Next-generation technologies are revolutionizing the professional services industry. Join Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech and practical tech futurist, for an insightful session exploring how next gen technology will reshape the way we work and serve clients. Gain clarity on disruptive trends and learn how to harness their potential for strategic advantage in professional services. From AI’s immediate impact to future disruptive technologies, this session will help you stay ahead in an industry on the cusp of transformation.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the pro, serve podcast. This is a podcast for founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business, let’s say you’re a technology consultant, marketing agency, or a law firm, you provide IT services, etc. This is a show for you. We aim to help you make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable someday when you decide to do so. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about spatial computing. We might even broaden that to include some other things like VR, AR, and emerging tech in general. I have a member with us. His name is Alex Bratton. Alex and I recently met at Collective 54’s annual conference, and he kind of blew me away. So I asked him if he could come on the show and drop some wisdom on us. Alex, it’s good to see you. For those that don’t know you, would you please introduce yourself and your firm?
Alex Bratton: Absolutely. I am the founder and chief geek of Lextech. Our focus is really providing technology-powered employee experiences that drive career wins for our customers in the Fortune 500.
Greg Alexander: Okay, got it. Alright, so let’s start at the very, very beginning. What is spatial computing?
Alex Bratton: That is a really simple question with a huge answer. So I’ll keep it brief. I’m coming to you via not spatial computing because we’re still flat here. But the idea of spatial computing, actually, if I step back, we’ve had virtual reality. Virtual reality is all about taking me somewhere else, dropping me into an environment. Then we had augmented reality, which is essentially taking what I’m looking at and annotating it, labeling it for me. Spatial computing, and again, it wasn’t just a buzzword for Apple when they put this stuff together, is bringing things to me in my environment. For example, right now, as we’re talking, I’ve got a window of some notes and some ideas floating next to me in my office here. I’ve got my Mac screen over here floating. I bring resources to me. On the office side, it works great. Or you could think of a technician wearing one of these things, hands-free, and manipulating things in the environment around them to have that information at their fingertips.
Greg Alexander: For those that are just listening to this and not watching, I wish you could see what I can see. I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie. It’s a hologram speaking to me. It’s the most unique Zoom experience I’ve had so far. With that as a broad definition, and you did an excellent job of explaining a complicated topic in an easy-to-understand way, we’re all about the boutique professional services firm. So if you think about this tech, which is remarkable and world-changing, it really is. How do you think it’s going to impact our industry?
Alex Bratton: In a major, major way. The best way I can simplify that is, if you think back to 2007 or 2008, there was this little thing called the iPhone that came out. We all had our Blackberries at the time. We knew what mobile computing was. Then something new came out, and we thought, “Wait, where’s the keyboard? This is different. What’s really going on?” In those first couple of years, folks were trying to figure out what to do with it. Fast forward a little bit, and that became the standard of how we interacted with all of our information and tech. What we’re seeing right now is the iPhone 1 moment of the Vision Pro that I’m wearing from Apple, which is bringing that spatial computing thing and making it real. This is just the start. One of the things that I’m super excited about is the collaboration opportunities for anybody that has a distributed team like we do. Being able to virtually be next to someone, not in VR, but having them in your environment where you’re actually working together, no matter where you are, is huge.
Greg Alexander: The analogy to iPhone 1 is a great one. Speaking on behalf of the members and the listeners, I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t understand the implications of that device when it came out.
Alex Bratton: The world didn’t. It was just a phone.
Greg Alexander: But if I could go back in time, I would have been an early adopter and then some because its impact on my business would have been great. It was a missed opportunity. That was 2007 or 2008, so what was that, 15 or 16 years ago? This only happens in our lifetimes maybe 2, 3, or 4 times. Missing a new platform like that is a giant missed opportunity. I just want to encourage everybody, if you think this is fictionalized science fiction, it’s not. I’m experiencing it right now, and it’s here. It’s only going to get better. Version 1 is going to become version 10.
