Futurist, spatial computing pioneer, and widely known as the “Godmother of the Metaverse”, Hackl gets candid with Beyond the Boardroom about building for worlds that do not yet exist, the cultural forces reshaping luxury, and why the next decade’s most valuable currency may not be technological at all.
Photonic interfaces. Agentic architectures. Spatial inference engines. Volumetric economies. Words that tend to empty a room, unless Cathy Hackl is in it, at which point they become the entire crux of the conversation.
For those not yet acquainted with the Godmother of the Metaverse (a title bestowed upon her by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Nike’s former metaverse lead Andrew Kessler) Hackl’s trajectory may at first glance, appear a conventional one. Starting out in journalism across CNN, Discovery and ABC News (where she earned an Emmy nomination in 2007), Hackl’s pivot into technology was less a career decision than a moment of conviction. One encounter of her tepping inside a virtual recreation of a solitary confinement cell and emerging (she has said) entirely certain of where she needed to be, set in motion a decade-long immersion in technologies most of her peers were treating as speculative. From VR Evangelist at HTC VIVE to Magic Leap’s most ambitious years, to advising the likes of Nike, Louis Vuitton, Walmart and Estée Lauder on emerging technology strategy, Hackl has been building and shaping spaces most people are still theorising about. When pandemic-era layoffs swept the industry in 2020, she rebuilt, founding Future Dynamics, the firm she leads today alongside an advisory role at BCG’s Frontier Tech practice.
Photo: Courtesy of Cathy Hackl.
What has followed that reinvention is the fuller picture of who Hackl is today. She’s the author of multiple books on spatial computing and emerging technology, among them the widely cited Navigating the Metaverse: A Guide to Limitless Possibilities in a Web 3.0 World (co-authored with Dirk Lueth and Tommaso Di Bartolo) and the host of AdWeek’s TechMagic podcast—where she interrogates the cultural and commercial implications of the technologies reshaping business. She’s a fixture on the world’s most consequential stages: Harvard Business School, MIT, SXSW, Davos, and Vogue‘s Forces of Fashion, among others. Named one of Newsweek‘s Top 25 AI Visionaries of 2024, featured on the cover of Forbes Latam’s 100 Most Powerful Women, and recognised by Vogue Singapore among the leading women shaping technology’s next chapter. She is in short, not a commentator on this industry, she’s one of the people who built it.
Living between Washington D.C. and Dubai, she has spent the past two years moving across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Global South, her work sitting at the precise intersection of innovation and the fast-moving adoption markets with booming growth. Beyond the Boardroom sits down with Hackl to uncover what the convergence of spatial intelligence, virtual economies and shifting cultural values really means for the future of luxury, and why leaders need to be brave enough to build for it.
The luxury industry has spent decades perfecting the art of making people want the finer things in life. But today’s consumer is younger, more digitally native, and shaped by virtual economies and seems to operate by an entirely different set of desires. What does value creation look like for this next generation?
We are at a generational inflection point, and I don’t think the industry has fully reckoned with what that means. Generational wealth is absolutely transferring from Boomers through Millennials to Gen Z and Gen Alpha on a scale and at a speed we haven’t seen before. These are consumers who have grown up inside virtual economies, spending meaningfully on digital goods, building inside platforms like Roblox. Their concept of what is real and what is worth paying for is not the same as their parents’. And by 2030, a significant proportion of the workforce will be Gen Alpha, who are AI-native, virtual-native, and mobile-first. That’s a scary proposition if you’re not prepared.
Technology and luxury have always had a more nuanced relationship than either side tends to publicly acknowledge. Where do you see that relationship heading today, and what does getting it right actually look like in practice?
The smart luxury houses understand something that sounds like a paradox but isn’t: technology doesn’t threaten luxury. When deployed correctly, it actually reinforces it. The high-net-worth consumer of the future is tech-enabled and simultaneously more discerning about authenticity. What changes is the interface, not the underlying desire for the exceptional. I’ve been having really interesting conversations with some of the top maisons, and what’s clear is that they all understand a shift is coming. Maybe not today, but the next-generation consumer is arriving and they will have to meet them where they are. Think about how glasses could be used to style a client remotely, or how spatial devices change the entire experience of showing a collection. These aren’t far-fetched scenarios, they’re conversations happening in those houses right now. The challenge is holding both truths simultaneously. Being tech-enabled without surrendering the very qualities such as craft, human labour, and provenance that make them worth engaging with in the first place.
The early 2020s saw enormous enthusiasm around the Metaverse and NFTs as the next frontier for luxury. Major luxury houses launched virtual collections, bought virtual real estate, and minted tokens. With investment cooling and many of those early experiments quietly shelved, was the industry simply ahead of its time, or did it fundamentally misread where the opportunity was?
Well to counter that I’d say the hype didn’t die, it actually localised. And I’d argue the industry didn’t misread the opportunity so much as misread the timing, and more importantly, the language. When I travel to parts of Africa, to Korea, to the GCC, the conversation has never stopped. What has shifted is the framing. What was always really being described was the spatial web: a three-dimensional extension of the internet that interacts with the physical world. Whether people use the word Metaverse is irrelevant, the underlying convergence of computing into the physical world is continuing regardless of what we call it. The holy grail was always the moment when devices could genuinely see and understand the world around them. On-device AI is bringing that closer. Once it arrives, computing stops being something we carry and becomes something we inhabit. The brands that wrote it off entirely will find themselves having to catch up very quickly.
