As the lead

writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had

ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan

pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials

interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity

will enter The Cloud.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is

Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily

Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and

emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She's Head

of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and

senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and

communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more

about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna

learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit

awexr.com.

Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily: Thank you for having me.

Alan: Oh, it's my absolute

pleasure. I've been really looking forward to this conversation,

because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a

couple times a week? -- on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe

just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE.

Let's start with that.

Emily: Ok, I wish I were

productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there's a

lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events

company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right

time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed.

And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if

you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren't a

failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases

for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all

related to facilitating enterprise XR.

Alan: You know, I've been at AWE

a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It's an

important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may

say it is the most important conference. It's where everybody around

the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building

happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to

exist, and we'd have to start over again. It was an amazing

collection of some of the world's smartest people working in this

technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this

technology forward. What are you seeing?

Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think

it's a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire

industry gets together at that one point. What we're seeing -- and

the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first -- is that

that's where the money is. I mean, that's where the money has to be

made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the

end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every

day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation

people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to

their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of

their pain points.

Alan: So what are some of the

pain points? Let's unpack that.

Emily: Huge one is a shrinking

workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the

workforce ages -- in manufacturing, I think the average age is like

40 to 50 now -- and retires, not only do you need to attract new

talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually

pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn't get you

as far as it did half a century ago. Tech advances, business models

change, and much of what I learned in school, I feel like it's

irrelevant. And for Gen Z, i