Brad Scoggin:
Welcome back to XR Industry Leaders Podcast. I am your host, Brad Scoggin:, CEO and co-founder of Arbor XR joined with my co-host Will Stackable, who’s also a co-founder and our CMO. And today we get to sit down with Kevin Marcum: from Delta Airlines. Kevin is the program manager for XR learning. And Delta is currently putting all new ramp hires to VR training, which is pretty impressive. Kevin, it’s great to have you on the show today.
Kevin Marcum:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited for this podcast.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah, I just want to go ahead and dig in. It’s interesting – and I’ll say also impressive – that you have been at Delta for 28 years. I don’t know if that many people can stick it out, anywhere. So kudos there. You’ve been there a long time. What has been the process for Delta, starting to consider and then actually roll out XR training.
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah, I can kind of back you up a few years when it came into the scope to look at VR. I was meeting with our senior vice president of ACS Domestic Stations at the time, and she mentioned that she was at a conference where they had VR, and she wanted me to look into it.
At that time, I had never even had a VR headset on, so it was very new to me. I just basically went back to my office and googled VR and in Atlanta, and a couple cable companies came up. The first one that came up was, was Dave Beck with Foundry 45, and I contacted Dave, and [I] went and met with him at his office and he put a headset on me, showed what it was all about [and] talked through it.
And he was great to work with and very patient with me as we went through the process. So that’s how we got started with the VR.
Brad Scoggin:
And what year was that? What year was that?
Kevin Marcum:
That was 2017 – late 2017 – when we when we started looking into it. Yeah.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah. That’s cool. I feel like you’ve been in it a long time. I also think it’s really interesting. I think – sometimes – I feel like the trade shows, the conferences, is this beneficial? But there’s a lot of people who are finding XR at a trade show – one – and then two – what was the magic moment for you? It was putting on the headset, which I just think are important takeaways.
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah, I mean, like putting on a headset really put me in in a real world when they put me into the headset and had me do some things: picking up items and, and moving and it just really was just a moment of “this really can fit with our program.”
When we started doing the proof of concept and putting it all together and actually getting to see the airline in the VR and getting to see the ramp operation in the VR, I knew that it was it was going to be a game changer for the for the learning department and Delta as a whole.
Will Stackable:
Did you expect when you put the headset on to be impressed? Are you a technologist or do you consider yourself an early adopter? Or are you surprised at how immersive and connected…
Kevin Marcum:
I think I was very surprised how immersive it was. I didn’t consider myself and still don’t consider myself a technology expert. But it really surprised me how immersive it is. And again, that was 2017. It doesn’t seem like that long ago. But things have really progressed since then, and I’m still – to this day – when I put a headset on and look at something, I’m still amazed at what it does.
Even the ones that we use every day, I still put them on and just think, “wow, I can’t believe this really just puts you right in the operation and makes you feel like you’re right there on the ramp.”
Will Stackable:
So if I’m a new employee at Delta and I’m going to go through this, I put the headset on. What am I experiencing? What all have you built?
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah. So the first thing they’re going to experience as a new hire is our “Welcome to Delta Virtuality.” When we first did our proof of concept and we talked about different ideas of what we could do, this was one that I always wanted to do. And the reason I wanted to do a “Welcome to Delta” is that a lot of people don’t think about this, but we hire ramp agents all over the world. You can be hired in Des Moines, Iowa to work on the ramp or the ticket counter. And they never actually get a chance to come to the headquarters of Delta in Atlanta because there is no reason to come here. They don’t come here for training. They get trained in their station.
So there’s no reason to come here. They might come here for some type of class or event at some time, but we have agents out there that have been with Delta for ten years and have never been to the headquarters, and I really wanted them to be able to see what the headquarters is – other than just this office building in Atlanta, where all the people make the decisions for them.
You know that we have the museum here. We have the history of Delta here. It’s a very cool place to come and visit. So I thought, well, the only way they’re actually going to get to come and visit it are – unless they want to come and visit it on their own –is to show them what we have.
