XR for Business at the Ritossa Family Office Summit

In between your regularly-scheduled
XR for Businesses episodes, Alan has a brief update and recap of his
recent trip to the Ritossa Family Office Summit in Dubai

Hey there, it’s Alan Smithson with the
XR for Business Podcast. And today’s episode is a very special recap
of a conference that I just spent two days at, called the Ritossa
Family Office Summit. This is a gathering of elite family offices, a
total of 600 prominent business owners, sheiks, royal families,
private investment companies, and international business people,
getting together to discuss the future of investing. Now, to put it
in perspective, the people that attend this represent about
$4.5-trillion in investable wealth. And this conference is the
world’s largest and most exclusive gathering of elite family office
decision makers.

This year’s topic was “East Meets
West”, and the theme of Dubai summit will act as a bridge
between Middle East families and their European, Asian, US, and Latin
American counterparts. This was an amazing experience for us. We were
there as a vendor. We were the only company there bringing virtual
and augmented reality to these people. And the interest level around
virtual and augmented reality was insane. People were asking all
sorts of questions, “How long is this going to take? What is the
roadmap now? Who’s using it? What companies are doing it? How can we
involve our company portfolios in this?”

And really, we came at this from a
training standpoint. Virtual and augmented reality training is the
most effective, efficient training solutions we’ve ever created as
humans. Everything from being able to track where the user’s looking,
to their biometrics, their heart rate, all of these things combined
create what we are hoping will be the future of all education and
training. And at MetaVRse, what we’re really focusing on now is
building out a platform marketplace to help businesses navigate the
technology, figure out what technology works best for the needs of
their employees.

Because as we enter into this kind of
age of exponential growth, what we’re seeing now is a massive change
in how we work. Over the next three years alone, IBM estimates that
over 120 million people will need to be reskilled and retrained due
to AI and automation. And from a strictly monetizable standpoint, PWC
— the global conglomerate — they’ve just earmarked $3-billion to
reskill, upskill, and retrain their staff.

AI and robotics and automation are
coming faster than we can possibly think about. And virtual and
augmented reality give us this kind of unique perspective as to how
we can train people in a way that is easier, faster, more efficient.
And I think we’re going to need that as we enter into exponential
growth.

Back to the Dubai summit. First of all,
I want to say a huge thank you to Anthony Ritossa — the host of the
summit — who brought together these incredible people. It was under
the patronage of His Highness, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the ruler and
prime minister of Dubai, and the ruling family. And it was really
amazing to meet their chief investment officer, Mohammed Al Ali —
who actually today is being knighted in London — and he is the CEO
and advisor of their International Investments Enterprise. We met
with Adam, the judge from the private office of His Highness, Sheikh
Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan. We met with Faris, and his team from
the office of Sheikh Sultan Bin Abdullah Al Qasimi.Qasimi.

And all of these sheikhs represent
family offices from different parts of the UAE. You have Dubai, you
have Sharjah, you have Abu Dhabi, and all of these different
emirates. There’s investments where they’re looking not just to
invest in oil and gas and these things, they’re really looking
towards investing in world cha

In between your regularly-scheduled
XR for Businesses episodes, Alan has a brief update and recap of his
recent trip to the Ritossa Family Office Summit in Dubai

Hey there, it’s Alan Smithson with the
XR for Business Podcast. And today’s episode is a very special recap
of a conference that I just spent two days at, called the Ritossa
Family Office Summit. This is a gathering of elite family offices, a
total of 600 prominent business owners, sheiks, royal families,
private investment companies, and international business people,
getting together to discuss the future of investing. Now, to put it
in perspective, the people that attend this represent about
$4.5-trillion in investable wealth. And this conference is the
world’s largest and most exclusive gathering of elite family office
decision makers.

This year’s topic was “East Meets
West”, and the theme of Dubai summit will act as a bridge
between Middle East families and their European, Asian, US, and Latin
American counterparts. This was an amazing experience for us. We were
there as a vendor. We were the only company there bringing virtual
and augmented reality to these people. And the interest level around
virtual and augmented reality was insane. People were asking all
sorts of questions, “How long is this going to take? What is the
roadmap now? Who’s using it? What companies are doing it? How can we
involve our company portfolios in this?”

