What is the biggest roadblock for AR adoption across industries?
The most common challenge we see enterprises face is choosing the right use case. The best way to get started with AR in the workplace is to start small. Build a practical AR project that shows real results. For example, you cannot get started by promising to overhaul your company’s end-to-end manufacturing process. Enterprises should identify one part of a process or procedure where AR can make a clear difference in terms of efficiency, quality, error reduction, and build time.
Another roadblock we see enterprise organizations struggling with is around the need to future-proof their investment in what is still an emerging technology. Executives signing off on the purchase of AR tools want to know their budget is being spent wisely and that the technology being deployed today will not be obsolete in just a few short years. Most enterprises today are looking for a cost-effective way to integrate AR into their workflow, which often means solutions that pair with existing AR-capable hardware like smartphones and tablets. After all, the cost of acquiring high-end mixed reality displays today can be prohibitive for even one unit, let alone the dozens or possibly hundreds that an enterprise may need across their workforce. No matter what AR solutions a specific business chooses, it is important to balance current needs alongside the unknowable needs of the future so that programs are scalable and that the AR content being created today – think digital work instructions or AR-enabled recorded training sessions – can still be leveraged on the devices of tomorrow.
Your company has clients across different industries and segments. Which industries hold the maximum AR adoption potential according to you?
We have seen some impressive applications in the field service, industrial manufacturing and aerospace industries, which is where we are focusing a lot of our energy. For instance, Lockheed Martin is using AR in their Space division to aid in the manufacturing of spacecraft, including NASA’s Orion. With the use of AR work instructions, they have achieved a 95+-percentage reduction in the time it takes to interpret work instructions, as well as an 85% reduction in overall training time.
Commercial kitchen equipment manufacturer, Prince Castle, is using AR-enabled live, video support tools to reduce equipment downtime in the field and improve the accuracy with which needed equipment repairs are diagnosed. Leveraging AR, remote experts can provide real-time support to workers in the kitchens of Prince Castle’s many fast-food chain customers. This has led to a 100% success rate of diagnosing support problems the first-time, eliminated service trips by 50% and reduced labor spend between 50-85%.
How has Augmented Reality transformed the B2B market?
Augmented reality has the potential to transform how an entire company works and shares knowledge. The use of AR can lead to better comprehension and communication of work instructions, decreased error rates, increased employee safety, improved worker efficiency and accuracy, as well as reduced travel and maintenance costs and decreased equipment downtime.
While more and more B2B enterprise use cases emerge, AR is becoming a ‘must-have’ technology that is driving value to enterprises today. It is no longer suitable to sit back and wait – organizations who don’t evaluate how AR can be used across many real-world business applications risk falling behind.
“Enterprises should identify one part of a process or procedure where AR can make a clear difference in terms of efficiency, quality, error reduction, and build time.”
Scott Montgomerie, CEO, and Co-founder of Scope AR
There’s no question that automation and artificial intelligence will profoundly reshape how work will get done. They could be as transformational as the IT era was to enterprise business just a generation ago. But how many jobs will be erased in the process? When a company unleashes AI, does it help or hurt its workforce?
I predict that enterprise companies will always need humans. They’ll always need to optimize productivity, improve job satisfaction, close skills gaps and shrink downtime. And today — not years from now — augmented reality platforms can uniquely solve problems where automation and the workforce intersect. Augmented reality help can help retain, and even create jobs, that automation can never fill. By providing contextually aware information in a convenient and consumable format, workers now have the ability to pair innately human characteristics, such as critical thinking skills, with knowledge-on-demand to train and gain skill sets on the fly, with little to no previous experience.
Fact or fiction: the robots are coming for your job
By now, the fearful reports are familiar: AI will swallow entire categories of careers, from factory jobs to truck driving to customer service and middle-manager roles. So will AI really kill 20 million manufacturing jobs in the next decade, as Oxford Economics predicts?
I see widespread workforce augmentation as a far more likely outcome than wholesale workforce automation. It’s highly possible that AI can create more jobs than some people worry that it might eliminate. And there’s evidence: according to a report commissioned by ZipRecruiter, in 2018 alone, AI created three times more jobs than it destroyed.
Amazon — no stranger to automation and robot-assisted warehouse facilities — recently made global headlines when they announced a $700 million investment to re-train a third of its workforce with technical skills like coding. It’s a massive initiative that underscores how deeply committed they are to automation technologies, they’re also recognizing they’ll need a highly-skilled workforce to run them. Yes, there will be more robots at Amazon, not fewer. But the company is aiming to address skills gaps that will only widen in coming years. And it’s doing so by investing in 100,000 people, not just automation technologies.
