Brad Scoggin
Hey there, welcome to XR Industry Leaders with ArborXR. My name is Brad Scoggin and I’m the CEO and one of three co-founders of ArborXR. We've had the opportunity of working with thousands of companies since 2016 and we've learned a ton about what it takes for XR to be successful in your organization.
Will Stackable
And I’m Will Stackable, co-founder and CMO. This podcast is all about interviewing the leaders who are on the ground making XR happen today—true pioneers in the space.
Jason McGuigan
Thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Vishal Shah
Thanks for having us, Brad. Appreciate it.
Brad Scoggin
Absolutely. And you know, it's been fun to get to know you guys over the last couple years. The Shaw you and I are fairly close we could hang out sometimes and so Cal and I get to see Jason at conferences occasionally since you're on the other side of the country but always love to start with a little bit of an origin story. So maybe you kick us off Jason, kind of how did you get into XR to begin with and how did you end up at Lenovo? And what are you doing now?
Jason McGuigan
Sure, sir. So as you mentioned, my title being head of commercial virtual reality. So I fall under Vishal's team. I've been in the XR space since the latest inception of it. So around 2014, 2015. Prior to that, you know, being in this space, I really focused on traditional media. So I worked a lot in television, film, 3D motion graphics and did a lot of real time applications.
So I led a bunch of teams on the creative side as well as the development side. Sometimes teams anywhere between 20 and upwards of 100 people if we had external resources. And we built applications and software and experiences for enterprise customers. So over the decades, literally, I think I'm in 25 years in the media space or so across the board.
doing all that, you know, working with companies like Disney and IBM over the years. But when we got into XR and we started moving in that direction, we really started focusing on how this would benefit enterprise customers pretty much from day one. We recognized the value from gaming and we were all big gamers in the company. I was the chief creative officer prior to Lenovo. And, you know, we got the opportunity to try it and we said, you know, this is something that will appeal to our customers.
We immediately brought it into places like the Home Depot, BASF, but our biggest customer across the board with doing it was Lenovo. They were our biggest customer in traditional media and they became our biggest customer early days in VR. As I continued to develop that relationship there and working in that, when I wanted to get out of that service field, when that small ISV mindset, I started looking around and just decided I just wanted to get out of the space and take a little bit of a breather. And my contacts at Lenovo said, no, we should talk. So I've been with Lenovo for about four years now, leading up the VR initiatives, everything from what we do on the hardware, software, strategy side, and everybody we work with on the ISV front, including some of the great relationships we have with MDM partners like you guys.
Brad Scoggin
Awesome. Michelle, give us your origin story.
Vishal Shah
Yeah, so thank you for the introduction, Brad, and great to be working with ArborXR. You're definitely a leader in this space and what we're doing in the XR world. So my origin is I've been in this space for almost a decade now. I was at Motorola and Qualcomm for a while working on a variety of digital transformation products, both on the hardware side as well as the software and solution side,
Vishal Shah
XR headsets, AR headsets, rather, about 10 years ago at startups in Silicon Valley. And I was really blown away by the potential of what this can do, right? To me, this is the new frontier for media, new frontier for content consumption. And ever since then, I've been working on a variety of startups, consulting for large companies, as well as working with Lenovo for the last two and a half years as the head of their entire AR, VR, and Metaverse initiative.
Jason McGuigan
Congrats buddy. Good luck.
Vishal Shah
And as part of that, I'm responsible for everything from the product development, product operations, to the sales and business development of the product. So soup to nuts in terms of the delivery of the product. So it's great to work with folks like Jason, build a team, as well as work with exciting partners such as you, because we strongly believe that the ecosystem is what is required to thrive in this industry. And looking forward to really help our enterprise customers scale with Lenovo Think Reality Solutions.
Brad Scoggin
Well, I definitely want to hear about from you, Jason, some more on the VRX. I actually remember when you emailed us, I don't know, I guess a year and a half ago, and we got the pitch of this is what's coming and we were all pretty excited. So maybe we transition to that and kind of share a little bit about the VRX and how you guys are differentiating in the market.
