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.
I happen to be very navigationally challenged. For years, as I traveled around the world, I used a paper map to get me to the next meeting or location I was going to, and I would often still get lost. This trait was so prominent that my family and friends nicknamed me “Wrongway Bajarin.”
Due to my work in the UK with various publications, which started in 1984, I learned that London cab drivers were the least navigationally challenged cabbies in the world. For them to get their license to drive the famous Black Cabs, they had to memorize the entire map of London and its surroundings so they could get people to their locations the fastest way possible. In one of my first trips to London, I asked a Black Cab driver how long it took him to memorize the London street maps, and he said that it took him about a year before he could pass his license test.
Fast forward 35 years later and thanks to digital maps, GPS and various navigation tools, I could drive a London cab today and be just as much as an expert about London streets as those Black Cab drivers are today.
While the GPS and maps example illustrates how technology can help us become expert navigators, at least in cars, the introduction of AR tools will soon make it possible for many to become, if not an expert, at least more capable of doing things that we have no training or experience within many areas. A good example of AR adding an untrained skill to your capabilities would be to use an AR app to help put together complicated furniture, assemble barbecues, electric bikes and a plethora of things we might buy that needs assembly.
Many makers of products are developing AR apps that can overlay on a product you buy from them and show you how to assemble that piece of furniture in a visual step-by-step process. It is not a video of how to do it. An AR app overlays the assembly process on top of the actual product you are putting together and walking you through each step in an on-demand process.
I recently attended the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, CA, and met with the President of Scope AR, David Nedohin. They had a sign in their booth that said “Anyone Can Be An Expert,” so I asked him what this meant.
It turns out that using AR integrated into various mixed reality glasses, their software platform can help companies make “experts” of non-experts which would help them identify equipment problems and if possible, even repair them on site using an AR program that overlays the repair steps on top of the actual equipment that needs to be fixed.
Mr. Nedohin told me that for many of Scope AR’s clients, if a piece of equipment in a factory goes down, typically an expert who may know how to fix it is somewhere far away. In the past, most companies dealt with this by flying an expert to the location of the problem to fix it onsite. With Scope AR, businesses can give the average non-expert employee on-demand knowledge with intuitive AR instructions. The company’s AR knowledge platform, WorkLink, gives companies precisely this kind of augmented reality support.
Another example of how Scope AR’s software works are how they are assisting Lockheed Martin engineers building NASA’s Orion spacecraft, a vehicle designed to travel to Mars.
“In the old way of doing things, an engineer may start with a 3,000-page binder full of instructions for how to build a specific aspect of the spacecraft. A technician searches the binder to find the correct fastener and memorizing the torque setting, before actually going in to tighten the fastener. Today that process is relatively cumbersome, slow, and could be subject to errors”, Nedohin explained to me.
“Using their Scope AR software, the workflow is designed with hands-free information viewed through a Microsoft HoloLens headset. Using three-dimensional views with AR step-by-step instructions, the engineer can see what they need to do, what the torque setting is, and where the fastener goes.”
When Apple showed off new AR apps at their recent World Wide Developers Conference, they showed its use in a gaming app. When they originally introduced AR Kit, their software tools for creating AR apps, they also emphasized its use in gaming. While AR in games will be a big market, the most significant demand for AR now is coming from businesses who want to use it for internal and external training as well as for field service projects. This translates into the vision that Mr. Nedohin of Scope AR is proposing, that “everyone can be an expert.” I understand that, to some degree, this is marketing hyperbole. On the other hand, his vision is on target as AR and VR and mixed reality software and glasses can help one become proficient in a lot of areas where years of training used to be needed to repair sophisticated machinery, assemble equipment and even learn to operate them virtually.
AR and VR is still a nascent market, but after walking the exhibit halls of AWE, I can see that the tools and devices that support its use, especially in business applications, is moving at a rapid pace. A vision of making people experts in areas where they have had no training before is no longer a far fetched dream. This is why the business market, primarily vertically driven ones, will be where AR glasses will take off first before it ever gets broad acceptance in the consumer market outside of gaming.
