Solution looking for monetisation.
The business model of selling superficially impressive technology to managers with limited technical thinking is a sound one.
But more I think about it, the more shortsighted it seems. Coordinate systems' usefulness depends on everyone being able to decode them. Yet W3W's core business hinges on rabidly protecting the intellectual property that's needed to do so, in the face of an internet of extremely competent hackers whose motivation to reverse-engineer it is directly proportional to the proliferation of W3W addresses. In that environment, the best way to make money is to licence W3W to a small number of high-paying customers, and hope that nobody actually uses it.
Selling it to emergency services would seem ideal in that respect, but they seem to have either done slightly too good a job on the marketing, or emergency services are a lot less competent than we all assumed, and they've leapt on W3W as the end-all solution to pinpointing arbitrary locations on maps as if they didn't have several perfectly good ones already.