This approach to automation is smart, for two reasons. For many employers, there are two key challenges to managing workforce costs: 1) training, ensuring your people have access to critical knowledge that is easy to find and consume in real-time and 2) retention of the workers you’ve already invested in. Replacing a highly-skilled worker can cost 400 percent of their annual salary, according to one estimate.
Your workforce is already changing
Transformational technologies like AI are advancing quickly, and more companies are finding ways to deploy them as they evolve. As businesses look to AI to reshape their workforce, it’s important to remember that the workforce is already changing, in very human ways.
At many U.S. companies, older employees are aging out of the workforce. According to the Wall Street Journal, the labor force is growing far more slowly than it did in decades prior. Overall productivity has also declined. And, older workers are staying in their jobs for years longer. Massive workforce re-skilling is an option, but it has a very real cost. (Just ask Amazon.)
However, losing a highly-skilled subject matter expert (SME) also carries a critical cost. Unilever, an enterprise customer of ours, told us that in the next five years, they’ll lose 330 years of experience to retirement — in a single facility alone. When an SME retires, your business shouldn’t lose a career’s worth of institutional knowledge. Augmented reality offers businesses an easy way to transfer this knowledge that new-hires need to be successful and retain it long-term to help build the next-generation of a skilled workforce.
Augmentation vs. automation: Why AR is the answer?
In industries like manufacturing, uptime is everything. When something goes wrong, it can adversely impact processes down the line. Faults and failures need to be monitored and corrected as quickly as possible. Human error is the source of nearly a quarter of all unplanned downtime in manufacturing, which cost trillions in losses to businesses each year. How can human error be minimized? AI is a long way off from identifying equipment failures and then automatically fixing them.
Augmented reality, at its core, is a new user interface — a way for humans to visualize and interact with data in more intuitive ways than before. Humans evolved to interact with the world with their hands and their eyes — interacting with 2D data like words and spreadsheets is merely an inaccurate abstraction, and underutilizes one of the most powerful parts of the brain – the visual cortex. The visual cortex enables a person to consume, filter and process vast amounts of information about the real-world, and utilizing this power to interface with the power of computers is an amazing opportunity. In this way, we can augment humanity by merging the best of both worlds; we can leverage the near-infinite and perfect memory capacity of networked computing power, along with the vast processing power of those computer systems, with the intelligent reasoning and extreme adaptability of the human mind and body.
Using this mix, we can leverage the strengths of both while overcoming the weaknesses of both. AI is far from generalized intelligence (although OpenAI is trying), and robots are far from perfect in actuating and interacting with the world. Augmenting humans with contextually relevant data and insights (potentially from IoT and AI systems) can be an extremely beneficial pairing.
In an enterprise context, AR can help workers alleviate downtime and more accurately assemble, repair or conduct maintenance on complex machinery. AR-assisted workers in manufacturing or field service can access contextual digital overlays and step-by-step instructions. They can access previously recorded support sessions, complete with AR annotations, to see how others solved a problem or completed a task on the exact same piece of equipment on which they’re working. And workers can even initiate a live, AR-enabled video session with a remote expert who can see what they see, and talk them through a task, dropping in pre-built AR instructions or drawing on the worker’s real world view to help along the way. It’s expert knowledge, on-demand, shareable across the enterprise and accessible exactly when it’s needed.
While some worry about the impending automation apocalypse as the ultimate job eliminator, AR can create opportunities to build a smarter workforce that will exist alongside automation tools like robots and AI. It’s an ideal platform for transferring and retaining expertise from experts to those learning new skills, regardless of physical location. It can also be used to bridge your company’s data and your employees in the real world, boosting productivity and minimizing costly downtime. And, when workers are more productive and better at their jobs, overall job satisfaction improves, and that’s a win for everyone involved.
There’s no question that automation and artificial intelligence will profoundly reshape how work will get done. They could be as transformational as the IT era was to enterprise business just a generation ago. But how many jobs will be erased in the process? When a company unleashes AI, does it help or hurt its workforce?
I predict that enterprise companies will always need humans. They’ll always need to optimize productivity, improve job satisfaction, close skills gaps and shrink downtime. And today — not years from now — augmented reality platforms can uniquely solve problems where automation and the workforce intersect. Augmented reality help can help retain, and even create jobs, that automation can never fill. By providing contextually aware information in a convenient and consumable format, workers now have the ability to pair innately human characteristics, such as critical thinking skills, with knowledge-on-demand to train and gain skill sets on the fly, with little to no previous experience.
