Background and Achievements:
I’ve given over 1,800 immersive demos in my lifetime, and I keep a tracker on my phone for every one of them. It started as a habit and turned into the most useful data I have, because after that many first headset experiences you learn to read a room in about ninety seconds. You can tell who’s going to champion this inside their organization and who’s being polite.
Before Skyhopper, I spent years on the enterprise side of this industry at Accenture and Meta, working with organizations trying to decide whether immersive technology deserved a real line item. The programs that stuck were the ones where somebody could point to a number at the end and say here’s what changed.
Today Skyhopper works with hardware manufacturers, software providers, and service partners on go-to-market, channel strategy, and partnerships. I’m also a founding partner at SBIR Connect, which helps XR companies find and pursue federal small business innovation funding (SBIR).
Challenges to be addressed by AR:
The biggest one is measurement. Companies run a pilot, everybody enjoys it, and then the conversation with the CFO goes sideways because there’s no number attached. Time to competency, error rates, rework, and proficiency scores are all measurable, and it’s import to design that into the deployment before you start rather than trying to reconstruct it after.
Content is the next one. A headset is a paperweight until you put something on it, and the cost of building and maintaining that content usually lands harder than people expect. Device management follows close behind, because fifty devices spread across a facility behave differently than five on a lab bench, and you want a mobile device management solution in place before you scale, not after.
Service and repair is the one that catches most organizations off guard. Cracked lenses, dead batteries, and headsets sitting in a drawer waiting on an RMA quietly kill programs that were otherwise working, so I’d tell anyone to sort out warranty and repair logistics during procurement.
For anyone selling into government or defence, compliance frameworks like CMMC and NIST 800-171 shape your architecture and your vendor list from day one. Handle that early and it’s manageable. Discover it late and you’re rebuilding.
Why AR is a strategic area:
AR earns its keep with the frontline workforce, and that’s where the math gets easy. When somebody has both hands on the equipment and needs the instructions in their line of sight, AR and guided workflows do something no other tool does as well.
The second reason is expertise transfer. A lot of industries are watching their most experienced people retire, and what those people know has mostly stayed in their heads. AR gives you a way to capture how the work actually gets done, in context, and hand it to the next person. That’s a strategic asset with a shelf life measured in decades.
That said, I stay even about it. Part of my job is telling people when AR is the wrong fit, and I’d rather earn that trust than sell something that ends up in a drawer. Crawl, walk, run applies here more than almost any technology I’ve worked with, and the organizations that respect that sequence are the ones still running programs three years later.
