Wearable technology has yet to hit its stride, but as products such as Google Glass become more prevalent, companies will find ways to implement the tech into the daily workflow, saving time and money in the process. Gartner’s Angela McIntyre predicts that by 2017 the field service industry will be saving $1 billion annually with smartglasses by “diagnosing and fixing problems more quickly and without needing to bring additional experts to remote sites.” Augmented reality will also ramp up efficiency, allowing workers to spend more time working and less time reading instructions. Instead, “the smartglasses could serve as an interactive, hands-free “how-to” manual.”
Employees could even collaborate with live streaming video of their progress, and the video could later be used to assess their performances and show other employees how to (or how not to) complete a task. “Given these advances, the goals of corporate training may evolve away from memorizing procedural steps to knowing how to use smartglasses and access key information using voice commands,” said Tuong Nguyen, principal research analyst at Gartner.