And also for a new hire, I can sit and tell you in a classroom or give you some papers and say, “hey, Delta started in this year and this is how it started and this is…” what the history of Delta is. But when it really immerses you into the virtuality world and you’re kind of walking through the general office, walking through the museum, people are talking to you, the operations control center, which is kind of what we call the Rock of Delta. There’s actually a rock right outside the door. that’s the headquarters. That’s the central point. That’s where all the decisions are made 24 hours a day for Delta, all the flight operations – everything is made from there. We have meteorology team and a lot of people don’t realize, even if you work for Delta, we have 12 meteorologists that work for Delta.
And we have a staff of I think 3 or 4 on staff 24 hours a day just looking at weather. So [some employees] don’t get to see that. This brings them in and gives them a view of what we do here at the general head office. Next from there, we have a couple other [trainings] right now that we’re using.
One is our ramp operation. We’re in the process of updating that right now, but it’s used for, reinforcement of wing walking: the proper dispositions and procedures for walking in an airplane, marshaling, which is parking the airplane when they’re bringing an airplane into the gate or pushing the airplane out of the gate, all the safety procedures, once they park the airplane chalking procedures and safety procedures around the airplane. And then the third one is our De-Ice program that we’re using.
Brad Scoggin:
So I want to talk about the ramp training just for a second because I, like most people, have flown on planes a lot, but I had never actually thought about what’s happening around the plane. And I think I heard about this a few years ago and it kind of blew my mind to that. And you’re gonna have to speak to this more, but my memory was there were 14 or 15 different activities. There’s potentially a high rate of injury or a potential for injury and training folks on the ramp is difficult because you have to decommission a plane if you have a new hire. Getting them FFA clearance takes time. So that’s at a high level. It just felt like, :wow, that is the perfect use case for VR training.” So maybe talk a little bit about just the ramp operations themselves.
Yeah you’re absolutely correct. So when we’re training our new hires and we take them out on the ramp to, to look at the airplane and get to touch the airplane and feel the airplane a lot of people don’t realize it, but we’re doing that on live airplanes that are being turned. We don’t have airplanes just sitting around that we can go out and train on and off airplanes. If it’s not in the sky, it’s not making us money. So we have to turn those airplanes very, very quickly so they land, they’re unloaded, they’re refueled, they’re cleaned, and turned in sometimes 35 to 40 minutes. And that operation is moving very quickly outside. So the ramp agents that are working, they kind of work with you, but they get a little aggravated when you have a group of 5 or 6 new hires around the airplane because they’re kind of getting in the way and they’re slowing down their operation.
They have a time that they have to get this airplane pushed out or it takes a delay. So we’re trying to show them some things around the airplane. In a virtual reality world, we can we can show them this and let them look at how the panels are opened properly, how the doors are opened, say “you know what happens if you do this?”, where can’t you walk around the airplane? You know as you’re walking around if you walk over a hose and, some people don’t even notice this, there’s a big yellow hose connected to the airplane that puts either heat in it in the wintertime or cold air for the summertime to cool the airplane down. If you’re walking around inspecting the airplane when it arrives to make sure there’s no damage or anything that happened to the airplane during flight, if you step over that hose, it’s a safety hazard. You could trip and fall. People have done it. A good example of that I always like to tell is when we were doing our testing and we were bringing agents in and letting them do the VR and getting their feedback, I brought a gentleman in that was from Fort Myers, Florida.
He retired a couple of years ago, but he had 40 years with the company. He worked on a ramp for 40 years. I brought him in, put the headset on him, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to do that. But he said “I’ll do it anyway.” He put the headset on he was doing to walk around, and he got to the air hose, and you had an option to go around or over. He went over and it came up on the screen and said “that is a safety hazard, stepping over the air hose”. So he took his headset off and he said, “you know, I’ve been stepping over that air hose for 40 years. I didn’t know that was a safety hazard even though I’ve probably been told that in training a thousand times.”
