The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Scope AR CEO Scott Montgomerie at AWE Show 2019

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Scope AR CEO Scott Montgomerie at AWE Show 2019

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com, thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We are at AWE 2019 here in Santa Clara, California, and we are wandering through all these wonderful, incredible booths for VR, AR, all that sort of good stuff. And we are here at the Scope AR booth. We're with the co-founder and CEO, Scott Montgomery. Scott, how are you doing today, bud? I'm doing great. This is a fantastic show. Awesome. Awesome. So you guys have this wonderful booth. I'm going to pan around the booth so people can see it. If you do come to the AWE show,

take and come to the booth. I believe it's 213? 213, that's correct. 213. And come see the Scope AR booth. There's actually something cool. I'm going to pan back here. They've got a cool sort of NASA spaceship thing. I'll have you maybe tell us what that's about. So where can we find you guys on the interwebs? We're at our website, www.scopear.com, S-C-O-P-E-A-R.com. All right, Scott.

So what is Scope AR doing at the show today? Yeah, so Scope AR really focuses on using augmented reality in an industrial context. So the idea is that we can overlay 3D models on top of real equipment to show you step-by-step instructions on how to perform some type of task. So that's a really intuitive way of learning how to do something. It's the way that we interact with the world and showing really visual instructions. Additionally, you can call into an expert who might be in a call center or maybe at home watching TV, and he can guide you through how to do something as well using real-time annotations, so drawing on the real world to provide really simple instructions on how to perform some type of task.

So who are your end users? Who are your customers that you guys are marketing towards? Yeah, so the guys that use the stuff in the fields are generally technicians on a manufacturing floor factory floor or even out in the field maintaining equipment and then we've got an authoring software that's in use by mechanical engineers or documentation specialists and it's a drag and drop software that allows you to really intuitively create content so that you can send that out to those workers. So it's like PowerPoint, just a drag-and-drop interface. So can they use it for training, or is it just maintenance, or both?

Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the use cases? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of our customers use it for training or maintenance or manufacturing assembly instructions. So if you think about how we learn, we can enable just-in-time training. If you can show instructions that are so intuitive that you can learn on the job and show you exactly what you're supposed to be working on at any given time, you can just go ahead and do it. You don't have to take time to watch training videos and do

something repetitive so you remember it. You just learn on the job. And I think this is so much more important. I've always been one of those people that I'm not a good book learner. I'm not a good teacher, here's the board thing. It's like, show it to me, work me through it, let me do learner. I'm not a good teacher. Here's the board thing. It's like, show it to me, work me through it. Let me do it. I'm very tactile that way. I've been that way with everything. And there are people that that's just the way they learn. Absolutely. And it's probably a better experience because I think there's a lot that gets lost in book learning where, you know, once you get, you know, a physical product in your hand, especially probably for the business you guys are targeting where it's very expensive product and stuff, you know, once you get, you know, a physical product in your hand, especially probably for the business you guys are targeting where it's very expensive product and stuff, you know,

they really got to know how not to muck it up. Absolutely. I mean, there's that old pyramid about how much you learn. You know, you only retain like 30% of what you read and 40% of what you hear and 50% of what you see and then like 60% of what you do or something. I don't know. I got the numbers wrong, but that's really what we're trying to do here is, you know, we're trying to show you hands-on a task while you're doing it so you can avoid that repetitive learning. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to have to go read a book or do a VR thing to figure out the math you

just gave me. But no, I know what you're saying. And certainly being able to work on products and stuff like this. So you guys have like this spaceship over here. It's kind of NASA. What is that about? Yeah, so one of our best customers is Lockheed Martin. One of the best use cases that we're seeing is building the next version

of the spacecraft, so the Orion spacecraft with them. So Lockheed Martin was nice enough to be able to donate that model. They dragged it out of a warehouse from somewhere so that we could kind of talk about it. But Lockheed Martin has been fantastic for us. They've been one of the sources of some really great case studies and some pretty impressive return on investment numbers.

So they're talking about how they're doing things, you know, 42% to 46% faster than without the technology. They're showing increased engagement with workers. Workers are staying in their jobs longer. They're not retiring. And they're just getting stuff done a lot more, saving a ton of money. So they're having really great success. It's being used in every business unit across Lockheed.

And, yeah, just a great customer that's really on the forefront of technology. So do you guys make a specialized sort of glasses that they wear? No, we're software only. So we're totally agnostic. You can experience our software on iOS or tablets, Windows, Android, the Microsoft HoloLens or RealWear. So we try to enable the most workers to take advantage of our software as possible. Obviously, each of those mediums has different pros and cons. Big glasses are heavy and weighty versus just the phone in the field.

