New Report Shows State of AR for Field Service

/

A new report on adoption of AR in the field service industry shows enterprises are continuing to invest in immersive technology. The survey was conducted by Librestream, a global provider of augmented worker enterprise solutions, in conjunction with Worldwide Business Research (WBR). 

In its Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management, Gartner reports that, “By 2025, over 50% of equipment manufacturers will offer outcomes-based service contracts that rely on access to digital twin data, up from less than 20% in 2019.”

The Librestream report shows similar trends. Here are our takeaways from the survey.

Respondents

The survey collected 100 responses. Respondents were from large enterprises—82% had over $1 billion in annual revenue—that do field service. 100% of respondents had some level of AR adoption within their organizations. 

Investment

Over the next 12 months, only 1% (so 1 enterprise) plans to reduce AR spending, only 5% plan for no investment, and 40% plan to keep AR spending level. 

Of the 54% of enterprises planning an increase in their AR investments in the next year, 82% plan at least a 20% increase. The companies investing in AR for field service are going all in. 

Business Benefits

What benefits do enterprises associate with AR? The winning response, with 45% answering in the affirmative, was that AR offers a selling point in 3rd party contractor negotiations. Other top benefits included:

  • Improved technician productivity - 40%

  • Improved service ROI/cost savings - 38%

  • Improved worker safety - 37%

  • Shorter training timelines for new technicians - 34%

Features and Capabilities

The capabilities respondents ranked as “very important” most often were digital work instructions and machine learning. The most important remote expert assistance features to respondents were:

  • Analytics that incorporate usage statistics, AI, and machine learning algorithms

  • Device agnostic software that offer a similar experience across all platforms

  • Diagnostic tool support

  • Offline features for areas with no internet connectivity

COVID-19

For respondents, AR plays a role in business continuity in the face of unpredictable market conditions (a la a global pandemic). 

While just 29% were concerned with using AR to help with safety and social distancing, the majority of respondents were more concerned with the bottom line:

  • Reduction in overhead leading to protected margins on service - 53%

  • Reducing the need to travel for delivering service - 56%

  • Improved support of contractor and new technician onboarding - 59%

Challenges

Enterprise AR strategy presents plenty of challenges. For survey respondents, their biggest challenges were:

  • Collecting and implementing technician feedback on solution performance

  • Managing the scaling of technology after successful pilot

  • Change management and training

What This Survey Tells Us

Jereme Pitts, COO of Librestream, said, “Sophisticated organizations are harnessing the full power of AR-powered remote assistance platforms...to improve productivity, enhance service ROI, and even create new revenue streams. These findings make it clear why these solutions need to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis by executives, not on an ad-hoc basis."

“Our future success is directly proportional to our ability to understand, adopt and integrate new technology into our work.”.png

While this survey looks specifically at AR in field service, it matches trends we’re seeing across industrial enterprises—a growing adoption of AR/VR/XR to improve safety, efficiency, and costs. 

Enterprises are continuing their investments in AR from afar.