I said probably. So he laughed and he went back to the station. He called me a couple of weeks later. He goes “I just want you to know, I haven’t stepped over that air hose since that day. It’s finally got me,” he said. “Every time I come up through the air hose, I see that safety hazard and pop up in front of me.”
And I tell the other agents on the ramp, “don’t step over the air hose. It’s a safety hazard.” So again, you’re giving him one type of learning and he didn’t get it. But in the virtual reality world, he did.
Brad Scoggin:
That’s very powerful because you’ve got somebody that’s not, maybe, super up to speed on technology, but with the company for 40 years or has been doing the same thing for a long time and, in their first time in VR, it triggered something that had not stuck with them. I mean, that is a really significant “aha” moment.
So tell us a little bit about what was your initial proof of concept? I mean, what was the process to get buy-in going forward? What was that the “aha” moment that you used?
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah, that was the “aha” moment. Yeah. We did that proof of concept and it was just what we call an “aircraft walkaround” because when an airplane arrives, the duty of one of the agents the lead agent on the flight is just to do a walk around the airplane to check to make sure there was no damage. They look for several things: 1) damage on the airplane – did something happen during flight that we didn’t know about? 2) is there any of what we call FOD (foreign object debris) on the ground – things laying around the airplane, zippers that fall off suitcases, bag tags from suitcases. When the airplanes taxi in, those engines can actually suck that up into the engine. They’re a big powerful engine, but they’re very delicate. If that engine sucks up a zipper, it could take that engine out. It could cost several million dollars with that. So that’s one of the things [the VR has new employees] look for. It looks for safety hazards where you’re walking around the airplane and not taking shortcuts like walking underneath the airplane to get to the other side.
So that was our proof of concept, and it gave you a score at the end and said, “hey, you scored 85% and this is what you missed. You missed picking up these items off the airplane, or you know, you missed this damage.” It became a type of game for [employees] because their buddies would score higher and they’re like, oh, I’m going to do it again. I want to see if I can get a better score than they did. Yeah. So I did a proof of concept.
Will Stackable:
Often people request do the old training. But I was going to ask what was the old training, what did the VR replace?
Kevin Marcum:
Well, the old training is just an instructor-led course. Classroom environment. And then taking them out and walking around. That’s what that was replacing.
Will Stackable:
I’m curious what has been the most successful VR program that Delta has run to date. Can you kind of give us an overview?
Kevin Marcum:
Yes, I would have to say that’s our de-ice program that we’ve been using. We’ve used it for two seasons and now this season – I mean de-ice season. Our season starts in October and goes through about April. So that I would say to date is the most successful program that we used. And to give you an overview of where it came into play: In the past our de-ice agents are trained in the summertime in July. Sol in July, we bring all of our Ice agents through Minneapolis, to a de-ice boot camp, where they go through an instructor-led training. Then they go out to an airplane that is actually sitting on the ramp that. They can go down to trucks and go up and spray the airplane. They spray water on the airplane and they do everything, and it’s summertime and it’s nice and clear and everything’s good. Then they go back to their stations. Once they’re back in their stations, obviously, they’re not de-icing airplanes.
So sometimes it might be three months before they actually have a de-ice event somewhere where it’s snowing. If they are getting some freezing rain or it’s cold, you’ve got to remember if I’m trained on something and, three months later, I get the call that it’s time to go de-ice an airplane, I’m thinking, “oh gosh, do I remember how to do this?”
So we do proficiency checks. So they would do proficiency checks where they would actually go into the station. We have ground safety advocates who go into the stations, and they actually would watch them. They de-ice airplanes, if they’re de-icing airplanes. they would watch them do it and see if they’re doing it right. But again, you had to find stations that were having a weather event.
Unfortunately, for these ground safety advocates, they would get the call and say, “hey, Boston’s getting a snowstorm. Go that way.” So they would head to Boston as their snowstorm come in. And that’s a good opportunity to go see how they’re doing. It was very hit and miss. So they were only getting a few a days that they were getting [a weather event] and they could actually go.
The safety team came to me and said, “hey, could VR solve this issue?” And I said, “absolutely.” So we started looking into it and developing it. Then we wrote it out two seasons ago. So that would have been the 2023 season? It was very successful.