Jason McGuigan
Sure. So, yeah, I think, I'm not sure if we originally met over email, but then ran to each other in conferences. But like, you know, obviously you guys have made a name for yourself in the space and early days when we were developing the VRX and we're getting ready to start talking to the market about it. I did a lot of research on who was out there and who was making penetration into those enterprise customers that we deal with on a regular basis. And you know, that translates directly into why and how we developed the product, why we in the way we did.
So I think Reality VRX was built from the ground up for enterprise customers with the approach that Lenovo has for the entire technology stack that we've been working in for quite literally decades. And that makes us very unique in the XR space. You know, all of our competitors in the space, they're selling their first or second or third version of a piece of hardware, but that's their only product that they put into these enterprise spaces, you know, typically by and large. Whereas with us, you know, we have these relationships that go back many decades.
Customers know how to buy from us, they trust us as a solution provider. And that's really what they look to us as, is they recognize a problem, they know how to measure it out on ROI and what the situation will actually result in if they solve for that problem. And then they look to us for technology solutions. And Lenovo is great at creating reliable enterprise hardware. We're also great at supporting it and servicing and doing all those things. The area that we have a gap in, and we recognize this, is in what the solution and software you put on those devices are. Everyone knows what to do with a laptop. So when we sell a ThinkPad to somebody, you don't walk in the door and say, oh, by the way, you need Windows, you need Adobe, you need Microsoft Office, you need all these things. Everyone knows what they have to do with that. But when you walk in the door with a ThinkReality VRX or any other VR headset, you have to explain to them what the full solution is. And that comes with how to manage it from the individual perspective, including the MDM aspect, which you guys really do a great job at.
And then looking at the legacy aspects of the tools in the market, we realized that there are going to be some customers that say, you know what, here's what we use for all of our devices. This is what we need to use for our new devices coming to the market. But then there's also the groups that say, you know what, we recognize this is a whole new paradigm and we need something that's built specifically for these devices, which is a custom XR built MDM like Arbor that we can then bring in there. So that was our big impetus behind reaching out to you guys and creating these relationships with all the ISVs we work with. But when it comes down to the device itself, it really was built with that mindset. We're not just sending somebody a box, we're selling them a solution. Because by and large, the devices on the market right now are very, very similar from their capabilities. They may have a little bit different screen resolution, they may have a little bit different processor power, little bit different in the RAM or storage space, things of that nature, but they all do exactly the same things. They are all 6-DOF VR devices primarily.
So if you look at that landscape, we fit very wholly into that space, but our big differentiator is that customers that work with us know they're reliable with the hardware, they know what they're getting working with us, they know that we're not disappearing tomorrow, or that we're going to have poor relationships with our customers and that we put our customers first. So those areas are the same tenants that we built this on, and it goes down to everything we built the device around.
We built this in mind very differently than our competitors' devices where it's one device for an individual user. We built these devices to be shared. There's no specific login on the device. They're meant to be shared in the fact that they're fully wipeable surfaces. We even have a new medical grade facial insert that we'll be putting on the device within the next month or so. That will just roll into all products that are out there. And even down to the lens type that we chose to make sure that people didn't have to put the device on and adjust it manually.
A brand new VR user is not going to know what IPD is, they're not going to know what a diopter is, they're not going to know how to adjust those things. You need to be able to put it on, not feel like it's gummed up from the previous person that wore it, but also be able to put it on and have an instantaneously good experience, not worry about how to adjust it and manually configure it if it's your first time in VR.
So we really thought through all those processes and made the decisions on the front end based around those ideals, as well as making sure we're using our partnerships in the software and MDM space as kind of the tip of the spear when we talk to our customers. Recognizing that bringing a piece of software is more important than the hardware that we're bringing them sometimes, because the hardware itself is not solving the problem. It's that hardware plus software solution that really actually hits our ROI metric.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah. And I think you all have a very interesting perspective. You know, a lot of the other manufacturers don't have decades of enterprise relationships who are, you know, where you're selling other hardware into those existing relationships. So Vishal, I'd love to hear maybe some of your perspective just on the enterprise market. And the fact that you get to talk to a lot of companies who are in XR and those who aren't and are already loan of a customer. I mean, how do you kind of navigate that journey?
