Gartner recently published their annual Hype Cycle for Frontline Worker Technology, and Augmentir was recognized as an important player and solution provider. The report covers emerging tech categories for frontline workers including Connected Factory Workers, Remote Expert Guidance solutions, and Augmented Reality. Digital Technologies for Frontline Workers This Gartner Hype Cycle focuses on the frontline […]
Gartner recently published their annual Hype Cycle for Frontline Worker Technology, and Augmentir was recognized as an important player and solution provider. The report covers emerging tech categories for frontline workers including Connected Factory Workers, Remote Expert Guidance solutions, and Augmented Reality.
Digital Technologies for Frontline Workers
This Gartner Hype Cycle focuses on the frontline worker technologies that are transforming the manufacturing workflows in which workers participate, while also improving the safety, quality, and productivity of the activities they perform.
According to the report, “The COVID-19 crisis has led organizations to ask frontline workers to work in new ways or to perform new tasks. To optimize efficiency, organizations are investing in mobile technology, including wearable technologies for frontline workers. These technologies transform the workflows in which these workers participate. Gartner predicts that up to 70% of new mobile and endpoint investments over the next five years will be for frontline workers”.
This Hype Cycle highlights several key mature and emerging technologies that are focused on helping frontline worker productivity, including the following:
- Remote Expert Guidance Solutions: Remote expert guidance solutions provide industrial-level collaboration between subject matter experts and remote workers or customers utilizing mobile or wearable devices. Typical features include chat, live video, file sharing, and annotations, which provide visual cues that overlay the worker’s view. These tools help guide remote workers as they perform tasks, and are used across a variety of use cases – maintenance and repair procedures, remote factory acceptance tests, post-task audits, or training.
- Connected Factory Worker: Connected factory workers use various digital tools to improve the safety, quality, and productivity of the jobs they perform. This technology helps connect workers to the “digital fabric” of the business, providing insight into the tasks they perform so that they can be optimized and continually improved on.
- Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality (AR/MR): Connected workers use augmented and mixed reality technologies to improve and integrate their interactions with both physical and virtual surroundings. Through the use of digital work instructions, as well as augmented/mixed reality delivered through mobile and wearable devices, they are able to make faster and better decisions that optimize and improve a process or workflow that they participate in.
Augmentir’s Approach to the Connected Frontline Worker
Augmentir sits on the intersection of these innovation profiles, using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to amplify the value that digital technologies bring to the connected worker.
Augmented Work Instructions and digitized workflows help guide connected workers with visual aids while AI-driven insights provide contextual information that enable workers to perform at their best.
Remote Expert Guidance helps companies virtually connect and collaborate with their frontline workforce and their customers to provide remote guidance and support.
AI-based Operational Insights help companies identify the largest opportunities in improving the skills of the frontline workforce, and helps to drive continuous improvement throughout the organization.
At Augmentir, our AI identifies patterns and generates insights based on analyzing data from connected workers. These insights improve worker performance as well as provide positive impact on training, operational workflows, and quality. According to Gartner, “The possibility of predicting performance is extremely attractive for manufacturers. This is driving the strong interest in ML. ML is an essential enabler of artificial intelligence (AI), smart factories and intelligent automation.”
Our view at Augmentir is that the purpose of a connected worker platform isn’t simply to deliver instructions and remote support to a frontline worker, but rather to continually optimize the performance of the connected worker ecosystem. Artificial intelligence is uniquely able to address the fundamental macrotrends of skills variability and the loss of tribal knowledge in the workforce. With an ecosystem of content authors, frontline workers, subject matter experts, operations managers, continuous improvement engineers, and quality specialists, there are dozens of opportunities to improve performance.
If you’d like to see how our AI-Powered Connected Worker platform improves safety, quality, and productivity across your workforce, schedule a demo with one of our product experts.