We had 12 ground safety advocates that were traveling the system that year, going to different stations. Each one had two headsets with them in their kit. They would go into the station, they would set it up, they would bring them in. Throughout the 12, they were doing about 150 proficiency checks a day throughout the system compared to the 5 or 10 we were getting in the past. So they didn’t have to wait for an event. They could put them in a headset, and it was snowing, and they would put them in it, and they would go through [the training] and it would tell them if they did it correctly or not. Very successful. We upgraded the program from the first year and said, “hey, we got some changes. We’re going to add some things into it.” We added multiple airplanes. We added enclosed buckets, open buckets because we have different types of deicing trucks throughout the system. We added that in the season for last year and, again, very successful. I think when I looked at my Arbor XR because it keeps track of all of that for me, I think we had 2650-something proficiency checks last season, which was amazing.
We’re actually working with Futurists right now – just kicked it off two days ago – and they’re upgrading again. And we’re doing some different things through the de-ice this year. So it’s really proved to be a very good tool, a very good experience, and very beneficial to the de-ice program.
Will Stackable:
What an incredible use-case. So you went from a few proficient proficiency checks a day to 150+. Massive increase. Now we have to ask a few follow-up questions. This is such a great story. Are VR proficiency checks are treated as equivalent to live action proficiency checks>
Kevin Marcum:
Say yes they are. Yeah. And actually on the proficiency check form that they keep on file at the very top,it used to say it used to say “live event” I think a “water event” where they had water in the truck still instead of deicing fluid. Now it actually has “VR.” So they check VR. Yep.
Will Stackable:
I was going to ask that, was there a cost savings associated with. I mean, I’m sure just being able to train more technicians is massive, but also in terms of materials or anything else, was there a cost savings?
Kevin Marcum:
There is a cost savings. And we’re going to start really kind of tracking that this year. The first year or two is just, “hey, will this work? Is it is it going to be proficient, is it going to do what it what we need to do?” I would say it is because, again, we were doing live events.
To use an example: if I’m going to teach you how to drive in the snow, the only way I can see if you can do it right is to get in a car with you and go down the highway where it’s snowing and hope you remember what you’re doing because, if you don’t, you’re going to wreck.
You know, in the VR world, I tell people, “hey, in the VR world, if you blast the window of the cockpit with the ICM fluid, which is a no-no, it’s going to tell you ‘oh, you shouldn’t do that. You failed.’” Well guess what, let’s reset and try again. But in the real world, if you blast the window of the cockpit with the deicing fluid, you could put the airplane out of service for 3 or 4 days and cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Will Stackable:
That’s where we talk about how this is a doctor, Jeremy Bill, and said, “that VR is great for anything that’s difficult, dangerous or expensive to do in real life.” So it’s a great example of something you don’t necessarily want somebody trying in real life, but in VR they can make that mistake and learn from it. I’m curious. One of the things I know that a lot of people listening [are wondering], if they’re thinking about building out a program, how do I track that this is actually working? How do I how do I get buy-in? And you’ve had now several goes at this in a process of getting buy-in from leadership. But talk a little bit about being able to monitor and see the usage. What things are you looking at to see if this technology is actually being used in a way that makes sense for it. You know, it’s a big investment for companies to think about getting into a new technology stack like this.
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah. I mean and backing up to 2017, I think 19 headsets and I would send them to a station just to test them. And the pandemic happened. I went home, like everybody else. I went home for the week or two that I thought I was going to be home. I’ll be back in a couple weeks and we’ll be alright. Well, four months later I came back, and everything has changed. And guess what: I can’t remember where I sent those headsets. I had an Excel doc somewhere, but I didn’t even know where that was. I kind of lost it. Lost track of everything. And fortunately the stations were very honest. Months went by and I would get emails, “hey, what am I doing with this VR set that I have set here?” I was like, “oh, send it back to me.”