Vishal Shah
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what people don't realize about Lenovo is a lot of people think of Lenovo as a company that makes the ThinkPad or the laptop company, right? But Lenovo is a $60 billion global pocket to cloud company. We own brands like Motorola, which is one of the largest cell phone companies in the world, one of the most prominent brands. And we have a very large data center, edge business, as well as workstations and a laptop business as well, right? So what we call everything from the client edge to the cloud. And this is where we sit with our category. We sit in the IDG business, which is the Interim Device Group. And as we talk to these customers, and I think Jason touched on this, right? I mean, they want somebody that understands what is necessary for the enterprise. And one of the biggest bottlenecks in any IT rollout or any digital transformation rollout is how well does it gel with your IT department? Where are you from a security perspective? How much do you care about the privacy of your employees? Where is the data going to reside? And can you work on these multi-tenant cloud solutions as opposed to just a virtual cloud? So these are the things that we have a heritage of, several decades on working with these large enterprises, working with all the stakeholders all the way from someone who's running a factory, someone who's running the IT department, or someone who's making these decisions at the learning and development.
Area for universities and schools and higher education institutions. So having that diversity of enterprise and the B2B aspect is a variety of ways how we've actually designed our product and that's what our customers come to in terms of reliability. So I think it's very easy to call you to design your primary product for a gaming use case and then try to be an enterprise player. People see through that very easily. They want something.
A company that works on products for the enterprise from the ground up. Our ThinkReality product was not designed for any other purpose. It was designed only to be a killer enterprise device, the first of its kind, and that's our heritage. And that's why we made some of the design choices that Jason talked about. And then the biggest thing that we do is we don't compete with our solution providers. A lot of times...
Some of the brands, our competitors, also have their own gaming platforms, or they will acquire content that will compete with the larger open ecosystem players. What we do is we built an ecosystem around Qualcomm, Snapdragon Spaces, around OpenXR, around OpenAndroid, that helps us create a huge ecosystem of these partners, similar to what you see in a Windows laptop environment, right, where we don't compete.
With some of these players that are pre-installed on your laptop. So that's why we work with folks like you. We don't have our own products that compete with it, right? Same thing when it comes to manufacturing remote assistance. We make sure that we are working on an ecosystem of partners that can thrive on our ecosystem as opposed to being worried about being cannibalized by us as well.
Brad Scoggin
I want to press in a little bit on that, on the open ecosystem. I think that's something we see a lot.
And obviously I think it's kind of funny to me that the closed ecosystem is so I think tempting for people to push toward. And I think if it works OK maybe great but it just seems like it often doesn't work. But I'd love to learn a little bit more Vishal and especially with your background at Qualcomm. What has it been like. How has Qualcomm contributed. How is the Snapdragon. I mean how do they add value to what you're doing. Where do you see that going.
Vishal Shah
Qualcomm have been great partners. I'm an ex-Qualcomm employee myself, so I may be a little bit biased there, but when it comes to just in general their grasp over the chipset roadmap and what it takes in terms of innovating in this space, they've been definitely leaders in the space and have been really pushing the envelope on this industry for over a decade now. They've been great partners on the hardware side, but what has been even more refreshing over the
And this is where we made a big investment with them on the Qualcomm Snapdragon Spaces has been their commitment to the open ecosystem, right? Just like our customers and our developers don't want to be stuck in a silo, Qualcomm has realized that they want to definitely go up the stack and create these SDKs that are easy for their customers, their hardware partners to go from one device to the other. So that's something that they've been very, I think they've been very insightful on.
