The hottest new position, an AI officer, pays over $1 million: 

Midway through 2022, Publicis Groupe SA, a major player in the advertising industry, hired Leon, a lion-headed digital avatar, to be its "chief metaverse officer." Leon would lead customers through the virtual world that had garnered significant interest in the real world.

His little period of fame was short lived.

After ChatGPT made its debut five months later, the artificial intelligence-focused excitement that had engulfed the metaverse ever before Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta Platforms Inc. A rapidly disappearing species were Leon and other human policemen who worked in the metaverse, an immersive virtual world where users could communicate with each other.

Leaders of the metaverse initiatives at Creative Artists Agency, Procter & Gamble, and Walt Disney Co. departed. Apart from his initial press release, Leon is no longer mentioned on the firm website and his LinkedIn profile (yes, he did have one) has vanished. Publicis Groupe declined to provide an official statement.

Rather, companies are rushing to name leaders in AI; notable hires include GE HealthCare and Accenture. A handful of executives in the metaverse have even rebranded themselves as AI specialists, adeptly transitioning from one fad technology to another.

The executive-search and leadership consultancy firm Heidrick & Struggles conducted a poll and found that the typical compensation packages are significantly higher than $1 million. Publicis announced last week that it would spend 300 million euros ($327 million) on people and artificial intelligence technology over the following three years.

"I haven't talked to a client about the metaverse in a long time," stated Fawad Bajwa, who leads the worldwide AI practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search and advisory business. "The metaverse may persist, but it's a solitary place."

The recent reorganization of the C-suite exemplifies how erratic technology trends may be and how hard it is for businesses to tell hype from reality.

The majority of businesses have mostly moved on from the metaverse. According to Bloomberg transcript data, the word was used just twice during results calls at S&P 500 companies last quarter, as opposed to 63 times during the first quarter of 2022. According to Russell Reynolds, eight out of ten CEOs stated that year that they were either increasing the responsibilities of their leadership teams to address it or employing specialized personnel with experience in the field.Everybody was vying for a share of a worldwide economic opportunity that, according to optimistic estimates from McKinsey & Co. consultants at the time, may be valued $5 trillion by 2030.

Nada Usina, the CEO and co-founder of NU Advisory Partners, an executive search and advisory firm specializing in boards and the C-suite, claims that another indication that "the focus has definitely shifted" is Apple's choice to refer to its new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, as a "spatial computing" device, without using any meta-mentions at all. Because of investors' enthusiasm for Microsoft Corp.'s aggressive investment in artificial intelligence, the business surpassed Apple this month to become the most valuable public company in the world. After investing billions on futile metaverse projects, even Meta's Zuckerberg, who previously called the metaverse "the next frontier," has switched his attention to generative AI.

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