So when we came back and we started using the Pico, I was introduced to Arbor XR by Futurist and he said, “hey, we have Arbor XR are that this is what we use to manage our headsets.” And I was like, “oh, interesting. Let me see what this is.” And when I sat with them and they showed it to me, I was like, “this is a game changer.” This is this a new thing? And they’re like, “no, it’s not really new. It’s just what we use.” Again, I’m learning as I go. So the Arbor XR system really made a big moment for our leadership when I showed them “hey, this is how I track the headset. This is how I know what they’re doing. This is how I know if they’re updated. This is how I can assist the people out in the stations” because the question always came up, “well, what if we send headsets to a station? How are we going to know if they’re using, how are we going to know if they’re up to date?” Well, now, with the Arbor XR, I can tell you if they’re updated. I can tell you when they’re using them. I can tell you how many times I use them. I can tell you how many minutes they use them. I can tell you who used them. and the other big one that came from my security that I got a question on. Well, what do we do if somebody takes our headset? Well, now I can answer that question because if I put a headset in a station and somebody says, “I’m going to take this headset home”, I can go on to the Arbor XR, I can wipe it out. I can pretty much lock it down. I can also tell you where it is because I can track it right down to the address of where it is.
So, so if it comes up missing, I can just take all the content off of it, wipe that out, and if we don’t get it back, we don’t get it back. But I can tell you where it is. So we can contact the station and say, “hey, Brad took the headset home last night. It’s at his address. You might want to just let him know to bring it back, but they shouldn’t be taken home.” But that was a big game changer for that. And like I said throughout the seasons, I go in there and with the Arbor XR where I can actually connect to the headset because I’m the only troubleshooter for the headsets right now.
So I was getting calls and you have to know that our ground safety advocates that are taking these VR headsets on the road, they are not technology people. These are these guys have been on Delta. Some of them been here for 25 or 30 years. I gave them VR headsets just like they did for me 5 or 6 years ago and said, “here, go use these.”
Well, they would contact me before I used our XR, before I was on it and say, “hey, I can’t get my boundary set right.” Well, I would kind of walk them through, but now I can just connect to the headset through our XR and go click there, click here.
Yeah, there you go. Or “hey my headset. It’s not working right. My right hand controller is not working.” I can click on a headset and go “oh, your battery’s dead”. Oh okay, let me fix it so I can troubleshoot. And it’s been very, very helpful troubleshooting that.
Brad Scoggin:
That’s great to hear that. I’d love to hear more about your process with content. I mean, you, you had a great start with Dave and Foundry 45 and those guys are legit. That’s a great entry point. But once you had to make the transition, how did you decide to go with Futurists? I mean, what was your process and what has it been like working with Futurists?
Kevin Marcum:
Yeah. again, Dave introduced me to, the future is with Annie. and I will tell you how I work. Dave actually contacted me at, like, 3:00 on a Friday and said, “hey, I talked to leadership at Exxon that acquired foundry, and they’re not really interested in moving forward with VR for this de-ice program that that we hadn’t really started.”
We just were talking about it, he said. But I don’t want to leave you hanging. So I have Futurists’ Annie Eaton, I’m going to I sent her an email and she said, yes, she’s willing to talk to you literally at 5:00 on a Friday night and I met we had a quick call. We met each other. I said, this is what we want to do. This is our plan with de- ice. She said, absolutely, we can do it. Within a week we were up and running a meeting and getting Futurists onboarded with us through our supply chain and getting the process started. And it’s just been a great relationship to work with the team. They they’ve helped me learn about VR. They’re very open. And he’s always open to phone calls. The whole team is open. Any time I would call them and say, hey, here’s what I got, or here’s what we need to do, or here’s my issue. You know, they would walk me through it and help me out. Being local, I tell I’ve had other corporations contact me or talk to me and say, “hey, how do I pick a VR company? There’s so many out there, VR developers.” And as you guys can imagine, I’m contacted all the time by my VR developers. I’ll talk to them, but I like the local, not just because it’s local, because I like to be able to go to the office. A good example for this year: You know, the safety team said, “hey, we want to do all these updates and upgrades to the de-ice program”. And I said, “okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to send a few of your ground safety advocates.”
