One Company’s Experience with AR

Guido Jouret joined the Swiss industrial giant ABB in 2016, after spending more than two decades in technology leadership roles at Cisco and Nokia. As chief digital officer, he helps lead the $34 billion company’s technology strategy in green power, transportation, robotics, and automation in over 100 countries, and he champions its AR initiatives. Here, Jouret describes AR’s transformative potential—and why many businesses underestimate the change that’s coming.

Why is ABB interested in augmented reality?

AR can help address three macroeconomic challenges that we—and our customers—are facing. The first is the aging of the skilled workforce. In the oil and gas industry, for example, there was a massive employment surge in the 1960s and 1970s and then a hiring lull. As a result, you now have a lot of older workers retiring, taking skills and institutional knowledge with them. A similar dynamic is happening in many other industries. Second, we have a lot more machines in remote locations, and we want to be able to monitor, operate, and fix those machines with fewer people on-site. And the third challenge is the growing complexity of new technologies, which require new technical skills.

What pilots are you doing?

In our pulp and paper business, we’re working on AR that will allow us to service the equipment of remote customers without sending in technicians. Today a customer needing guidance on repairs gets a binder with documentation. We’re developing AR on a HoloLens headset that will let the customer be guided by a remote technician who can see what the customer is looking at and walk them through a repair. We’re at the early stage. We’ve put together some prototypes, and we’re sharing those with customers to get their feedback.

In our marine business, we’re working with a coalition of companies on pilot projects involving autonomous vessels—like Google self-driving cars but ships. You can imagine starting with small autonomous ferries on lakes but eventually scaling up to container ships. You wouldn’t need large crews on these ships. If somebody on shore needs situational awareness of what’s happening on a vessel, they could use AR technology. We think we could bring this capability to market within a few years.

How would that work, remotely checking in on an autonomous ship?

A captain onshore might use AR to see the view from the ship’s bridge and contextual information about the ship’s speed and course and other telemetry data. This is a case where you’d be integrating virtual reality and augmented reality. The VR would be the view from the bridge. The AR would be live telemetry overlaid on that view. If sensors showed that something was going on in the engine room, you could teleport there from the bridge and have a look around a virtual engine room that had AR information superimposed on top of it. You can imagine needing only a few people actually on board at any time.

What other sorts of jobs do you see AR doing?

There are three overlapping areas where I see AR taking off. The first is in dangerous jobs. You want to make sure people have the best information possible at exactly the right moment, because the cost of not having that—people getting injured, equipment being destroyed—is so high. So I would imagine AR applications in refineries, chemical plants, construction, and mining, for example. The second area is jobs in remote locations, like on an oil rig or an offshore wind farm, where it’s really valuable to make sure that the people you do have on-site have the skills they need. Third, AR will be really useful in cases where people are working with products or machines that are extremely complex, so they can’t be easily automated. Servicing an industrial 3-D printer would be an example. Or work done in semiconductor labs.

Those are all pretty cutting-edge. Are there less-cool applications that will be as important?

This doesn’t sound superexciting, but it could have a big impact: If people use AR simply to adhere to a best-in-class process, it can prevent mistakes and injuries. You can have the best standard operating procedures in the world, but if your workers don’t follow them, it doesn’t matter. AR can ensure compliance with processes. For instance, imagine you’re working with an industrial motor and there’s a step in the manual that says, “Turn off the power.” It would be easy to overlook the step and damage the equipment or get hurt. With AR, the software could say, “Turn off the power and glance at the switch to confirm it’s off.” When you looked at the switch, the AR could take a picture of the state of the switch, time-stamp it, and record the location of the motor using GPS. So you would now be certain that the switch on a motor was off at a specific location and time during a specific step in a process.

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Money is pouring into development.

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Do businesses have unrealistic expectations about AR because of hype on the consumer side?

Actually, I think it’s sometimes the reverse—press about consumer uses of new technology negatively influences the perception of that technology in business. It’s a recurring theme. Think of the press around consumer drones, for instance, which suggests that they’re a nuisance or a toy. But of course we’re finding important applications in industry now for inspecting refineries, pipelines, and high-voltage transmission lines. Same thing goes for blockchain, which at first was seen as the technology behind bitcoin, the digital currency used by drug dealers. But businesses are beginning to understand that blockchain will have a huge impact on contracts. AR was seen as a game platform, and there was bad press when Google Glass stalled, which may have colored how businesses saw the technology—maybe as a science experiment that wasn’t going anywhere. But people who actually work with AR in the industrial space are quite excited.

How should a company get started with AR?

First, if you haven’t already done so, you should design and build your products digitally so that you’ll have digital models of them to use in developing AR and VR. Otherwise, you’ll need to create those digital models later, which is complicated. Second, figure out where AR could generate the most value in your operations or services. I’d gauge that using those three dimensions I’ve mentioned: danger, remoteness, and complexity of the task. It probably shouldn’t be a priority to add AR to a simple machine that’s easily accessible. On services, I’d ask where AR could enhance an existing service rather than what new service you could build from scratch with AR. It’s much easier to get a customer that’s already using some of your maintenance services to try an enhanced version. If you and a competitor provide the same service, and yours has an AR component that allows customers to do some of their own work, that creates value for them and differentiates you.

How do you see augmented reality and artificial intelligence coming together?

Today we can create really good artificial intelligence that can play Jeopardy! or a game like Go, but it’s harder for AI to figure out how to respond to situations where it has no training. It will come up with an informed response, but the outcome can be unpredictable. If you train an automated ship to handle clear skies and a calm sea, and a hurricane hits, you don’t know what the AI will do. People, at least for quite some time, will be better at reasoning in context in novel situations. So we can imagine that with the fusion of AI and AR, the AI will provide a set of recommendations about, say, what step to take next in a repair; a human with the contextual expertise will make the final call; and at that point AR could provide useful guidance. If there’s a noise coming from a motor, it could be many things. AI could look at the data and suggest 10 possible causes and recommend a few to consider first. But the tech’s decision about which to follow up on will be based on his experience, his team’s design knowledge, what he finds when he opens up the machine, and so on. He will make the final call about what the problem most likely is and then select an AR program that guides the repair.