and have made a lot of investments. And a lot of our products like the VRX A3 were the first products to support the Qualcomm Snapdragon Open ecosystem. And actually we welcome competition on that platform. We want more and more of our competitors to get on that platform as well, because we see that as a way for this industry to scale. We all believe that the spy of the metaverse AR-VR is big enough, and we really need more and more people to adopt that. And we want our developers to be able to monetize their software over multiple devices so that we can actually grow together in this space.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, Jason, I'm curious from your perspective, you know, boots on the ground talking to a lot of customers. I think one thing we've seen, I always say, you know, over the last year, but I'd say especially in the last six months, is just really heating. I mean, we're seeing our signups increase every month or conversion rate increase every month, which is great for all of us. I think we're seeing more and more really, really powerful use cases that don't feel like hyper flash, that feels like they're here to stay. I think we're up to almost 100 of the Fortune 500 Global 2000 using Arbor. So to me, it's like, wow, that's really exciting. And it's I always say, too, it seems from our perspective that it is industry agnostic. It just seems, you know, certain companies have more forward thinking L&D departments and that's who moves quicker. But from your perspective, what are some trends you're seeing in the market as you're talking to customers, both with from a use case perspective, but maybe also even in what they're looking for in an enterprise device.
Jason McGuigan
Yeah, so I think there's a couple of answers to that. You know, the way we're seeing the market right now is absolutely similar to what you're seeing. There's been a dramatic uptick over the past year or so where we're seeing a lot more folks getting interested, getting invested. You know, I think new product announcements have helped to kind of get some new excitement in there. We are also talking a lot about the powers of what generative AI can contribute to the market as well. But before we touch into that, you know, we're...
We see it is absolutely the same place you mentioned, a little bit different than traditional hardware use cases, things of that nature, which may be very vertically focused. And what we're seeing is this horizontal across all vertical sort of nature of XR, where every organization is recognizing there's value in it, but they're recognizing it in kind of similar ways. Training and collaboration are two of the biggest, biggest buckets that we see across the board. And that's really our sweet spot, on the Think Reality Really hits at the heart of that. Every organization brings on new employees. Every organization has to train those new employees on the socialization aspect of their organizations, their onboarding, their initial training. How do you get somebody up ready and efficient at their job most quickly? All of those things have value to organizations. So where we're seeing the biggest uptick in it are places that have high levels of turnover. Now turnover can mean different things for different groups. A lot in our group about the QSR industry. QSR is like the quick service restaurant industry. QSR industry has on average 150% year over year turnover, meaning every year they turn over one and a half times their entire workforce. So they have 100 employees, 150 employees get hired per year, but most likely these groups have thousands, tens of thousands of employees. So you get the idea. They turn all of those employees over on a regular basis, which means they're bringing on a lot of new people. That means that they have to train all those new people, you're taking the trainer out of the rotation, you're also taking those people and making them much more efficient by training them more efficiently or more quickly and getting them on that line much more quickly. But then there's other areas that have high turnover that you don't necessarily think is turnover. Look at a higher education university that may employ VR devices for a classroom experience. Their turnover is that new bachelor students that comes through every semester. So they're getting this high cycle rate.
Maybe your utility of the device isn't a lot per individual, but because they're bringing so many people through, they're getting a lot of utility out of those on an annual basis. So we start looking at it less as a laptop that one employee may have to use every single day to a device that is shared where you'll get a lot of utility across an entire organization by many different hands touching it. So those are the sorts of target use cases that we really try and look at, and that can go primarily towards those training.
And collaboration sorts of mindsets. So we're really seeing a lot of that kind of grow and organizations are starting to understand the ROI around that, especially as we have kind of this post-COVID lull back into people moving back into the office, having to go back into these training scenarios, but also organizations being resistant to the idea of spending how much money they were on things like travel and training pre-COVID. So there's this kind of ebb and flow. They're like, all right, well.
We recognize we have to get back into this older mindset of how we're going, but we also wanna, you know, employ some of those cost savings we had, and XR has been one of those ways they've been able to do it. The other way, as I mentioned though, is generative AI and the powers that we're seeing within that. We're seeing a dramatic uptick in the ability to use generative AI to create some aspects of content, and very soon, many, many more aspects of content, which is going to increase the volume of use cases you could create.