Alex Bratton: That’s the part to take home from this. Apple has never done this before. They’re telegraphing the future of where they’re headed. We didn’t see that with the iPhone, but we’re seeing that here. No, it’s not going to look like this in 5 years, but this is their expectation of how we’re going to interact with technology in the future. We’re going to use our eyes and our hands in space. We’re not going to touch something. The technology is going to keep evolving in that way. How does that change our businesses? How does it change how we work? How does it change how we interact with our customers at a distance? That’s really interesting. They’ve kind of said, “Hey, this is coming,” and we’ve got some time to start figuring it out in the next year or two.
Greg Alexander: Now you mentioned Apple and their product Vision Pro. Tell us what that is, and is that the only product on the market right now? Or are there others?
Alex Bratton: So the Apple Vision Pro is really the first one that’s coming out with the spatial computing side of things. Yes, we’ve had virtual reality headsets and augmented reality headsets. The one thing that’s been consistent about the XR (extended reality) industry has been that, for the most part, when applying it for business purposes, I have yet to meet a customer where it’s even broken even. It has not been the 10x or the 100x that we are collectively trying to deliver to customers with our services. It hasn’t happened.
Apple has really tried to make this in such a way where, and again, this thing’s not cheap—round off, call it $4,000 or $5,000 per person. But anything we’re talking to a customer about needs to be worth 10 times that. So what’s the business case where this is worth $50,000 per user? It totally exists, but that’s the thinking as opposed to the low end of the market, where the problem is the resolution is not really good, and you get nausea using it in some cases depending on the flow. Apple’s taking their time, and that’s the reason I’m giving them a lot of credit, the same way they did with the iPhone. Fast forward a couple of years, and then there was this thing called Android. It happened. We’re starting to see that the Android-based versions of headsets are just starting to be talked about now. So in a couple of years, yes, it’ll be a broader market.
Greg Alexander: Interesting. You know, when we met in person in Fort Worth, I asked you who your clients were, and you told me the Fortune 500. I have to say I was surprised by that because, in my experience, the Fortune 500 has not been early adopters of tech. It’s usually smaller companies who have nothing to lose, so they go for it. So what are some, you know, without violating any competitive issues, what are some of the use cases within the Fortune 500 space?
Alex Bratton: This gets really interesting. The idea is, yes, I’m wearing something, and it’s hands-free. One of the things that I’m really excited about is, if you think about industries, we see this in pharmaceutical manufacturing, with technicians in the field, and with pilots. To train those folks and keep their skills up, they have to be in front of a big piece of equipment. They have to touch something. Flying people so they can go do that is expensive. Shutting down a production line so I can teach a new person how to manipulate the machinery is really expensive. If we can take that piece of equipment and put it virtually in front of someone, no matter where they are, that has value. Again, that gets back to that 100x kind of investment of, “Wow, I can grow my team. I can educate my team without having to mess with my current operations.” That’s a big deal.
So training, and I would call that muscle memory training, not just knowledge training, is something we haven’t been able to do before. I was talking with a company recently in the power industry, and one of their challenges is they’ve got folks going down into very constrained environments, working with transformers and wiring in potentially life-threatening situations. For example, you have to know what it’s like when you’re in a 3- or 4-foot tube. Well, with something like this, you could actually create that environment and put someone into that constrained environment. Especially because it does such a great job—those who can see me, I’m moving my hands around in front of me here—of recognizing where my hands are and what I’m doing. I don’t have joysticks in my hands; I have fingers. So there are really interesting opportunities there.
Greg Alexander: And Alex, when you sell this to your clients or win a project, who is the, I guess, what’s the job title inside this big Fortune 500 company that’s paying attention to this?
Alex Bratton: That is a great question, and that’s one of those core ICP questions that we’re continuing to work on because there are a couple of different folks. I’ll say the ideal case is it’s an enterprise leader who’s got a field team of at least 500 people. What does that mean? They could be technicians, salespeople, or pilots. That’s one of our challenges because we’re actually very broad horizontally. But it’s someone who could see, “Investing in this so I can empower 500 people is worth it.” For those of us as members, it’s a different story. In the Fortune 500, the numbers don’t make sense, so it’s got to be a big enough field team where, “Hey, if I can give leverage to people in this role, that’s worth a huge amount to me.”
