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Though we spend ample time examining consumer-based XR endpoints, greater near-term impact is seen in the enterprise. This includes brands that use AR to promote products in greater dimension (B2B2C) and industrial enterprises that streamline their own operations (B2B).
These industrial endpoints include visual support in areas like assembly and maintenance. The idea is that AR’s line-of-sight orientation can guide front-line workers. Compared to the “mental mapping” they must do with 2D instructions, visual support makes them more effective.
And with VR, employee training and onboarding can be elevated through immersive sequences that boost experiential learning and memory recall. It also scales given that far-flung employees can get the same quality training, versus costly travel for senior training staff.
Altogether, there are micro and macro benefits to enterprise XR. The above micro efficiencies add up to worthwhile bottom-line impact when deployed at scale. Macro benefits include lessening job strain and closing the “skills gap,” which can preserve institutional knowledge.
But how is this materializing today and who’s realizing enterprise XR benefits? Our research arm ARtillery Intelligence tackled these questions in a recent report. It joins our report excerpts series, with the latest below on some of enterprise XR’s high-level drivers and dynamics.
Style Crimes
Headworn XR’s adoption friction is most evident in consumer markets. In the enterprise, by comparison, AR’s style crimes don’t loom as large. That makes the technology an easier sell to enterprise buyers. AR’s cousin, VR, likewise offers a strong enterprise value proposition.
Moreover, XR’s ROI is felt greater by enterprises. Benefits include operational efficiencies from AR’s line-of-sight visualization, which engenders faster, safer, and less error-prone work. VR meanwhile shines in immersive training, given its efficacy in brain encoding and memory retention.
To wrap some numbers around these claims, PTC reports up to 40 percent improvements in new employee productivity and 30 percent improvements in first-time fix rates with AR. And in the VR realm, HTC tells us that up to 91 percent of enterprise execs report positive results.
Joining these micro-benefits and unit economics are macro-benefits. They include distribution and retention of institutional knowledge. This is all about mitigating knowledge loss from seasoned personnel (such as baby boomers) retiring in large numbers – an expensive problem.
XR can mitigate such issues in a few ways. On one level, it turns seasoned pros into centralized experts who support field staff through remote guidance.” On another level, both AR and VR help novice workers train and upskill faster. In all cases, institutional knowledge is optimized.
Distributed Workforce
Meanwhile, another adoption accelerant has occurred: Covid-era inflections. Global lockdowns and constraints during Covid-inflicted years had a lasting impact by compelling enterprise XR’s remote support and collaboration functions. This gave the technology a chance to shine.
Now, in the post-Covid era, the opportunity is no longer framed around remote work per se, but an increasingly distributed workforce. Within this framing, operational efficiencies can be achieved by scaling individual capacity through place shifting and collaboration that reduces travel.
This can be seen in functions such as design collaboration for far-flung product teams. Another example is IT support. Even with a human actively involved in the job function, XR can empower that human with line-of-sight reference data, or see-what-I-see support from remote experts.
For all these reasons, ARtillery Intelligence estimates that enterprise spending on XR-assisted productivity and guidance will grow from $4.87 billion in 2022 to $9.06 billion in 2027, a 10.47 percent compound annual growth rate. This includes headworn AR, mobile & tablet AR, and VR.
But it’s not all good news. Though many of enterprise XR’s advantages above are evident, organizational change is hard to implement and several barriers persist. We’ll pick it up there in the next installment with a breakdown of the most common enterprise XR stumbling blocks.
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