Adam Berg
It could go to the XR room. They could put on the headset. They could launch the app and then open up this pressure testing simulation. They could run it again and again until they got comfortable. So the score and assessed mode actually come from the training. But the VR gives you a chance to just make mistakes with no real consequence.
Will Stackable
Welcome back to the Industry Leaders Podcast. I'm Will Stackable, co-founder and CMO at ArborXR. Brad's out today, so you've got me. But I promise the guest makes it worth it. Joining me today is Adam Berg, who is the senior technology expert at TechnipFMC, which is a global energy technology company. And over the last several years, he's helped build VR training across 30 sites globally for high-stakes scenarios like pressure testing, crane operations, CAD model review, and more.
Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Berg
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Will Stackable
Let's start. Walk us through the origin story. So I've heard there's a HoloLens moment in 2017, and then it sounds like there's a bigger push in 2021. But how did your team actually get into XR training?
Adam Berg
Well, there wasn't a team in 2017 when the spark was lit. There was a person who was aware of HoloLens. It was an IT person, and he bought one of them and just, in his spare time, wrote code and built things until he could play with it and consumed it on the holidays. And then he started showing people, and he started showing more people.
And some of the people he showed were executives, and they really liked it, and they wanted to show other people. And so it was kind of intermittent and just very small scale, just the HoloLens. And what I just described probably lasted off and on for a year or two. And then during that time, we purchased about a dozen, but for the most part, they just collected dust. And there was an occasional demo.
And then for the most part, they just collected dust. And the collecting-dust part lasted until late 2020, early 2021. And by this point in the industry, which we were kind of monitoring as a company, VR was becoming more popular, and the company decided we needed to do something with this. And that's where I got brought in with my team, and there was a mandate: come up with a multi-year plan. And the plan was going to be to figure out how to scope and implement VR in the business.
And because I was in the learning organization at the time, and learning was thought to be the majority of the use cases, the focus was going to be on learning, but it wasn't going to be limited to just learning. And so that's how we got to 2021. And then, if you want, we can talk about the years after that.
But that's—that was the initiation.
Will Stackable
Yeah. We'll get there. That's great. Give me, in your words, what does TechnipFMC actually do?
Adam Berg
Yeah. We're more than anything, we're an equipment manufacturer, but we're also a systems integrator because we manufacture most of the equipment from the start to the end.
So what is that? So we're mainly talking about upstream. So upstream oil and gas is from the seabed or the surface, the ground where the well starts. And then, you know, upstream goes all the way to the production where the oil and gas is produced.
Adam Berg
And then it stops. And then where it goes and gets processed and distributed, that's downstream. We're mostly not involved in that. So the upstream part is what we do, and we make all the equipment, for the most part, that's in the upstream part. And then we package it. So when the clients come to us, we design, procure, and build the entire package and then supply it to the client as a system.
Will Stackable
That makes sense. So in that context, what problems in the upstream sector is XR solving for your workers, like actually on the ground?
Adam Berg
So in addition to what I said about designing and building and supplying the system, we also provide support service on the equipment, you know, after it's in operation. So operation support and also maintenance services and all. And so a lot of these operations that we're talking about, there's probably 40% of our workforce is hands-on workers, whether it's in the manufacture or in the assembly or in the testing or in the service after it's in operation or in the maintenance.
There's a lot of these hands-on operations. So we have about 22, 23,000 employees. About 40% of that is hands-on, whether it's in our shop or at the customer site or in the field. And we have procedures for all of these processes, and we have training, but a lot of times training is not at the time of need.
Or it might be in the production facility, which you have to shut down in order to do training. And it may not be at the right time or the right place when the person really needs it. And even if it is and they get trained properly, it might be some time before they actually use what they learned.
And so there's this gap. And then they don't get the practice. So the training was good. But if you go a while and you don't use it, your recall might not be as good. And then you might need a refresher before you're about to go.
So what would be the greatest promise for us that VR offers is the ability to practice whenever you want, on demand, as much as you want. And that's filling a gap because right now we don't have that ability to practice whenever you want because it's dependent on having a trainer or it's dependent upon having a facility, or it's dependent on having an open slot. And those things can be removed from the equation if you're using VR.
Will Stackable
That makes sense. So if somebody—if I'm a worker, it's a Monday, I want to do some training, I put on a headset at the office or maybe at home. What am I seeing? What am I actually doing?
Adam Berg
So, I'll give you an example. We do a lot of pressure testing as a company in a lot of different ways. So this is something that if a worker wanted to learn how to do pressure testing, they could take the training. But if they wanted to practice it on their own sometime, they could go to the XR room.
