I've long been a proponent of the importance Augmented Reality (AR) will have in field service operations. Indeed, I’ve remained somewhat admittedly confounded by the fact that AR hasn’t gone ‘mainstream’ as yet in our sector.  Admittedly, if I sit back in the cold, hard light of day and reflect on Gartner’s much loved and generally accurate hype cycle, I realise that’s not the case.

Indeed, the technology that has been exciting myself and others in the industry for some years now still has a journey down to the bottom of that famous curve before it finally reaches a point where it can be positioned as the industry-wide accepted tool, that I and many others have predicted.

However, if I’m honest, given that AR could yield the solution to one of the biggest challenges field service organisations face today - namely the rapid and sudden evolution of the field workforce from ‘Baby Boomer’ to ‘Millennial’ I still things have moved a little slowly. Our very industry is changing around us, and AR can (and I believe will) be crucial in bridging the gap between yesterday’s break-fix world to today’s ‘everything now, everything connected’ society and the customer expectations that come with it.

So yes, I would have thought we’d have seen more urgency in bringing this technology to the fore by now. I even remember thinking the same as far back as 2016 when reporting on a Field Service News research project that showed while over two-thirds of field service companies were embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) only around 10% of companies were exploring the potential of AR.
Obviously, the two emerging technologies of the time would impact field service in different ways.

I’m equally as big a proponent of connected field service as I am of AR, so it’s not that I felt companies should be investing and experimenting with one technology at the expense of the other. I just found it odd that an industry as forward-looking as ours that was actively embracing an exciting and innovative new tech in IoT was essentially snubbing IoT en masse.

"AR is currently being re-positioned not as an emerging technology within field service but as the interface for a new technology stack that also includes IoT and Artificial Intelligence..."