Quicker to market and at lower cost factor. And that's getting a lot of people interested in the ideas of what they can do. Because prior, a lot of times they'd spend so much money on a singular use case and it's hard to justify. But if they can get for the same cost factor, you know, five, 10 X by using some of the aspects of generative AI on the software development side, then they have a much better use case and much better ability to create ROI based on that. So we're seeing a lot of these things kind of.
You know, confluence of these technologies come together that are creating a much higher demand across the board.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, you know, we were at talking about the quick service industry. We're at dinner a few weeks ago with some customers. And another just value add, I guess, from XR is waste. And you we're talking to a big pharma company. And they said, you know, the reason they got into XR doing their training VR was because they were training someone and they spilled a vial, you know, it was a million dollars worth of chemical waste. And but then you got the quick service guy who's kind of laughing and saying, well, we've got, you know, the ice cream. Not you know it's not a million dollars but we have a million machines or whatever you know if we have a thousand so it kind of ends up being the same so it's interesting yeah the variety of use cases.
Vishal Shah
Or imagine safety, or imagine safety for that matter, right? Imagine an employee's hand that gets chopped off or someone who gets electrocuted in a, you know, in a EV factory when they're installing a battery, right? So the ROI on the human life and the wastage is absolutely irreplaceable.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, right.
Jason McGuigan
One saved alive, one saved limb, one less lawsuit, one less item on the safety side could mean literal millions or plant shutdowns. We talk a lot about oil and gas. Something happens where something isn't done right there. It could cost lives. It could cost millions of dollars overnight. There's so much that could go into those things. But we're seeing that across the board on the wayside as well.
There was a group we were speaking to and it was a company that does essentially hardware, but paint mixing, something as simple as mixing cans of paint. And the amount of times it gets screwed up and how much waste there is, they have a calculation for it. They understand that for every employee that they put on and every new person they have to train, there's approximately four cans of wasted paint, which may cost $100 per, you know… per every day, every ship that they have somebody on there. And if that's the case, they add that up over the course of a year and of course all their locations and then they could share that training aspect and even just reducing that by a single or a few percentage points really means some significant savings for them. So that waste portion is absolutely a major portion of that ROI calculation.
Will Stackable
I love it, we should do a whole podcast just talking through use cases. I feel like between the four of us, I keep wanting to jump in with more, but I wanna rewind. Jason, you said something that struck me. You said, with this new headset, you're not buying a device, you're buying a solution.
You gave some great details on the headset and why it really is an enterprise first headset. I thought maybe it could be helpful because I know a lot of people listening are in the process of trying to decide what headsets to use as they go to scale. At a small pilot project stage, it matters a little bit less, but once you start to scale up, it really does start to matter. If you get stuck with the wrong headset, you're gonna be stuck with it for a while and you may really regret it. So could you paint a little bit of a picture, even a hypothetical customer acts?
Comes to Lenovo and says, I'm in, I'm gonna scale up with Lenovo, what does it mean when you say you're not buying a device, you're buying a solution?
Jason McGuigan
Sure, I mean, that's something I talk about. That's like a layup. That's something I talk about every day, right? So we really do focus on that as a whole agenda every time we talk to our customers. And it depends on the sort of customer. It depends on if they're already a previously Lenovo customer or not, but the story is the same. We don't just sell a box. If you're going to do a proof of concept with XR, absolutely go to Best Buy, order a device off Amazon.
Easy enough to test out in your organization and see what works. But if you're going to scale into the hundreds or thousands of devices, that's going to open up a lot of issues when it comes to how do we get product onto those devices, how do we make sure that they work on our IT network, how do we make sure that those devices aren't talking to a setup that we're not comfortable with, where they get their updates from, where that data is stored.
Does it have to store credit card data or does the employer and person using it have to do anything with it?