Fact or fiction: the robots are coming for your job
By now, the fearful reports are familiar: AI will swallow entire categories of careers, from factory jobs to truck driving to customer service and middle-manager roles. So will AI really kill 20 million manufacturing jobs in the next decade, as Oxford Economics predicts?
I see widespread workforce augmentation as a far more likely outcome than wholesale workforce automation. It’s highly possible that AI can create more jobs than some people worry that it might eliminate. And there’s evidence: according to a report commissioned by ZipRecruiter, in 2018 alone, AI created three times more jobs than it destroyed.
Amazon — no stranger to automation and robot-assisted warehouse facilities — recently made global headlines when they announced a $700 million investment to re-train a third of its workforce with technical skills like coding. It’s a massive initiative that underscores how deeply committed they are to automation technologies, they’re also recognizing they’ll need a highly-skilled workforce to run them. Yes, there will be more robots at Amazon, not fewer. But the company is aiming to address skills gaps that will only widen in coming years. And it’s doing so by investing in 100,000 people, not just automation technologies.
This approach to automation is smart, for two reasons. For many employers, there are two key challenges to managing workforce costs: 1) training, ensuring your people have access to critical knowledge that is easy to find and consume in real-time and 2) retention of the workers you’ve already invested in. Replacing a highly-skilled worker can cost 400 percent of their annual salary, according to one estimate.
Your workforce is already changing
Transformational technologies like AI are advancing quickly, and more companies are finding ways to deploy them as they evolve. As businesses look to AI to reshape their workforce, it’s important to remember that the workforce is already changing, in very human ways.
At many U.S. companies, older employees are aging out of the workforce. According to the Wall Street Journal, the labor force is growing far more slowly than it did in decades prior. Overall productivity has also declined. And, older workers are staying in their jobs for years longer. Massive workforce re-skilling is an option, but it has a very real cost. (Just ask Amazon.)
However, losing a highly-skilled subject matter expert (SME) also carries a critical cost. Unilever, an enterprise customer of ours, told us that in the next five years, they’ll lose 330 years of experience to retirement — in a single facility alone. When an SME retires, your business shouldn’t lose a career’s worth of institutional knowledge. Augmented reality offers businesses an easy way to transfer this knowledge that new-hires need to be successful and retain it long-term to help build the next-generation of a skilled workforce.
Augmentation vs. automation: Why AR is the answer?
In industries like manufacturing, uptime is everything. When something goes wrong, it can adversely impact processes down the line. Faults and failures need to be monitored and corrected as quickly as possible. Human error is the source of nearly a quarter of all unplanned downtime in manufacturing, which cost trillions in losses to businesses each year. How can human error be minimized? AI is a long way off from identifying equipment failures and then automatically fixing them.
Augmented reality, at its core, is a new user interface — a way for humans to visualize and interact with data in more intuitive ways than before. Humans evolved to interact with the world with their hands and their eyes — interacting with 2D data like words and spreadsheets is merely an inaccurate abstraction, and underutilizes one of the most powerful parts of the brain – the visual cortex. The visual cortex enables a person to consume, filter and process vast amounts of information about the real-world, and utilizing this power to interface with the power of computers is an amazing opportunity. In this way, we can augment humanity by merging the best of both worlds; we can leverage the near-infinite and perfect memory capacity of networked computing power, along with the vast processing power of those computer systems, with the intelligent reasoning and extreme adaptability of the human mind and body.
Using this mix, we can leverage the strengths of both while overcoming the weaknesses of both. AI is far from generalized intelligence (although OpenAI is trying), and robots are far from perfect in actuating and interacting with the world. Augmenting humans with contextually relevant data and insights (potentially from IoT and AI systems) can be an extremely beneficial pairing.
In an enterprise context, AR can help workers alleviate downtime and more accurately assemble, repair or conduct maintenance on complex machinery. AR-assisted workers in manufacturing or field service can access contextual digital overlays and step-by-step instructions. They can access previously recorded support sessions, complete with AR annotations, to see how others solved a problem or completed a task on the exact same piece of equipment on which they’re working. And workers can even initiate a live, AR-enabled video session with a remote expert who can see what they see, and talk them through a task, dropping in pre-built AR instructions or drawing on the worker’s real world view to help along the way. It’s expert knowledge, on-demand, shareable across the enterprise and accessible exactly when it’s needed.
