RESEARCH REPORT
Going beyond with extended reality
5-MINUTE READ
May 25, 2025
In brief
- Accenture believes the future of meeting, learning and working together will combine physical and virtual experiences to transform the enterprise.
- Advancements in 3D, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) enable companies, including Accenture, to create immersive experiences that are shared and equal.
- Accenture’s Nth Floor metaverse is enabling employees to meet, learn and collaborate in new ways.
As more people are embracing the virtual world to better connect, a continuum of technologies and experiences are growing in popularity—and offering huge potential for future ways of learning and working. Accenture is recognized as an early leader in this space, applying technologies, such as extended reality (XR) and digital twins, to deliver breakthrough solutions for more than a decade.
With the belief that physical and virtual experiences will co-exist in future ways of working, Accenture is moving boldly into the metaverse to create workplace experiences, where our people can participate, contribute and feel like they belong, regardless of where they work.
Working closely with Microsoft, Accenture started this journey pre-pandemic by building a virtual campus called the “Nth Floor” for people to gather and participate in community events. Soon after the pandemic hit, Accenture began building on these capabilities for onboarding new employees and then extended them to serve learning and collaboration needs within the organization.
Accenture’s metaverse: The Nth Floor
A new era of digital change is being ushered in by the metaverse—a convergence of physical and digital worlds that enables people to move beyond “browsing” to “inhabiting” in a shared experience. Enhanced by advancements in 3D, AR and VR, it’s where people can meet and where digital assets—land, buildings, products, and avatars—can be created, bought and sold.
Accenture’s enterprise metaverse, known as the Nth Floor, refers to the virtual environments we have created to bring Accenture people together to meet, collaborate and learn. Whether hosting meetings or socializing, the metaverse is a versatile, scalable solution for bringing a geographically distributed workforce together.
In addition, Accenture has created digital twins of many of its physical offices, from Bangalore in India to Madrid in Spain and San Francisco in the United States to provide familiar environments for its people to meet, collaborate and network.
Onboarding new hires
The first few days as a new employee are crucial to talent retention. However, a Gallup poll found only 12% of employees reflected favorably on job onboarding experiences – and that was prior to the pandemic. These experiences crucial to shaping the path forward for an employee.
Accenture has held hundreds of community gatherings in immersive spaces where people can connect, learn and better collaborate because they're in the same place together. For example, at an annual strategy meeting with our client account leaders, we created a virtual lounge using a combination of avatars and realistic meeting spaces to provide a deeper sense of connection. The result: more than 150 managing directors in 25 countries enjoyed face-to-face time from their own locations.
XR helps our people go beyond in-person experiences to discover the art of the possible and reach new levels of workplace innovation.
Jason Warnke / Senior Managing Director – Global IT, Global Digital Experiences Lead, Accenture
XR excellence foundation
Our strategy is grounded in using XR to develop a sense of community and enhance our culture. It focuses on three foundational pillars: experience, adoption and infrastructure.
Experience
- Mobilize the Accenture metaverse where our people can learn, onboard and collaborate.
- Explore new ways to engage our people, both professionally and personally.
- Create meaningful content that delights our people.
- Innovate and iterate with our ecosystem relationships to provide the best experience for our people—making it a seamless experience from reality to VR.
Adoption
- Manage user acceptance of XR across a variety of countries and diverse populations.
- Fuel adoption with a strong strategy that ties to daily ways of working and user needs.
- Weave XR into the fabric of Accenture and create opportunities for our people to continue to innovate and discover.
- Create a strong change network to enable our people to be experts and inspire others to create consistent usage.
Infrastructure
- Determine our device strategy and key components needed to be effective.
- Determine how to roll out headsets across the globe and use our extensive user base for feedback.
- Engage our IT support teams to add new devices to their support scope.
As we look to the future, the introduction of new platforms—such as the platform Microsoft Mesh that’s designed to make app creation easier—offers the promise of new forms of mixed reality collaboration in the metaverse.