuff. So the conversation technology behind digital humans enabling us to distinguish between people, to therefore personalise tone of voice and approach, to actually have a, you know, an empathetic response in a genuine human voice. So rather than being one conversation going on everywhere, this is true to one-to-one conversation at scale. And that's very powerful. So that's digital humans. What about the metaverse? Because that's kind of exploded, hasn't it? Well, let's start with, with a few stats here. So in 2020, 27 million people attended five concerts by Travis Scott in Fortnite. These were viewed 45 million times in May of this year. And for a one hour only, Gucci sold a digital version of one of its Dionysus bags in Roblox, a virtual world, for 475 Robux each. Now, Robux is the currency within this Roblox virtual world. So about $6. Now, the resale value of these digital bags reached a point where one of them was resale for over $4,000, which is $800 more than the asking price for the real world. Until October last year, the most money being made by digital artists of Beephole off the sale of one of his works was about $100. And then he got into the NFT game. And this year, an NFT of one of his works was auctioned at Christie's in New York, and fetched about $69 million. And then this year, again, Commerce Company Boson protocol spent a fairly significant amount of money on the real world. Commerce Company Boson protocol spent a fairly significant six-figure sum of money purchasing real estate in Decentral land with a plan to build experiences there that bridge the physical and digital commerce divide. Now, these are all metaverse stories, but they're all wildly different. They're all really big with really big numbers attached to them. And they're not outliers. They're like, there are lots of other stories I could have used in the place of this. So what actually is the metaverse? Well, simply put, the metaverse is any virtual space where people go to play games, to interact with each other, meet people, buy things, dance moves, outfits, go to gigs and just hang out. Now, again, like digital humans, this all sounds very, very high-tech and expensive and rather science fiction. But again, the answer is no, it's not. For example, this is Haikland, which is built off the back of the Haik messaging app in India and it's a space where people can watch videos and hang out. It's a pure mobile virtual world and it's described as a magical place to hang out online. There are a lot of big virtual worlds out there with millions and millions of players, Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Decentral land, Minecraft, Animal Crossing. But as you can see, there's no technology barrier here. A mobile-first or even a mobile-only community can be still be just as much a part of the metaverse as a person with an Xbox or a PlayStation. And actually, this report from the Mobile Marketing Association in collaboration with Group M showed that of all those many people that we've heard about today, using their mobile as the way to access the internet, 84% of those are using it for entertainment. So there's no shortage of an audience for the metaverse in this region. Sort of about NFTs, because we've heard about those, but they're not virtual worlds and that's indeed true, but they are crucial to any future metaverse economy. Now, an NFT or a non-fungible token is essentially a code which is attached to a singular instance of a digital image or item and tracked on the blockchain. Now, we're used to a digital asset being just one of a potentially infinite number of identical copies. So each one individually doesn't really mean much. As you attach an NFT to one of them, the first one, that becomes a unique one-of-a-kind item. That gives it value. That gives meaning to ownership, which gives rise to trade, this scarcity that's created by NFTs is a powerful thing. So the NFT boom that we're experiencing is inextricably a metaverse phenomenon. Now, Indian blockchain firm Polygon have actually created a solution, which is the first dedicated NFT platform specifically for Cricket. And today is actually quite an auspicious day because I'm pretty sure that today is the day of the auction for Dinesh Kartik's Six for the Win NFT. Now, Cricket fans out there and I'm gonna assume that there's a fair number and I am myself, would remember India needing six runs to win off the final ball against Bangladesh in a famous cricket match. And Dinesh Kartik smashes it out of the ground. So what's been created here is little animated film of this event with Dinesh Kartik himself narrating it, giving his kind of thoughts and feeling as it happens. And NFT has been attached to this and it's being auctioned today. So keep your eyes peeled basically for the success of this auction and to see what happens. But this is just one of many, many things happening in the region with NFTs. Now, interesting things happen when the metaverse in the real world coincide and cross over. We can imagine that happening through augmented reality in the spatial way. And an interesting example of that happened in London fairly recently through Snapchat. So again, a completely mobile first experience with city painter. And this enables you to go to a real physical space and apply virtual graffiti through augmented reality. But the key is that graffiti is retained in the virtual world. So you go away, somebody else comes in, they look at this wall through their app and they see the graffiti that you left behind. So there is a digital copy of the world invisibly inhabiting the same space as the real one, which is really interesting. But what it means is that we can't afford to think of this metaverse as these virtual worlds as being separate as other and kind of closed off. The metaverse is becoming an increasingly large part of the everyday world we live in. And it will play an increasingly large role in our everyday lives just as it already is for so many millions of people. Now, earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the future of Facebook is as a metaverse company and there's word that they might even change their name basically to accommodate this or what does that mean? Well, it really means that alongside everything else we've talked about today can see that the metaverse is not like a passing fat. It's a fundamental cultural and economic shift that we need to be involved in and understand. Right now, the whole movement is nascent, which presents a huge opportunity to get involved and help to shape a metaverse that we can all believe in. A metaverse which is consistent with the values that we hold to build an environment that is a positive one for ourselves and for our children. But things are moving very, very fast. And that window of opportunity to be truly influential will not remain open indefinitely. So really to close this, my rallying cry for everybody is to get involved because the more people with a passion and with a good aspiration who can partner with people who have the same aspiration and the knowledge and experience, this is the thing that will allow us to actually make real positive change in the world using these technologies. So thank you very much. Hi. There we go. I thought I'd got away with it there for a minute. No, you didn't. In fact, the