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 alr