Next to that, there’s the head of innovation. Those innovation leads in the Fortune 500 are really looking at how to apply new technology like this. In the right organizations, they’ve got the funding and the business partners around them to make that real. In other organizations, it’s hard for these folks. They essentially see a potential future, but they don’t have a budget. They’ve got to then go sell the concept internally, and that’s hard.
I much prefer working with a business leader who gets it. We have a very deep partnership with Apple. We’ve been working with them for 15 years. They actually bring us into these Fortune 500s. We’re actually an Apple enterprise consulting partner—we can say that publicly. But the key is, it’s the 10 to 20% of the forward-thinking leaders who get it that we can engage with. The rest of the world’s not there yet. Again, this is the iPhone 1. What do we do? Nope, we’re not ready yet. Great, we don’t have to do that education yet.
Greg Alexander: Now I have a business question for you, not a technology question. You just mentioned that you’ve been an Apple enterprise partner, which is quite a distinction for 15 years, and the Vision Pro has been out for a year or two. How did you get yourself comfortable with the tech to say, I’m going to spend my precious resources, my time, and my money developing the expertise in this area?
Alex Bratton: That’s a great question. And it really goes to the core of our go-to-market. We don’t have outbound cold outreach. Our primary is actually trusted partners like Apple, who are bringing people to us. If I rewind 15 years ago, we actually pivoted our organization. 100% of our revenue, which is nuts, had been coming from backend development, web development, embedded software, and a bunch of geeky stuff. When I saw the iPhone, we flipped our entire customer base in an 18-month period to focus on mobile apps and technology because my belief was, at the time, the iPhone is where people are going to touch technology in the future. This is where organizations are going to make their investments. So we started back in 2008 making that investment. For the Apple relationship, we’ve actually invested about two FTEs annually for 15 years managing that relationship. So that’s how much I believe in it. And again, it’s not that the world is Apple-only, but they’re leaning in and really working with companies that want to serve their employees. And that’s what we do.
Greg Alexander: I think it’s a wise bet. I’ll do some pattern matching for you. When I look across Collective 54 and the tech sector, the firms that are doing the best have a partnership like that. For example, some firms that were early believers in Salesforce.com really built sizable firms there. People that were early experts in SEO through Google and had that partnership grew substantially. It’s a proven strategy to partner as a way to grow a services firm. You’re a walking example of that and a brave one because you’re on the bleeding edge here with a brand-new platform.
Alex Bratton: Sometimes beyond bleeding edge, and you feel that sometimes.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, maybe this is my last question. Just to conclude the podcast and we’ll save the rest for the member Q&A. If you weren’t immersed in this area and you were listening to this podcast, and you owned a boutique pro-serve firm, what would be the immediate thing or two that you would do to try to come up to speed on this new platform?
Alex Bratton: I appreciate you asking that because that is my number one recommendation to everyone out there, whether or not you like the Apple tech or otherwise. Apple is telling us what the future looks like. Get into an Apple store, get one of these Vision Pros on, and experience it. That’s number one. Understand it, because until you put it on, we can talk about it, you can look at it flat on a website—none of that matters. You have to put it on. So that’s number one. Number two is, if you happen to purchase one or if you’re able to pull this off in an Apple store, you’ve got to experience what they call spatial FaceTime. iPhone to iPhone today, we can FaceTime video call. Spatial FaceTime is the killer app for the future. Right now, we’re in a flat conversation. Eye contact is what we lose in Zoom. One-on-one, we can do it. As soon as there’s three of us, we’ve got no eye contact. Being spatial means you’re actually standing in the room next to me. We can turn to each other. We can point at documents. We get that in-person interaction virtually. You’ve got to experience that and start contemplating, “Hey, is this something that helps my distributed team?”
Alex Bratton: Excellent. Well, thanks! It was great diving in with you.
Greg Alexander: Okay, great. Just to wrap this up, if you’re a member and you want to learn more about the Apple Vision Pro and spatial computing in general, look for the meeting invite that you’ll get. We’re going to have Alex on to host a Q&A. You’ll be able to ask your questions directly to him. Until next time, I appreciate you all attending, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks, everybody.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.