So it really depends on how you want to use it. We try to enable that. Wow, that's pretty awesome. I noticed another thing you've got up on your deal here is remote assistance. And I suppose that's like if I've got a guy working on an oil field in, like, North Dakota, and we're in, I don't know, Tennessee with our headquarters or whatever, we've got to get that guy trained. This probably enables him to get, you know, hands-on training without flying over to Tennessee. Absolutely.

I mean, one of the biggest forces of downtime is you've got this frontline worker that doesn't necessarily know what's happening. You know, he's working on this piece of equipment. He hasn't been properly trained on every scenario because that's virtually impossible. And when something breaks down, you might have, you know, one or two or a handful of guys in your organization that really know how to solve that problem. So in the old world, you'd actually have to fly that guy out to North Dakota, drive out there. You know, we're probably talking about 24, 48 hours, maybe a week of downtime before this guy can actually get there and solve the problem. And when he gets there, it's probably a five-minute fix. He goes and looks at it.

He's like, oh, I know what the problem is. Let's just get that part. So if you can enable remote assistance, we can walk him through what the problem is. He can say, oh, yeah, it's this. And then using augmented reality annotations, he can draw on it and say, here, go here. It's this part right here. This is how you unwind it and pull this part out and replace it. You can solve problems in a fraction of the time previously. So some of our customers are reporting about 50%

reduction in downtime with that. One of our customers, Unilever, they're using this technology in one of their factories. And so the expert, the guy that knows what he's doing, actually wasn't that far away. He was on the same campus. He was about a 20-minute walk just in a different building. But the facility is a clean room. They manufacture food goods there. So the problem is that this guy has to drop what he's doing. He has to walk over to the facility. And then he has to get to the clean facility. So it's hours before he can even get there to even start looking at the problem. Once he gets there, it's usually pretty simple. So just by enabling the frontline workers, the guys that are already there looking at the problem, to have the knowledge transfer

from that one guy that knows how to solve the problem much faster. They're able to reduce their downtime by 50%. Having knowledge silos in a company is really important. Absolutely. The biggest thing that we used to have was always training employees. And usually we'd have to, like you say, have a more experienced, more successful employee take and train the new employees and stuff. And then, of course, they have the database of information where they have questions like, what do I do with this?

Or what's here? I don't understand. And people are more tactile and more visual learners. I'm a visual learner. I mean, if you show me, I can do it. If you put me in front of a book, I'm going to be like. And if you're dealing with complex property and complex machines, I mean, you definitely don't want somebody screwing up a $100,000 or $1 million.

Absolutely. We've definitely heard a lot of anecdotes from our customers where we've saved errors. They were about to commit a $1 million mistake, and because the augmented reality instructions didn't jive with what they were about to do, you know, we saved that mistake. We've heard about workers doing their jobs more safely because they're not guessing. They're being guided through the proper procedure on how to do things, not skipping steps. And, you know, so they're actually doing their job much safer, and that's a great outcome for the workers too, right? Don't stick your hand in the spinning gearbox.

Yeah. Show them the screen of Don't do this. Don't forget to turn off the power before you pull out the wire, right? Turn off the power. So this is pretty awesome. Anything more we need to know about Scope AR? We're just really excited.

The industry has been a long time coming. We're excited to be on the forefront of technology and really solve these problems. I think the world today has a lot of problems. We keep hearing a lot about the skills gap. And conversely, we hear a lot about workers being put out of jobs, GM closing plants, coal miners out of jobs. And we think this technology really has the ability to get these guys back to work, to enable them with new technology. If you don't have to go through years-long training programs and we can give you those instructions at the time of need,

that's going to help these fairly unskilled workers or retrained workers get back in the job force more effectively. There are a lot of jobs. People that are going to need to, with automation, they're going to be retrained. They're going to need to learn new skills and stuff. And so AR software, anything they can use that can be much better. Because like I say, you put me in a classroom of any company that I ever worked with, and my brain just goes, it just melts into the goo. I think most people would agree with you.

Yeah. And so being able to learn and do stuff is everything. So give us the website that people can look you guys up at, please. Yeah, it's www.scopear.com, S-C-O-P-E-A-R.com. And you'll be able to see these guys. They got a really cool booth, their AWE 2019. Come see the Lockhart Martin little rocket ship thingy they got there and it's a booth 213 yep 213 213 come see these guys tell them chris foss sent you

thanks for tuning in we'll see you guys next time thanks very much chris