So we look at it and lock the devices down from that perspective. When you get the VRX, it essentially is an empty shell waiting for you to fill it up with your solution. So we work with folks like you guys, like Arbor, to make sure that they can manage and provision the device itself. We work with other MDMs and many ISVs, but we essentially tailor the solution specifically around the customer. We'll bring an ISV to board, we'll bring an MDM to board, and we provide the hardware. And those are the easy steps that I think everyone will find.
has an understanding of. But when you're buying hundreds or thousands of devices you want to be able to work with enterprise pricing. So who do you buy from? If you're a big company and you always buy through a specific channel partner, I guarantee you Lenovo has a relationship likely with that reseller already. You know we work with
tens of thousands of resellers across the globe that already work with enterprise customers to do reselling of Lenovo products. So when you're already in the Lenovo catalog with the VRX, we can easily then create a solution around that. But then we go even further. We've got global support from actual experts in the field. So you work with our Lenovo integrated solution support, which we call LIS. That LIS team is true engineers that work in the XR space that know the products of OBAJ employees. Then we have things like DAS, like Devices of Service Financial Modeling. Which means that we could go in there and if you want to take all of your solution, your hardware, your software, your MDM, your support, and wrap it up in a nice little bow and then amortize those costs across 24, 36 months, we can create a leasing plan through Lenovo Financial and give the cost factor and bring that cost factor down on a monthly basis. So we try and think of every single angle in that equation and then on the support side, we do everything from help you upscale your team, on how to actually do change management to bring these devices on board. We can help you procure the device and provision the device. We can help with content development. We can help with 3D model conversion.
Like there's literally no...part of the service chain and the support chain that Lenovo doesn't have an equation for. So, you know, the reason we have that is because this isn't our first rodeo. Like we have been doing this for decades. The things that we offer within the XR space have graduated over from very mature platforms that have been working extremely well on the enterprise side for decades. And the easiest metric to do is that a lot of your audience, I'm sure have Lenovo laptops, them have gotten from their jobs and when they receive it from their job it came with their employee identification on it, came with a custom system image, came with everything set up specifically for their organization because that was provided to them by Lenovo or by that channel or reseller partner to do that and that's the exact same thing we do on the XR side. Make sure that when it walks in the door it's as low-impact on your team as possible and solves an actual solution from day one.
Brad Scoggin
I think you don't delay up and broke the backport. I love it. I you know there's a lot there and a lot of awesome stuff I still the device as a service to me really stands out as a big you know I think that's a huge differentiator. The show I just kind of a high level strategic question I just love your thought your perspective on because it feels like
You know, and for those of us who are just so up, you know, in the industry on a day to day basis, it feels like, okay, it's proven that training in VR is effective, right? Whether it's for turnover or it's waste management or for safety, like, it's just proven. It seems like that's no longer a question.
Now, I mean, Jason just answered every other potential challenge that inch, you know, like from the financing to like getting us with the whole package. So and we all we believe all this, you know, 100%. That's why we're pouring out our blood, sweat and tears and make this thing happen. So how do we Vishal like get from where we are today, you still have some resistance in companies, I think, just because it's new, or whatever it may be, like, how do we bridge the gap from today to the future where this really is ubiquitous?
Vishal Shah
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a question we struggle with in any new burgeoning technology, right? And, you know, I often ask the same question, is like, when will XR reach its chat GPT moment or its iPhone moment, you know? And to me, the solution lies, and not to be redundant here, in the ease of the solution. The thing that took, you know, AI has been around forever. Generative AI has been around for five years. But what really helped chat GPT take off
how anyone could interact with it with a simple chat bot. So the same thing when it comes to training, when it comes to learning and development, when it comes to remote assistance, when it comes to helping your labor force become more efficient in the field. The question is, how do we design these applications and how do we design these solutions to be very intuitive? Even now, when I see some of the solutions that are out there in the market, they are a little complex. The setup time takes a while.