While some worry about the impending automation apocalypse as the ultimate job eliminator, AR can create opportunities to build a smarter workforce that will exist alongside automation tools like robots and AI. It’s an ideal platform for transferring and retaining expertise from experts to those learning new skills, regardless of physical location. It can also be used to bridge your company’s data and your employees in the real world, boosting productivity and minimizing costly downtime. And, when workers are more productive and better at their jobs, overall job satisfaction improves, and that’s a win for everyone involved.
Since co-founding Scope AR in 2011, CEO Scott Montgomerie was one of the first executives to get augmented reality (AR) tools in use by multi-billion dollar corporations.
Last month, my team and I had an eye-opening experience at Augmented World Expo 2019 (AWE), the premiere augmented and virtual reality conference. It’s a thrill to see how rapidly AR and other technologies are evolving. And it’s just as gratifying to see just how these knowledge-sharing technologies are meeting the business needs in the marketplace.
Just a few years ago, enterprise AR was an emerging technology. But one thing became crystal-clear at AWE this year: AR for the enterprise is no longer a novelty. It’s not just a wild idea to test out in a sandbox. Companies are using AR to solve real business problems. They’re giving their workforce access to critical, specialized knowledge when and where they need it. After seeing impressive use cases, and talking to the enterprise innovators that now use AR for real-world applications — I can safely say: the emerging-tech phase is in the rearview mirror.
We’ve spent a lot of time talking with executives ready to test AR in parts of their business. They’re typically optimistic, but cautious: I get it — but where do I start, and how do I get my team on board?
There are definitely use cases that AR is better suited for than others in an enterprise setting. In order to ensure you’re choosing the right use case for your organization, here are three mistakes to avoid as you prepare your business for AR adoption:
1) Don’t plan to rewire your entire business. You can’t expect AR to replace a process across your global operations overnight. Start smart. Find a discreet project where you can address a real-world business problem. Ensure it’s a process that can be enhanced by real-time knowledge transfer. And above all, ensure it’s a use case where you can measure and share quantifiable results.
What scenarios might be a good candidate for your business’ first use case? Be sure to consider workflows and teams that would benefit from augmented knowledge like step-by-step instructions, contextual digital overlays, and even live video support from a remote expert. For instance, imagine how impactful on-demand expertise – by way of real-time remote assistance or pre-built guided instructions – could be for a field service team or remote workers managing highly-specialized manufacturing tasks.
2) Avoid complexity and embrace efficiency. From the outset, it’s important to understand where AR will most benefit the people and processes that are the lifeblood of your business. You need to make sure it brings instant expertise and context to the task at-hand. You don’t want to add another layer of process; you want to ensure workers can access knowledge from subject matter experts or resources, wherever they are and whenever they need them.
Some questions to ask along the way:
What direction or communications do your remote workers need most while they are in their workstream?
Where can real-time expertise help them complete tasks most efficiently and effectively?
What tasks in physical space — such as locating repair points, modeling, assembly or QA — could benefit from real-time guidance or visual, intuitive instructions?
What situations might benefit from live assistance or access to a support recording of the same scenario, versus specialized standalone training?
What do your senior-staff subject matter experts know that new hires don’t — and can AR-enhanced support, communications or replays help bridge the gap?
3) Don’t lose sight of business realities. At the end of the day, if your first AR use case fails to provide ROI, you might not get a chance to kick off a second one. Ensure you’ve allocated ample budget to complete a project successfully. But don’t burn budget on proprietary hardware or a closed software platform. You likely can build out an initiative with an agnostic AR platform that extends across devices and operating systems your team already uses. Creating a smart budget will help you more quickly achieve ROI.
Beyond planning for cost, you’ll need to navigate another business reality: you’re rarely in it alone. Your AR project will need buy-in from two additional critical sets of stakeholders: your leadership and your IT department. An advocate inside the business can help make the case to leadership for the investment, and ensure they see the hard-cost savings potential in the unprecedented levels of knowledge sharing that AR allows.
Just as critically, however, IT needs to be on board, as early as possible. IT can help you clear hurdles around security, governance or other compliance protocols, like limited-access to intellectual property you might need to share over an AR platform. Approach your AR use case with IT as a full deployment partner, so you’re integrated with the existing systems and infrastructure that knowledge and communications already flow through.
From conversations with business leaders, I know it can seem daunting to get an AR project deployed. With the right use case, you can unlock expertise, share knowledge and add value well beyond the objectives of your initial project. Ready to get started? Download our free eBook, “Building the Perfect AR Use Case” for a step-by-step guide to launching an enterprise AR initiative.
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