They could put on the headset, they could launch the app, and then open up the pressure testing simulation. And then they would see a pressure test cell virtually, and then they would be able to interact and do steps that you might do in a pressure test. And then at the end they could see if they did some things wrong, or they could see the consequence of doing something wrong.
And then if they didn't do it successfully, they could run it again and again until they got comfortable. So the score and assessed mode actually come from the training. But the VR gives you a chance to just make mistakes with no real consequence.
Will Stackable
Does that make sense? We often talk about VR being great for things that are difficult, dangerous, or expensive to simulate in real life. And you can imagine the difficulty of maybe simulating one of these. Are they pressure valves or pipes or some kind of assembly that they have to do that's in a dangerous situation?
Adam Berg
Well, all of the above. And, yeah, there's test cells and barriers which protect people. But in some cases the pressures can be, you know, over 30,000 psi or more in a test pressure, which, just being that high pressure, it can be very dangerous. And so having the ability to do it virtually where you're not actually exposed to the pressure, or you don't have to—you know, you can do it very quickly.
So in a real pressure test, it might take hours and hours to raise the pressure from zero to that high in a safe way. But in virtual, you can simulate that instantaneously. And so it's not only safe, but it does it, you know, very—it saves a lot of time in actually doing the simulation.
Will Stackable
Are there certain levels of certification that your employees are having to receive? Is there a way that you're having to track the training they're doing, or is it just sort of on demand that, as they feel the need, they can upskill there?
Adam Berg
There are definitely levels of certification, and those correspond to the work that you're doing. And so for each work, from the starter to the expert, you need additional certifications. And the VR doesn't really change that. You still need those certifications with or without the VR. But what the VR does is it gives you the ability to practice more, to get comfortable, and to reinforce what you learned.
Will Stackable
Yep, that makes sense. I want to talk about infrastructure and some of the tooling. But before we go there, what's feedback been like for employees? Have you had any stories that you can think of where somebody was able to share what kind of impact this kind of training had on them?
Adam Berg
Sure. So we always, especially because we're early on in the big picture, in VR training, we do user surveys. So it's a people score, like typically 1 to 5. And so we'll get open-ended comments, and then we'll get a star rating, like 1 to 5. And so that's a big way on how we assess the training.
For the most part, the scores are in the 4 to 5 range. The last one that we did, the last batch, the score was 4.3 out of 5. So good room for some room for improvement, but generally, like, well accepted. And then most of the comments that we get that are constructive are not associated with the training content itself or the method of training.
Adam Berg
It's mostly around logistics, like maybe the Wi-Fi cut out, or maybe the person didn't get enough training on how to use the headset. It's those types of issues which garner the negative scores. And it's generally not the VR experience or the interaction that they have with the simulation.
Will Stackable
I'm sure anybody listening who's tried to implement a program in any way would laugh at that, because that seems to be—you hear that all the time—that the VR is great, but getting into it sometimes, just the challenge is having them put the headset on, adjusting the strap, getting comfortable, figuring out the prescription glasses or whatever if they've got them.
It's funny how some of just the real basic things can be the biggest points of friction even now.
Adam Berg
For sure. And especially in a global company where you have multiple countries, multiple languages, multiple locations in each country, in some of the countries.
Will Stackable
Right.
Adam Berg
And then trying to address what you just said on that scale is a bit of a challenge.
Will Stackable
Well, let's talk more about that. You're operating across, I think, 30 global sites. What are some of the infrastructure and scaling challenges that you've experienced that maybe somebody who's just starting a pilot in one location is not even thinking about yet?
Adam Berg
Well, one thing that's important, especially when you're starting, is to have somebody on site that can help the new users. If you're trying to do it fully remotely or with, like, an e-learning or a handout or something, it's probably going to fail. And it's the human factors. It's the—some people are really receptive and others are really unreceptive.
And having a person there that knows all those things that we just mentioned is critical. And you can get that person. It can be an IT person, an engineering person, a learning person. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that you have somebody that, even if they don't know all the answers, they know the basics, and then they can get answers from the remote experts and then help the people locally overcome whatever issues come up.
Will Stackable
That makes sense. What else is there—challenges in coordinating at the leadership level, or are most of the challenges implementing and contextualizing at each of the global sites? Where do you see the most friction occurs? You talked about having an actual person on site, but kind of the operating procedures and processes, and what does it take to build that out?
Adam Berg
There's several points. I mean, one of them is being able to share the content from—you know, if you have new content—and then being able to share it to all the sites. And so just being able to share it, that's one thing. And then being able to socialize it. So you can share it, but people have to know what it is, why they care, do they need it, do they not need it?
And who's it for? Basic stuff like that. It sounds easy, but when you've got so many sites and different languages and different business units involved, that can be a challenge too.