There’s something almost philosophical in what you’re describing, a world that becomes more virtual and yet somehow makes the physical more precious. Is that a genuine cultural shift, and what does it mean for how we assign value to the human and the handmade?
It is completely genuine, and the evidence is already in front of us. Recently, a textbook arrived recently for my son (a physical book) required for a pencil-and-paper exam. On the cover in bold print it says “Human Authored.” That is not a marketing decision, that is a cultural signal. When everything is AI-generated, when the generic is infinite and free, people will aspire to the “Ferrari” of things and the “Ferrari” is the human-crafted, the irreducibly personal, and the thing made by a specific person with specific intention. Human is becoming the premium category. I’ve been saying recently that we may be moving from the era of OnlyFans to the era of OnlyWalks, where people pay simply to be in the physical company of another human being doing something entirely unremarkable. That sounds absurd until you sit with what a world of unlimited synthetic presence actually feels like. The premium becomes actual presence. Events. Objects. Encounters. For luxury, this is actually a profound opportunity, the very qualities the industry has always guarded most fiercely, craft, human labour, provenance, the irreplaceable hand of a specific maker, are precisely what becomes most valuable in a world where everything else can be generated instantly and for free.
Boardrooms everywhere are drowning in AI strategy decks and yet somehow the conversation keeps circling without landing anywhere. What is actually going wrong at the leadership level?
The problem is definitional. Ask any CEO what they mean by AI and the answers vary enormously, ChatGPT, agentic systems, large language models, or something a consultant told them about last quarter. The mandate has outrun the understanding, and you cannot lead what you have not defined. The parallel to the Metaverse moment is exact. When everyone was first saying Metaverse, some meant NFTs, some meant gaming, and some meant VR headsets. The word became noise and the strategy became meaningless. The same dynamic is playing out right now. What I look for in leaders is not technical fluency, it’s clarity of intent. It’s the intellectual honesty to sit down and say “here is precisely what we mean, here is the problem we are solving, and here is how we will measure whether it is working.” A market correction is coming. Large language models will hit data quality ceilings. The next architectures will be world models (AI systems that simulate how the real world works), spatial intelligence (AI’s ability to understand and navigate physical space), and embodied AI (AI that exists in physical machines like robots that can interact with the world) are where the genuinely transformative applications will emerge. The leaders who understand that distinction will be positioned. The ones chasing the current wave without understanding what is underneath it will find themselves perpetually reactive.
Much of this conversation has centred on Western markets and Western anxieties. But you’ve spent the last two years making a very deliberate argument with your feet, travelling across the Gulf, Africa, India, Asia. What does the future of this industry look like from those vantage points?
Hope. I mean that as a strategic observation, not a sentimental one. In parts of the Western world, the dominant narrative around technology has become anxious. It’s been jobs lost, trust eroded, and futures uncertain. In the GCC, in sub-Saharan Africa, in India, the narrative is fundamentally different. These are places where investment in the future is accompanied by genuine belief in it. Governments are building infrastructure not for the economy they have, but for the one they intend to create. The demographic case is not debatable. The younger generations concentrated in these regions are mobile-first, gaming-native, and growing up with a relationship to virtual value and digital economies that will shape global commerce for the next thirty years. I would not bet against Africa. I would not bet against India. I would not bet against the Global South. The centers of power in technology are shifting. As they shift, so will who we consider a leader, what we consider innovation, and whose story gets told. I am paying very close attention.
Luxury and gaming might seem like an unlikely pairing, but you’ve been making the case for their convergence for years. What is the economic argument, and what is the concept of virtual GDP that underpins it?
Gaming is a larger industry than music and Hollywood combined. One in three people on Earth plays video games, whether they identify as a gamer or not, and yet it still doesn’t get the respect it deserves in most boardrooms. The generations growing up inside those virtual worlds have a fundamentally different relationship to value and spending. They transact meaningfully in digital economies already. They understand virtual ownership intuitively. Their concept of what is worth paying for is not anchored to the physical in the way their parents’ was. That is the consumer the luxury industry is inheriting. Virtual GDP is the economic layer that sits on top of physical GDP: digital assets, virtual goods, and new forms of commerce operating in the space between atoms and data.
That layer is already enormous inside gaming platforms. What happens when it is overlaid onto the entire physical world through spatial devices such as glasses, wearables, or ambient computing? The economy that emerges from that convergence will be substantial. And the luxury brands that have already built meaningful presences inside virtual worlds, that understand digital ownership and scarcity, that have thought seriously about what their brand means in a spatially aware environment, those are the ones that will have a structural advantage when that layer fully arrives.
Finally, you sit at a genuinely rare intersection between deep technical expertise and a decade of luxury advisory work. Where do you see the most compelling opportunities for the luxury industry to actually win in this next chapter?
To me opportunity is in owning the transition, and the window will not stay open indefinitely. The brands that move with genuine intention rather than just experimentation, will define what luxury means in a spatially aware, AI-native world. The first-party data these houses hold—on their clients, their preferences, their behaviour—is extraordinary, and most of them are barely using it. Plug that into world models and you create something no competitor can replicate: a brand intelligence that is continuously learning and anticipating. The second opportunity is presence itself. As the virtual layer expands, the physical experience from the store, the atelier, and the one-on-one moment becomes the ultimate luxury expression. Not instead of digital, but because of it. The brands that can hold both simultaneously are the ones that will define this era.