And really, we came at this from a
training standpoint. Virtual and augmented reality training is the
most effective, efficient training solutions we’ve ever created as
humans. Everything from being able to track where the user’s looking,
to their biometrics, their heart rate, all of these things combined
create what we are hoping will be the future of all education and
training. And at MetaVRse, what we’re really focusing on now is
building out a platform marketplace to help businesses navigate the
technology, figure out what technology works best for the needs of
their employees.

Because as we enter into this kind of
age of exponential growth, what we’re seeing now is a massive change
in how we work. Over the next three years alone, IBM estimates that
over 120 million people will need to be reskilled and retrained due
to AI and automation. And from a strictly monetizable standpoint, PWC
— the global conglomerate — they’ve just earmarked $3-billion to
reskill, upskill, and retrain their staff.

AI and robotics and automation are
coming faster than we can possibly think about. And virtual and
augmented reality give us this kind of unique perspective as to how
we can train people in a way that is easier, faster, more efficient.
And I think we’re going to need that as we enter into exponential
growth.

Back to the Dubai summit. First of all,
I want to say a huge thank you to Anthony Ritossa — the host of the
summit — who brought together these incredible people. It was under
the patronage of His Highness, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the ruler and
prime minister of Dubai, and the ruling family. And it was really
amazing to meet their chief investment officer, Mohammed Al Ali —
who actually today is being knighted in London — and he is the CEO
and advisor of their International Investments Enterprise. We met
with Adam, the judge from the private office of His Highness, Sheikh
Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan. We met with Faris, and his team from
the office of Sheikh Sultan Bin Abdullah Al Qasimi.Qasimi.

And all of these sheikhs represent
family offices from different parts of the UAE. You have Dubai, you
have Sharjah, you have Abu Dhabi, and all of these different
emirates. There’s investments where they’re looking not just to
invest in oil and gas and these things, they’re really looking
towards investing in world changing things. Education is on the top
of mind of everybody right now because as an investor, if you own
several companies, you realize already that there is a skills
shortage.

In America alone, there’s about a 6
million person skills shortage in skilled trades. So things like
plumbing, HVAC, electrical, all of these things. Kids, it turns out,
don’t want to be in these types of things anymore. They really want
to be YouTube influencers. And actually, a study was recently
released where they studied 3,000 kids in America and 3,000 kids in
China. And they told them, “Just simply rank these seven jobs.”
And the seven jobs were– in America, the number one job was YouTube
influencer. The number seven job was astronaut scientist. And in
China, the list was actually completely flipped.

So if you look at our priorization of
learning, it’s more important for people to be on social media than
it is to learn truly transformational skillsets, and I think we need
to take what we’re learning with virtual and augmented reality — and
even things in entertainment — and apply these to our new learning
procedures. If you look at education as competing with Hollywood
movies, blockbuster AAA video games, and social media, these have
teams of people designed around just making these things addictive.

Netflix has AI algorithms that give you
better shows to watch. What we need to do is really take all of this
knowledge of AI and machine learning, and apply it to learning. And
that’s really what we’re hoping to do with MetaVRse. Some of the
other people that we met this year at the Ritossa summit were just
incredible. Sheila Driscoll, the founder of Driscoll– or I guess
founding family of Driscoll’s Berries. I don’t know if you’ve eaten
their raspberries, but I have. They’re delicious. But she was on a
panel talking about giving back, and philanthropy.

And all of these people are looking at
investments that not only serve their wallet — because once you have
enough money, you have enough money, you don’t need that — what
they’re looking for is investments that make positive change in the
world. Some of the panel discussions were around artificial
intelligence and machine based learning. Why are people invested in
it? And what we realized is that there’s a lot of misunderstanding
going on with that. And one of these things are that people just
don’t understand. So they need to– there’s a lot of education that
needs to be done around. What are these technologies? How do they–
how are they interrelated? AI, and machine learning, and computer
vision, and virtual and augmented reality, and mixed reality, and IOT
sensors, and cloud computing, and edge computing, and quantum
computers. All of these things are interconnected, they’re
intertwined. And we’re seeing a convergence of technologies.