Company adds session recording to its industry leading AR knowledge platform and announces continued enterprise customer growth with Becton Dickinson and Lockheed Martin
SAN FRANCISCO and SANTA CLARA, California, May 29, 2019 — Scope AR, the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality (AR) solutions, today launched at Augmented World Expo 2019 (AWE) an upgraded version of its highly-touted WorkLink platform. With the addition of session recording, WorkLink becomes the industry’s only AR knowledge platform to offer real-time remote support, access to AR work instructions and the ability to record sessions simultaneously in one application. With this, workers can now easily capture, retain and share knowledge like never before. Scope AR also announced new enterprise customer, medical device manufacturer Becton Dickinson, as well as expanded use of its integrated AR platform with Lockheed Martin.
“This is an exciting time for the AR industry. Adoption is growing and expectations among users are shifting towards more comprehensive, enterprise-ready solutions,” explained Scott Montgomerie, CEO of Scope AR. “With the latest WorkLink platform, we’ve added even more ways for workers to collaborate and quickly get the knowledge they need to successfully do their jobs. With the addition of session recording, businesses can now better capture and retain knowledge for future use and training purposes, while taking compliance, quality assurance and accuracy to the next level.”
The updated WorkLink platform can be customized with varying sets of functionality depending on customers’ needs. It can also be deployed across all major platforms and select industry wearables so organizations can use their device of choice. The platform is built to help make anyone an instant expert with seamless access to a variety of features including:
Session Recording to capture important knowledge delivered during live support video calls for retention, future sharing and new insight into additional training needs and how processes can be improved. Either the technician or remote expert can record a live session so real-time knowledge becomes a reusable asset that can be accessed by others in the future.
WorkLink Assist (formerly known as standalone product, Remote AR) for real-time expert remote assistance
WorkLink Create for quick and easy AR content creation for step-by-step work instructions
Beyond its latest product innovations, Scope AR has also experienced continued customer acquisition and growth on the heels of its $9.7 million Series A funding round in March 2019. Becton Dickinson, an American medical technology company that manufactures and sells medical devices, instrument systems and reagants, is the newest addition to the company’s already impressive client roster. Becton Dickinson will use WorkLink at the company’s Automation Center for Enablement to deliver AR instructions across the organization.
Additionally, Lockheed Martin is now expanding its use of Scope AR’s technology after its highly successful implementation of WorkLink to improve workforce training and spacecraft manufacturing procedures. They are now deploying Scope AR into all four of their business units across a broad variety of use cases.
Lockheed Martin’s Emerging Technologies Lead Shelley Peterson added,
“Creating AR work instructions with WorkLink has enabled our Space team
to reach unprecedented levels of efficiency and accuracy, as well as
reduced manufacturing training and activity ramp-up time by 85%. Scope
AR’s platform has proven to be so valuable that we have expanded our AR
adoption into even more manufacturing applications within the Space
division, as well as leveraging the technology in other areas of the
business.”
The next-generation of the company’s WorkLink platform is available immediately, and attendees of AWE 2019 can see a demonstration of the new platform at Scope AR’s booth #213. For more information on the upgraded WorkLink application visit: https://www.scopear.com/solutions/worklink-platform/
About Scope AR Scope AR is the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality solutions, delivering the industry’s only cross-platform AR tools for getting workers the knowledge they need, when they need it. The company is revolutionizing the way enterprises work and collaborate by offering an integrated AR platform that provides more effective and efficient knowledge-sharing to conduct complex remote tasks, employee training, product and equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, field and customer support, and more. The company’s device-agnostic technology supports smartphones, tablets and wearables, making it easy for leading organizations like Boeing, Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Assa Abloy, GE and others to quickly scale their use of AR to any remote worker. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco with offices in Edmonton, Canada.
Scope AR announced the launch of Remote AR for Microsoft
HoloLens today, marking the first cross-platform live support video
calling solution available for HoloLens. Designed specifically with
enterprise customers in mind, Remote AR is the company’s remote
assistance augmented reality (AR) application and is revolutionizing
real-time, remote collaboration at leading enterprises such as Lockheed
Martin, Siemens and Eaton.
With today’s launch, Remote AR now supports the most effective
hands-free AR device on the market, bringing live remote support with 3D
annotation to the Microsoft HoloLens. With the most sophisticated
spatial tracking available, field technicians can use the Microsoft
HoloLens to connect to a remote expert with an unprecedented clarity of
communication, as well as receive assistance and perform tasks with
unmatched speed and accuracy, since they no longer need to hold a mobile
device.
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