Are we ready for metaverse adoption in the service industry? Theoretically exploring the barriers to successful adoption

The Metaverse has emerged as a convergence of technologies and conceptions with the potential to reshape how we interact, participate, learn, and entertain ourselves in the digital age. It has gained substantial attention recently due to its immersive, interconnected, and virtual environment for meeting evolving customer and market demands. As technology advances, firms implementing the Metaverse may gain a competitive edge and create new revenue streams. However, the service sectors still face challenges in adopting and successfully implementing Metaverse. Therefore, we attempted to establish a theoretical foundation to understand the challenges of Metaverse adoption in the service sector and to develop an integrated framework to analyse the barriers using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Fuzzy Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (F-DEMATEL) techniques. To achieve this, we first identify barriers from extensive literature and categorise them into six broad categories based on experts’ opinions. Then, we ranked each category and the barriers constituting them based on their criticality through FAHP. The Security and Privacy category has the highest weight among the six categories of barriers, followed by Governance and Standardisation, Infrastructure, User Behaviour and psychology, Feasibility, and Organisational culture and Stakeholder commitment. Further, we developed the causal-effect relationships among the six categories and analysed those categories through the degree of prominence and relationships. We found that Security and Privacy is one of the most influencing barriers. Then, we analysed our proposed decision-making model under different scenarios through sensitivity analysis. This study offers valuable insights into the relationships among the barriers and how they can impact progress towards achieving specific goals or objectives.