We set up a day. We went to the Futurist office. They sit right there in the office. They put the headset on and say “okay, at this point we’d like to adjust this” and the developers are taking the notes right there. That would be very hard to do if I was working with the company that was on the other side of the United States or out of the country. I can’t just bring them in with Elijah who works for Futurist and is the main developer for the VR for us. He came to the Delta, he got into the ice truck, he went up, he sprayed airplanes. He did everything live so he could feel what it was like to actually do it and then said, okay, now I understand what it feels like to be up here, what it looks like when I’m we’re developing this,
Brad Scoggin:
Very nice. That’s great. So as we move to wrap up, two questions for you. The first is you talk about talking to other companies and being in VR. So another enterprise comes to you and says, Kevin, your years ahead of us in VR, we’re thinking about launching, a VR, training initiative. What’s the one piece of advice you give them?
Kevin Marcum:
The one piece of advice I give them is really do your homework on who you’re going to work with Again, I always say wherever you’re located, try to keep it kind of local or that they’re willing to come to you or you can go to them. The second piece is what type of headset are you’re going. There’s different headsets out there. There’s all kinds of different things. Don’t get wrapped up in a fancy lens and get the sales pitch of hey, this one’s the best.
I’m not going to really name the names, but really talk to them. And it’s just the relationships between the vendors, the headset, the developer. And then I do tell them you’ve got to have a management system of your headsets. I can’t imagine having more than 5 or 6 headsets and not be able to manage them and know what they’re doing. If you’re using them, be able to have that data with Arbor XR.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah, that’s great advice. Okay. And one kind of fun question. As much as you can share. And you can answer this either from Kevin perspective or the company’s perspective. But what is the future of VR at Delta?
Kevin Marcum:
I really see the future of VR really growing in the next year or two. This year was kind of a slowdown for Delta. We were doing good financially, but it was kind of reset. Let’s look at our finances. We had a slowdown on big projects. But now it’s kind of really starting to pick back up, getting a lot of questions, a lot of input from other departments. So we now have flight ops, we have tech ops, we have in-flight. We have several other departments that are really interested in VR. you know, I see [the rest of the company] let me jump off the ledge to see if I survived or not, you know. And now you’re all willing to come with me. So they’re all very interested and the key thing at Delta, some corporations, like Chick-Fil-A, we collaborate a lot on things. Chick fil A is different. But Delta we have several different trainings.
We have tech ops learning. We have in-flight learning. We have Aces, which is where I am. We have several different learning organizations and they’re all kind of doing their own thing. And we’re all kind of coming together now and saying, “hey, let’s stick together and look at this as one group.” I actually brought our innovation team in recently.
So our innovation team is bringing everybody together instead of saying, “hey, instead of you off buying this headset and Kevin’s buying this headset, you guys are using this developer and we’re using it. Let’s all look at this together.” And that way we’re working as one instead of battling back and forth, [asking] who’s the best developer and so on. And who’s the content manager and the headset that we’re using.
Brad Scoggin:
Somebody has to be the first one to jump. Okay. So you know what? When you when you jump and you survive, it’s kind of like, all right, Kevin’s the guy, right.
Kevin Marcum:
So I will tell you, my wife laughs at me all the time because when I tell her I’m doing a podcast or I’m going to a conference, I’ve been invited to talk. She’s like, coming from the guy that I teach you how to log into a computer 28 years ago so you could get a job at Delta.
You know, I am not technologist, but my grandson obviously he 12 years old. I bought him an Oculus Quest four years ago. He’s always playing his games, and he comes over and puts my headset on and does the ramp operation. He does the de-ice operation. He gives me advice. He gives me input on it. Well, why don’t you do this or why can’t it do this? Why can’t the headset…? And I’m like, hey, we’re not Fortnite here. You know, we’re Delta. But he gives me great input on it. And then, when I, when I have people put headsets on neck that struggle with using it and they get aggravated, I tell him that I understand because I can put a headset on him, click on a de-ice program, and I can click through it. But my grandson brings his headset over and says, hey, play this game. He gets mad at me because I can’t figure out how to shoot somebody. And it’s like, well, you didn’t teach me how to use the buttons properly here. You know?