Will Stackable
Could you talk a little bit about, like, I don't know what the origin of when you had the idea that, okay, this thing is obviously working, let's go scale it out. Let's—tell me about what was the planning like. How did you—was it a gradual rollout across a few and then you scaled up, or was it 30 all at once?
Adam Berg
It wasn't as gradual as the way we do many new technologies. It was a big leap. The big leap was we bought 80 Quest 3s. And then once we knew that we were going to target our larger locations and we knew that we were going to start with engineering.
And the larger sites all have engineering. So we looked at the population of engineers, the population total for all of our sites, and then we prioritized those sites. And that ended up being 15 countries and about 30 sites. And so those were the ones with the largest populations, more or less—more or less population with 200 people or more at the site, and almost in all cases, having some engineering representation.
And then we allocated the 80 headsets based on those ratios, those numbers.
Will Stackable
Was there a team that you worked with? What would it look like to plan and roll that out?
Adam Berg
Yes, we had learning people at most of the sites, and then at the sites that we didn't have a learning person, we had an engineering person who was an advocate or somebody that was very interested or curious about extended reality. And in some cases it was, like I said, in some cases it was an IT person.
Same thing—in some cases an engineering person, in some cases a learning person. But you needed that advocate. Yeah, the boots on the ground for the location or the country or the region, to get anything done and to even understand, you know, the three different locations in Malaysia or the eight different locations in Brazil.
Will Stackable
I'm interested in the IT angle. So we're, I think, now working with over 100 Fortune 500, globally, Fortune 500 and Global 500. What? Sometimes we hear that it is the blocker, and sometimes it is a great partner. What was your process to sort of build consensus? It's no small feat to do a global rollout like that, I know.
So how did you manage that?
Adam Berg
I would say—
Will Stackable
You're chuckling. I'm excited to hear your answer.
Adam Berg
Yeah. Well, it's how far we've come. And, yeah, it's a journey. When we started, learning was the driver and the owner, and IT as an organization wasn't involved. Like, certain people were, but not the leadership.
And so when we started and we were doing things, we would submit a ticket anytime we needed anything, you know, to unblock a site, to connect anything, and everything was a ticket. And it was a small scale, so that worked.
Once we said, okay, we're going to buy 80 headsets and we're going to do this stuff, we said, tickets, tickets aren't going to work anymore. And we talked to IT leadership, and we got a liaison, like a business relationship manager, who the people in IT could talk to. This person would help us to navigate dealing with, you know, interacting with IT.
So whether it was cybersecurity or architecture or network or something else, they would either do it for us or tell us who to talk to, at least help us understand what needed to be done and how it would happen. And that was essential to get, you know, basically like a language translator. So translating English to IT-speak and also to IT process, and helping us understand. This was all—
Will Stackable
Pre-Pre-GPT-2.
Adam Berg
For sure. Yeah, for sure. And it was hugely necessary and beneficial.
Will Stackable
That's great. I so I've heard, talking to you a little bit before we started, that you all had a process of—you started with the Meta-native device management, Quest for Business. And then over time you've migrated now to ArborXR. Just talk a little bit about that story. And we all—a lot of everybody listening probably can relate at some level to that journey, but maybe talk a little bit about that story.
And then, as you're thinking going forward, how you're planning your hardware and vendor strategy.
Adam Berg
We've had a few surprises, as you know, and as the listeners know. Surprises such as HoloLens being discontinued, such as Meta is going to discontinue support, such as the Meta MDM is changing. So you take that along with the fact that even if you're not talking about XR, just think about any computer-based technology.
How many years do you have before you need to upgrade or replace? Three, four, five? Something like that. It's—I think we, I think we—the laptop that I'm using right now to talk to you, I think it's on a four-year refresh. So let's just say if you don't know anything, that's your starting point. Whatever we buy, four years, you've got to replace it.
Adam Berg
And that's not too far away from what we're thinking with the headsets now. The HoloLens that we got in 2017, those are nine years old. We're not really using them anymore. The Meta Quest 3 that we got, it was just under two years ago. So we, without thinking too hard, we have two more years to use the Quest 3 before we either have to replace them or at least think about replacing them.
And you probably don't want to wait until it's time to replace them to come up with a plan. And as far as the MDM, we didn't have one. When we bought the 80, we also bought the Quest for Business. It came along with some expectations. One of the big expectations was what's called individual mode and shared mode.
We had an understanding of what those are, and we based a lot of our strategy, our use strategy, on that. And the individual mode gives you more freedom, where you can access the settings in the browser, and the shared mode does not. It's consumer-only. And so, based on that and some other details, we decided initially for the rollout to have a few select users, like creators and authors of content, to be in individual mode and then everyone else to be in shared mode.