There's no, you barely see kiosk mode, right? So you have to like fumble around a couple of times to get into a particular application and then how you manage it is kind of complicated. So, you know, my challenge to our UX team, our UI team, and also to the solution providers who we rely on, and, you know, they unanimously agree on it, is how can we simplify this solution? How can we make it more intuitive so that it's as easy as using a smartphone as we use it now, or as easy as using a chat bot
Gen. AI, right? So to me, the solution, the ease of use of the solution is gonna be a big part of what is required. The second is the hardware and price points. I mean, they will get better, they will get cheaper. And we'll continue to work with some of the top hardware vendors, that's the other big advantage of being Lenovo is you have a $60 billion supply chain behind you and you can work with some of the best industry optics players, battery players, people who are in the chipset industry to help you scale the product, to help you… creates some of the best in class technologies. Excuse me. And the other thing is, again, as being Leno and being this pocket to cloud player, a lot of this technology, especially with generative AI and 5G technologies, a lot of these digital twins, a lot of the data is going to sit on the edge. So we're working with companies like Nvidia on Cloud XR so that more and more of your spatial recognition, your AI, your 3D data is sitting on the edge. And that's how you can actually make smaller and more compact, right? So between the ease of the solution, the hardware getting better and having this wrapper of services that makes it a lot easier to consume and manage, I think is gonna be a big part of what will help the scale.
Jason McGuigan
And just to kind of tack onto that, the gener AI portion, again, I think it's such a big part of that. One of the biggest issues that we see across the board is with any new technology is relevant content. First television wouldn't have scaled if there was just one television show on it, right? So we wouldn't have had new versions of that technology unless there was more things for people to consume with it. And the more things we have to consume with these devices, the more demand there is from the market for smaller, better, faster, cheaper devices.
And as you get more demand from that market, that will create more hardware innovation. That new hardware innovation will then in turn create more adopters, more fans, which want more content. And it just creates this perpetual cycle of demand that we'll see take off.
The reason I think generative AI is such a big part of that is because you're going to be able to create that content quicker. You'll be able to have more content of higher relevance to individuals. The personalization aspect brought in.
by things like Chat GPT, where people will be able to create very unique scenarios for every single individual approaching a new piece of content, will make these things that much more powerful, they'll make them that much more useful, and again, create further demand. I do believe that with this technology, with XR and with generative AI, we're entering this age of hyper-personalization when it comes from everything from education to training because of that convergence of these tools.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, that's the content component. I mean, I think something we learned recently, we just launched a content directory, you know, realizing it is funny. There's so many
pain points with XR that are just so basic that still exist and getting good content, you know, is, is one of them. And so we just launched recently demo apps because we found this like the same thing. You have somebody that's excited to get into XR and then there's not great content that they can just try out immediately. And so I think it's, we've got over a hundred ISVs on our directory and over a thousand companies within the last month or two have enabled demo apps, which helps them to evangelize it and you know, internally, if it's a proof of concept or whatever the case may be. Uh, like, you know, we just all have to keep going. Right. Like we see that. I think the frustrating thing probably for all of us sometimes is a year ago there was or maybe 18 months ago there were questions around is this going to work or maybe does this work? And I think all of us are like, it works. It works so well, right? Like just like everyone needs to realize that it works. And so it is encouraging. Yeah.
Vishal Shah
Yeah, and to me, the metaverse direction in the hype cycle has been very, has been good for the industry in general, because that took out some of the hype and some of the dystopian consumer use cases that people were working on or thought that this would enable, as opposed to the pure enterprise ROI use cases that we have the data around, right? We know that it works. And now when we talk to customers, when we talk to CIOs, CXOs, they're like, okay, how do I go implement this, right? How can I make this work? Now I understand what the power of the industrial metaverse is or what the power of 3D digital twins and 3D data is in training, how can we do it? So I think that's really when the hype dies is when you actually get some real work done. So I think this has been very beneficial over the last six months.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, that's it. I like that quote. We need that when the hype dies, you get the real work done. But you know, Will said we should, we could do a whole show on, on use cases. I think it's funny. You know, when we talk to investors sometimes, sometimes they're the worst because they're like, they just start going like, Oh, you could do this and you could do this. And it's like, look, like we, yeah, that that's not, yeah, they go, well let's just train people 10% faster and save company X a few million bucks. Like let's just, you know, then.