Brad Scoggin:
That’s awesome. well, now we know that the secret you kind of gave it away. I was trying to give you props as the secret to success. It’s your grandson. He’s the secret.
Kevin Marcum:
To success.
Brad Scoggin:
For Delta.
Kevin Marcum:
You got to bring the younger generation. And he has advice to give other you know, their corporations attending good, good conferences. You know, you get so much information out of out of the conferences that they have throughout the year. and attending shows and just talking to people and listening to what other corporations are doing and what \ they’ve been doing or what they’re looking to do.
Oh, I went to, conference last what was that, October in Houston? And you know, we found ourselves in the lobby of the hotel. It was Delta, American, Alaska, Frontier and United, all sitting in a lobby hotel comparing what we were doing in VR and talking about it. We’re all competitors, but we were all one because it was like we’re all there to help each other. It’s not a secret. It’s like, here’s what we’re doing. And they’re like, that’s cool. Here’s what we’re doing. Oh, that’s really cool.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. But you didn’t tell them about your grandson. I’m sure that was. That’s the key. Right?
Kevin Marcum:
Left him out of that. Yeah, I left him out of that.
Brad Scoggin:
Oh, man. Well, Kevin, this has been awesome. A lot of fun. And I feel like a ton of great info, so I really appreciate you taking the time. I’m sure you’re busy, and we look forward to catch up with you soon at one of those conferences.
Kevin Marcum:
All right. Thank you all for having me. Thank you.
Brad Scoggin:
Man, we’ve seen it time and time again that working with a good content creator is just so key. Overall, but especially in the early proof of concept.
Will Stackable:
Yeah. It’s true. Futurists is killing it. And it was fun to hear the behind the scenes from Kevin. I’ve heard it from Futurist’s side, but one of the things that stuck out to me on the deicing side of things was we’ve often, at an academic level, talked about this idea that VR is great for things that are difficult, dangerous and expensive to do in real life. Well, their training hits all those buckets. And not only that, but it’s saving them money. It’s making their trainers more efficient. And these are trainers that, like you mentioned, are not technical trainers. So they’re leveraging this new technology to do something they’ve already done. They’re just doing it way better. it’s going to make for a more safe work environment.
It’s obviously saving the company money. And my guess is that we talked about I loved the gamifying aspect. Maybe there’s a future Delta/Fortnite, collaboration coming, but just even the anything you can do in your in your training simulations, even if it’s fire extinguisher training, adding in little, little things that employees can mess around with just for fun to make it engaging, you’re going to get better results.
You’re going to have people when they do it and they’re holding they’ve got it in their hands. They’ve got the whatever, the hoses that they’re spraying, the deicing, it’s going to stick with them with muscle memory much more than anything on a PowerPoint slide or and especially the fact that they can do it over and over again and then get a green light, make sure that they’ve passed all the checks. So I think that’s just so huge.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah. I don’t know how you get a better moment than someone who’s gone through traditional training for 40 years, finally having a change in behavior because of your training. Yeah, I mean that’s…
Will Stackable:
I’ve heard a thousand times and I’ve recently ignored the training, which all of us who’ve gone through some kind of safety training you watch it and you check the box saying you finished it, but being able to put a headset on, and I don’t know if the hose blows up on you if you step over it but just being able to do it in a virtual environment something clicked for this employee that had been learning this safety instruction for 40 years and never it never actually complied.
So it’s huge. And we’re hearing that across the board. I mean so many companies are reporting back that this is dropping safety incidences and employees are engaged with the training. So it’s sticking with them. They’re retaining it, but also because again, it’s muscle memory, they’re able to avoid actions that are going to cause them to be injured that are very difficult to simulate in real life.
Brad Scoggin:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as always, we appreciate you spending a little bit of time with us. make sure you check us out wherever you listen to your podcasts, and we will see you next time.