And that plan sounded good at the time, but it was a disaster. Shared mode didn't work the way that we expected, and a lot of people couldn't use the headsets. And so instead of trying to work around it, they put the headset on the shelf. And then we had to go say, okay, why aren't you using the headset?
And then deal with that. That was a lesson learned that was painful and hurt our adoption.
Will Stackable
And kind of going forward, what's the plan? How are you thinking about the ecosystem of vendors and how you build a program that is able to maintain—you said, for your life cycle, you're two years from another refresh—what are you thinking?
Adam Berg
To continue on with the MDM, we—and then get to the hardware—we, this year, switched away from the Quest for Business and switched to the Meta Horizon Managed Services, along with ArborXR. And as far as the hardware, we have over 100 in use of the Quest 3 and some Quest Pro, and they're working well.
And then we are following along with several industry-leading vendors that have announced, or we've heard that they're coming out with, different headsets.
And so going to conferences and keeping up with online materials and updates is giving us input to the strategy. But those inputs are going to help, you know, build our strategy as far as, like, what other devices we might use. But I think, at least for the next two years, we plan to continue with the Quest 3 while we build the plan for what will succeed Quest 3.
Will Stackable
Makes sense. You mentioned being able to share content out to all your global sites, and you also mentioned, you know, you wanting to have support for a variety of different headsets over time. What other features or functionality do you think are important to you as you're thinking about an MDM that others should be thinking about?
Adam Berg
So sharing is definitely the top. We get source material in different ways. So some of it might be—we use a Unity or Unreal to build something. Or it might be that we build it with an app that we have a subscription, a vendor app or third-party app, that we have a subscription, and it could be a no-code application.
There's several options for that. It could also be something that we build internally in a different way. So this is to say that sharing is complicated because it's not just one process that works for every source. And so we need a process that works regardless of where we get the source material or what type of source material it is, and then be able to share it and consume it easily and version it when needed.
Again, easily. Because we go back to, it's not just being able to do it. It's got to be easy, and it's got to be something that you can explain to somebody that's in a different country, in a different time zone, sometimes in a different language. You've got to be able to explain it to them easy enough to where they can do it, otherwise the headset stays on the shelf.
Will Stackable
Well, Adam, as we come to a wrap here, I'm curious, what's next for your program? You've talked about moving XR from something that part of the company uses to something that the majority uses as a core technology. What does that path in your mind look like, and what are you excited about?
Adam Berg
There's a couple of things. So most of the progress to date, it's been about 10 or 15% of the company. So that means there's still the rest of the company that hasn't experienced it yet. So lots of opportunity there.
Also, most of the usage so far has been learning and training related. Good stuff. There's still some non-learning use cases out there, like engineering design reviews, those types of things that we've touched on. We've done a little bit here and there. Big opportunity that we haven't exploited nearly enough just yet.
So excited about those two things especially. And then a few other things as well.
Will Stackable
And are you excited about—I mean, HoloLens was it for the longest time. And now we have a whole new crop of either heads-up display glasses, smart glasses, or even full new AR glasses. Do you feel like that—yeah, this new crop of hardware is going to open up new use cases for you?
Adam Berg
I'm sure it will, because there's some use cases that we currently can't pursue because they're not suitable for the headsets that we have.
But I'm also aware that, as excited as I am about that, we still have people that won't try their current solution with the Quest 3 because they tried a Quest 2 or something else a few years ago, before Quest 3 was out. Had some nausea or a headache and won't try it, so we can't leave those people behind. Or at least we can't forget about them.
So bringing them along is part of it. Even though you're not going to—there's some people you're never going to reach, but you got to try. So we have that, and we have to temper our enthusiasm for the next best thing while we're still leveraging, you know, what we're doing now.
So it's both, if that makes sense.
Will Stackable
That makes sense. Okay, I know you've got to run, but in the last 60 seconds, what's a piece of advice you'd give to somebody who is building a new program at their organization, something that you wished you knew when you started way back when?
Adam Berg
So I would say two things. I would say one thing is, regardless of what you do, talk to the IT leadership and get them involved as soon as you can. And whatever you're doing, however small or big, without fail. And then the second thing is, there's tons of different use cases, and there's not a magic bullet.
Look at what other companies are doing. Find something that sounds relevant for you that you're not doing, and socialize that with different groups in your company, and then—and then once you've got that and you know what that is, just pursue that. Make that happen, get some wins, and don't try to boil the ocean.
Will Stackable
Don't try to boil the ocean. You heard it. That's great. Adam, thank you so much for being on. I know you've got to run. I hope I see you at AWE here shortly, and have a great day.
Adam Berg
All right. See you then. Thanks for the time.