And really, being able to talk to these
philanthropy arms of these massive investment companies, you start to
realize that they’re getting bombarded with people in blockchain, and
cryptocoins, and these types of things. There’s tons of presentations
on investible digital assets. “What’s to come in 2019,”
with Nick Ayton from Chainstarter Ventures. One of the other things
was interactive roundtables, and art as an investment asset class,
building global businesses in partnership with family offices,
investing in blockchain, machine learning, and artificial
intelligence.

I went to that one — the roundtable on
artificial intelligence — and the question came up around the table,
was “When will artificial intelligence replace bankers?”
And everybody had their different answers: 2030, 2040. And the real
answer that I gave is, “as soon as possible.”. And it’s not
that people don’t want bankers, it’s that as soon as you have an
algorithm that takes out the emotion of banking and does the job more
efficiently than a human, this is where AI becomes a replacement for
what we do. And if you look at how many jobs are in the financial
services sector, and how many jobs are already changing around quants
and around artificial intelligence algorithms, it’s really going to
be revolutionary.

Some of the other things that we saw
there at the Rotossa Summit, this one really got me, I love this one.
This is “Buckle your seat belt. What options do families have
for insurance against market volatility?” Having President Trump
and China at this trade war leaves a lot of uncertainty for the
world. And we are in a time of volatile markets, and really being
able to invest financially secure investments against real estate or
against other assets. It was really a great eye opener on what are
the insurances that investors are taking, to make sure that market
volatility does not affect their returns.

One of the panel sessions was on
blockchain and business delivering real world benefits. And we’re
talking about how blockchain can be used for medical records, it can
be used for education records. In fact, one of the things that we’re
building as part of our platform marketplace is a blockchain
component that allows you to have an immutable transcript of your
record. So if you take a course at work, or you take a course on
Coursera, or you take a degree at Harvard, or a microdegree in
Udacity, these can be locked into a blockchain and really secure
there. So that’s a great use case there.

I know it’s being used a lot in
shipping, in logistics, being able to track where your food comes
from, and where everything is sourced from ethically. One of the the
panels that I really, really enjoyed was “Philanthropy, impact,
and social responsibility investment opportunities.” And this
one was big for me, because on the panel was Justin Rockefeller from
the Rockefeller family. And here’s a descendant of one of the
wealthiest people on the planet to ever live in humanity, and talking
about how their family wealth is being preserved and reinvested, and
how they have a moral obligation to invest in philanthropy and impact
and social investments.

And it really resonated with me,
because everybody there has the ability to fund all sorts of
philanthropy efforts. And it was really wonderful to understand how
these people invest, how they think, and more so, what is important
to them from a standpoint of their long term visions and their long
term dynasties, I guess is the right word. So what is it about their
dynasty that they want to be remembered by and listen, making a lot
of money is easy, easier for people that have it. Making more money
is easy, but making money while doing good in the world, I think is
going to be the new way of doing business. And I’m really excited for
it.

One of the things, my purpose in life
is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and act in a
socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable way. And by
being networked with these wonderful people at the Ritossa Summit,
and having deep conversations around the ways we can use
virtual/augmented/mixed reality technologies combined with the other
technologies — AI, blockchain — combining these to serve humanity
and especially from our side, from the eyes of learning, and really
creating education. I’m going to throw this out here, because our
mission — and we’ll be announcing this outside of the podcast soon
— but our mission at MetaVRse is to democratize education globally
by 2040, using spatial technologies.

And we believe that as these
technologies become more mature and more ubiquitous, the future of
learning isn’t going to be looking at a YouTube screen. It’s going to
be looking at a YouTube screen, it’s can be listening to a podcast,
it’s going to be doing something in spatial computing. All of it
combines to create a learning environment, where each individual
learner can learn the best possible way for them. And being able to
incorporate data like eye tracking and biometrics and head pose and
hand tracking, we’ll be able to deliver learning at a scale and
efficiency never, ever thought of in human history. So we’re really
excited about building that future.

With that, I want to just say a huge
thank you again to Vanessa Eriksson from the Ritossa Summit, and also
to Sir Anthony Ritossa for the invite to this incredible gathering.
And I can’t wait to the next one, in Riyadh. So thank you again. And
thank you guys for listening. This has been the XR for Business
Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Oh, one more thing, if you
haven’t subscribed to the podcast, hit the subscribe button, so you
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xrforbusiness.io.