Jason McGuigan
And then really, that is it right there. Like the reason this will not die.
is because it has already been proven to save companies money. And this one thing we know about companies is they want to keep as much money in pocket as possible, right? You've got two ways of increasing your profit margin. And one of the major ones is saving money. Like if you could save more and basically just spend less on your corporate training or spend less on your collaboration, spend less on travel, spend less on waste, spend less because of injuries, all those things that XR has been proven to an organization sees that once they are essentially customers for life. But it is that newness and it is that initial gate and it is sometimes a big challenge of the perception. And I think it's another area where Lenovo really excels is that we are not seen as a gaming company. We are not seen as a social media company. We are seen as kind of the stodgy business tool company. We are known for the ThinkPad.
the workstations, the server side, all the things that make up Lenovo's core aspects. That's what people know us as. So when we go into the boardroom with somebody that's an XR champion, and they say, we wanna use company X, and they say, oh, my kid's got one of those, and they laugh them out of the room, or they say, we wanna go with Lenovo, they say, okay, that makes sense. So it's that idea that we like to say, we're the adults in the room when it comes to XR.
We look at it from that perspective, we look at it from that maturity level in the technology space and the people that are not the champions in the organization have a much easier time bringing that up to their senior executives and the other folks that may be decision makers when we have that kind of serious edge to our name.
Vishal Shah
And also we're seen as the solution consultants, right? Being the largest enterprise player, people are looking to how can I do an end to end deployment and scale an XR solution? And that takes a lot more than just the device and the software. It takes, okay, what is my data privacy security? What's my cloud profile? How can I keep my data? I got to do multiple tenants of this data in 15 different factories. How do I go about doing it? Lenovo, can you be a consultant? Can you bring the right SIs in? Can you bring your expertise in to help us through this entire journey? So we are solution consultants to them in this entire journey, which helps them through this digital transformation process. And you're seeing the same thing with generative AI right now. There's a lot of buzz. But when it comes to companies and them putting their data in a public LLM or a private LLM or even a personal LLM for personal data, how do you do it? So Lenovo, again, is going out there and becoming consultants to them.
In terms of what's the most secure way, what's the most cost-effective way of doing that, right? So the same challenges we're seeing in the generative AI space as well, which we saw in the IoT space, we saw that in the XR space, and that's kind of a typical digital transformation process that you have to go through.
Jason McGuigan
And I think that's a great point is that this isn't our first time around the block with this stuff. Every example that Vishal just laid out is something that Lenovo has come at head on and worked with enterprises to solve specifically around their needs. So again, it just kind of leans on that decades of experience.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah. Very, very good. This has been great, guys. Just one last thing here as we move to a wrap. You have a very cool partnership with Formula One. I'd love to hear a little bit about that. And then maybe we will wrap for the day. I don't know if Vishal, you want to hit that?
Vishal Shah
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're one of their elite technology partners, a handful of partners that help them with their entire technology stack, whether it's servers, whether it's PCs, whether it's managing some of their equipment that's being used for real-time broadcast. And proud to say that we were chosen, we were the only company chosen for our XR experience as well at two of their locations this year, Japan and...
and Austin, which Jason was really involved in. So we had some fun there around our stock car experience, around a Formula One experience. And that was just a teaser, but now we're gonna expand that into how can this be used for training, remote assistance? How can, you know, now these companies are getting more and more global and a lot of their teams are still sitting in the UK and processing data in real time, right? So how can we kind of bridge that gap using technology and using XR solutions? So that's going to be a big part of our challenge and solutions going forward as we bring, like you said, right, how do you reduce waste? How do you reduce travel? We keep talking about DEI and ESG, right? How do you like, instead of having 50 people travel to a site, how can we just do it remotely and do a remote collaboration or a remote training? So those are the things that we are trying to build and bring into a cutting-edge organization like Formula One, which is, you know, has absolutely the most advanced needs for speed and data.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, well it's fun too. I mean to get a little brand recognition, you know, name recognition out there, I think helps, helps move XR forward. So guys, this has been great. I mean, I'm thinking we should maybe try to do this once a once a year, once, you know, every six months, just to kind of check in and see how things are going. But I know you're busy and we really appreciate you sitting down with us and we look forward to chatting again soon.
Vishal Shah
Absolutely, absolutely.
Jason McGuigan
Thank you.
