Walmart Has Trained 1 Million People in VR

Is The Enterprise Moment Here for VR?

Walmart has trained 1 million people in VR. That’s one of those stats you hear that sounds incredible when you first hear it, but then sounds like utter BS when you spend any time thinking about it. “How could that possibly be true?”, you might ask yourself. Well, Walmart employs a ton of people. Incredibly, they have 2.3 million employees (or associates) and are the largest employer in the country.

Oh yeah, pretty big company.

But what subjects could they possibly be training almost half of their workforce on using VR? Well, according to this interview, the first thing they trained their associates on is the experience of Holiday Rush - the term Walmart uses for Black Friday and other holiday-based sales events. They also train on active shooter scenarios, which sounds bleak, but actually made a difference during an active shooter situation in a store in El Paso in 2019. On top of those scenarios, there are dozens of other subjects that Walmart employees are trained upon on a regular basis. As it turns out, for a company that has more than 1 million deskless employees, VR training appears to be the perfect way to effectuate trained behavior. The Company has 4,700 stores in the US alone and each store has approximately 3-4 VR stations for trainings.

Below is a video (sort of) that shows what one of these specific trainings looks like.

Now, it would be easy to spike the football here and say that if Walmart is doing something, then it must be past the early adopter phase and has fully crossed the chasm. However, studying Walmart’s history will show you that it is a relatively technologically advanced company, or, at the very least, it attempts to not be a last mover when it comes to tech advancements. Famously, Sam Walton attended an IBM School in 1966 in order to further improve operational efficiency in the company’s early days. So Walmart doing something does not mean that the enterprise moment for VR is finally here. But it’s obviously not a bad sign either.

(Wake me up when a small regional retailer starts training it’s employees using VR, or at all).

But even so, a statistic like this might make you think that the VR space is ripe for startups. But I don’t think that’s super likely. Why? Because VR is still really freaking hard. There are tons of corporate training software companies out there, but only a handful of post-product-market-fit stage. The Company Walmart works with is Strivr, a growth stage VR company based in Southern California focused on enterprise VR training. They provide VR hardware (the platform is device-agnostic), software, content design solutions, and a host of other features. Striver has raised $86 million since it’s founding in 2015. While impressive, it’s still hasn’t cracked the Cloud 100, or anything like that.

Which is to say the model is still very unproven. VR companies are mostly still in the business of creating content (labor intensive) or building hardware (bad unit economics) or getting user adoption (expensive) or selling in quick sales cycles (VC-aversion). None of those parentheticals get investors excited.

This is not to say that I think VR is never going to happen. If anything, stats like the one I started this post with are furthering my resolve that VR will serve some larger purpose in the future. But I still think there is a long road ahead. However, I think this dislocation between demand-pull and actual scalability / capabilities of the industry today are likely great breeding grounds for startups.

Let’s look at an example problem in the space: creating content for VR training sessions. Today, this can be expensive and overly reliant upon the enterprise buyer, who has no expertise in trainings in this setting and can be margin dilutive for the enterprise seller. What’s a solution? Using generative AI to build VR-based trainings. We are already seeing GenAI build training programs (one of the best use cases for gen-AI is structuring content) in a host of startups, and there are early examples of gen-AI building VR environments. It’s not that big of a stretch for someone to build this and sell / resell to the enterprise.

[Obviously it’s not that simple, but some enterprising hypergrowth entrepreneur is probably already 10 steps ahead of me on this one.]

What’s Next?

Eventually you might have a meeting in a VR setting, only if the adoption of VR in the workplace becomes prevalent enough. In order for that to happen, VR needs to unlock something that you just couldn’t do with any other tool. Maybe that’s training, but I find it hard to believe that training for white collar jobs can be made better using VR. It does appear that training deskless employees is a great use case for VR, so it might be a platform shift for those kinds of workers in a major way. Ironically, while traditional mobile/desktop software companies do generally face an uphill climb when putting their technology into the hands of deskless workers, it might be VR that struggles to get software into the hands of white collar workers.

It might also be required that for a new computing platform experience to occur, there might need to be a better consumer shift in experience as well. Right now VR is really just focused on the gaming & entertainment space - the numbers are rather bleak when it comes to adoption. Meta poured literally billions into the space and hasn’t really accomplished much yet. That’s not necessarily a nail in the coffin of the consumer VR dream. However, it does likely dispel the idea that this is just something that people inherently want. This is not a if you build it, they will come scenario. You need more than just the technology to drive adoption.

It reminds me a little of the PDA (personal digital assistant). The Palm Pilot was the tool to have in the late 90’s early 2000’s for any working professional. However, it never really reached mass-market adoption. And it eventually got supplanted by the smartphone (read: iPhone). A PDA was capable of improving your work life incrementally. But it didn’t really do anything you couldn’t already do with pen and paper. But the smart phone changed work altogether in a somewhat radical fashion.

So maybe it’s the Apple Vision Pro that will lead to more consumer adoption. I am not totally sold on this because, again, I am not sure it really helps someone do anything new or different, rather than just slightly better than phone, tablet, or PC. But it’s another sign that a lot of smart people are pouring a lot of money into a space. That doesn’t ensure success - there are plenty of classic examples of technology investments gone down in flames that had this same characteristic. But it does mean that if there is a there there, then somebody is going to find it. And make a ton of money off of it.