The digital parallel universe Metaverse will also play a key role in industry in the future.

This was pointed out by Microsoft's Germany boss, Marianne Janik, on Monday at the Hanover Fair.

The pandemic not only finally helped the home office and other variants of the newly organized work to achieve a breakthrough, said Janik of the German Press Agency.

As a result, many companies have had to deal with procedures in which certain scenarios are run through virtually before they are implemented in production or product development.

"It's like the industrial metaverse."

The industry defines the metaverse as a world in which physical reality merges with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in a cyber world.

Important components in this world are also digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, with which, among other things, virtual real estate, digital art, items for games or digital status symbols can be purchased.

The term metaverse comes from American writer Neal Stephenson, who first used it in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

In the USA, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in particular relies on the Metaverse and therefore renamed the Facebook group Meta.

Janik emphasized that in an industrial metaverse you can accomplish things that used to be done physically with significantly more effort.

According to Janik, the various crises such as climate change or the Ukraine war are forcing the economy to increase its efforts in the area of ​​sustainability.

However, according to a survey by the market researcher YouGov on behalf of Microsoft, every third company, namely 31 percent, has not yet made any investments in sustainable technologies.

"This shows that good will alone is no longer enough, we really have to implement things to make sustainability a reality." Digital modeling of products and manufacturing processes helps to achieve these sustainability goals.

At the same time, processes such as the "digital twin" mean that innovations can be implemented and brought to market more quickly.

"We now live in a world in which risk management plays a completely different role and is much more existential than before," said Janik.

It is not just a matter of better assessing risks, but also of acting with foresight.

"Data can help decisively in this mammoth task." Microsoft also accommodates the concerns of data protection officials who refuse to store data outside of Europe.

"We can already limit the storage of customer data to Europe if the customers so wish."