audience has many questions that I'm just going to restrict myself and ask you three. So here goes the first question. How would you suggest that we all get started in learning about NFT and the metaverse? It's an interesting one, this one, because I think way back when we were talking about websites in the 2000s, we all used websites. That was quite easy. And then we started to talk about iPhone apps when they emerged and we all used our mobile phones. So that was quite straightforward. We are now finding a lot of people talking about the metaverse and NFTs where it's quite possible that not that many people over say 35 have actually been there. So the thing to do is actually to dive in and you could start with the metaverse. For example, you don't have to create big profiles and do complicated things in Roblox and Fortnite. You could just start by having meetings, business meetings, internal meetings in things like alt space or Mozilla hubs or horizons, which are really, really easy. And what you get out of that is just understanding the feeling of being in there, of what it's like to meet people and talk to them and to behave in virtual worlds. And then we create a common ground to have a conversation which we can move forward. And getting a wallet for NFT transactions, again, just buy some cheap ones. It's not about spending lots of money. Just use the mechanisms of the metaverse and have a presence in it so that you can understand it. It's really, really easy. Okay. Well, that takes me to the next question, which is what steps should a brand take if they are planning to get into the metaverse? Like what are the initial go-to strategies that a brand should employ for the same? Yeah, and there'll be a lot of brands thinking about this because the stories are coming thick and fast. So, but the key is to understand the relevance and kind of role of the brand and the consumers. It's just like if the metaverse was a real physical new country, a brand wouldn't just, you know, fly in, set up shop and start selling things. They do some thinking and research to go, okay, well, you know, where does our brand fit in this new country? And how do we speak to the people there? And what are their customs and behaviors and how do we align with those? It's the same. So you need to kind of have an idea about where your brand will fit in the metaverse and the kind of message it could have or the kind of experiences you could provide, how they relate back to that brand in the real world is important. Because as we say, these things are not, shouldn't be considered as two completely separate things. If you've got a big audience in one, you want that to translate. So it's just having some ideas and some thoughts that you can test in quite small ways to prove some of these ideas out before starting to do some bigger things. Right. I'm gonna end this with a slightly open-ended question. You know, because of the pandemic, we've seen this sudden shift worldwide to a more virtual and hybrid model for businesses. And that also brings about this as things normalize, it brings about this thought that things will get back to normalcy what we do pre-COVID. So my question to you would be all of this, right? We're talking about metaverse here, we're talking about the importance of the virtual world. Why would you say that this is all not just a fad, not just a passing tandem trend? And you know, what is it, what is going to ensure that this model stays? Yeah, to me it's because the, so technology change, although obviously it requires experts and gifted people or whatever, it's easier than behavior or change. Behavior or change is really, really hard. It's the hardest thing you can do is to try and shift people's behavior. So technologies that do really well have a tendency to actually allow you to use your normal human behavior to interact. It's why voice is actually so easy and has, which seemed odd when it first happened. It was an awkward thing. You would like say something to your phone and then it would kind of respond and you laugh and tell jokes and things. But very quickly it becomes normal because actually it's just you interacting with your devices and services in the same way that we interact with each other. And in the metaverse, what you see is that people have an environment and an identity in the metaverse and they care for it and curate it as exactly as they do in the real world. So there isn't a big behavior or shift you're using your lifetime of learned experience to behave in the metaverse as you do in the real world. But the fact that it is, it's not the real world, allows you to carry out things and do things which in the real world you can't. Going to a concert in a metaverse concert like Roblox or Fortnite, these are concerts which are not bound by the laws of physics and those are amazing experiences. So it's that combination of the enhanced experiences you can have but just being able to have those things with the kind of life experience that you bring to it. It's not that you have to learn some complex set of controls and culture. You really can just dive in and get going straight away. Just to understand a little bit more, I'm actually not supposed to but this is an interesting topic and you have a lot to say. So I'm going to ask. When you say metaverse, right? I mean, essentially what we're saying is that you talked about behavioral patterns of consumers. Behavioral patterns often, not often actually always are dependent on the environment they're in, right? So during the pandemic, the environment was such where the behavioral pattern turned to a metaverse. So in your humble opinion, I mean, do you see even if the environment changes, quote unquote, becomes normal, do you see metaverse holding in terms of behavioral patterns of consumers? Yeah, because these metaverse worlds that have become enormous things, they come from the world of gaming. They're game worlds. And gaming isn't going to go away. Basically, this aspect of play isn't going to disappear. There are more and more gamers, like all over the world, there's a huge number of gamers in India, for example, it's become a professional sport now. And you see esports, which is people watching people play games, which to me when I was young would seem crazy, but it's a huge industry. So the metaverse basically has kind of been created off the back of the gaming explosion, which means that rather than anyone who might remember second life from way, way back in the day, which was metaverse to a degree, but it was really, it was a bit bare bones. Like it hadn't been fleshed out, it was new. But by the time people now are getting into the metaverse, these gaming worlds are very well-established and very sophisticated in kind of complete exploratory environments. So, and I think that passion for gaming and connecting in these places will just keep powering it forwards. Lovely. Well, that was a really interesting session. I know that you're overseas and you've logged in at a different time. Thank you so much. It's pleasant. It was an honor having you here and we hope to see you soon in India at an on-ground event. Absolutely. It would be lovely to do this in person at some point, wouldn't it? 100%. And we look forward to that up until then. Take care. Stay safe. Thank you. Cheers everybody.