NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Business

You're hired. Now wear this headset to learn the job

By Karen Weise
New York Times·
11 Jul, 2019 06:36 AM7 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Toby Bouska Jr. assembling semitruck cabs for Kenworth in Chillicothe, Ohio, with the help of a Microsoft HoloLens. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

Toby Bouska Jr. assembling semitruck cabs for Kenworth in Chillicothe, Ohio, with the help of a Microsoft HoloLens. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

When Toby Bouska Jr. started assembling cabs for Kenworth semitrucks last year, he learned the ropes by observing longtime workers at the factory. But it wasn't exactly engaging, and he didn't get much practice doing the job himself.

"It's them doing the job, and you just have to watch," said Bouska, 21, who works at Kenworth's plant in Chillicothe. "I'm not really good at just sitting there watching."

But then his managers had him train in a new way: with a high-tech headset. They gave him a Microsoft HoloLens, a device that blends digital imagery with the real world. When he wore the headset, it overlaid digital arrows and diagrams over the parts he was looking at, helping to guide his work.

"With the HoloLens, it's just you and the directions," Bouska said. He said he had picked up his first new task in about 20 minutes.

After the success with Bouska's training, Kenworth's parent company, Paccar, has ordered 50 of the devices. Five will be coming to the Chillicothe plant, which employs more than 2,000 workers, and the manager plans to use them to train employees on at least two dozen tasks.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
The latest version of HoloLens, which ships later this year, will be more tailored to workers than this original model. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
The latest version of HoloLens, which ships later this year, will be more tailored to workers than this original model. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

High-tech devices have played a central role in white-collar workplaces for decades, with a screen in front of nearly every face, and employees' days spent on email, spreadsheets and video conferences. Now, companies like Microsoft see a multibillion-dollar opportunity to get more personal technology, including the HoloLens, in the hands of workers who don't sit behind a desk.

The new push goes beyond tools to perform a particular task, like a clerk ringing up a customer with a tablet or a robot moving materials around a factory. It is meant to integrate the tools into the corporate life of a company, like training, scheduling and regular communications. The efforts are enabled by cloud computing, which makes it easier to deliver information via a smartphone app or a mixed-reality headset.

Google is going after the market, as is Salesforce, with its acquisition of Quip, which makes programs for worker productivity. Plenty of niche tech products target particular industries and tasks.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
A truck cab leaving the paint booth. Microsoft estimates that two billion production, sales and service workers are potential customers for its tools. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
A truck cab leaving the paint booth. Microsoft estimates that two billion production, sales and service workers are potential customers for its tools. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

Perhaps no tech company, though, is more aggressive than Microsoft at pursuing so-called frontline or firstline workers, who do the actual production, sales and service work for customers. Microsoft built much of its riches on supplying technology to businesses and is pushing a variety of products to the workers.

Microsoft estimates that 2 billion frontline workers have access to fast internet connections and are, in theory, potential customers. In a call with investors this year, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said selling products for firstline workers expanded the market Microsoft could tap into.

Discover more

Business

Best of 2019: The 40 most powerful people on the NZ technology scene

23 Dec 05:00 AM
Business

How do we fix the internet?

07 Jul 07:00 AM
Business

35 employees committed suicide. Will their bosses go to jail?

10 Jul 06:24 AM
Business

Are smartphones making us smarter, or more stupid?

11 Jul 01:12 AM

Emma Williams, a Microsoft executive who develops productivity tools for various industries, like health care and retail, said there was a big, open playing field.

"With firstline workers, it's pretty fascinating," she said. "There really isn't a large incumbent."

Technology already surrounds many frontline workers, but many of these workers do not even have a corporate email account, so they create workarounds to communicate. Team Inc., a company that performs maintenance and repairs at industrial sites like refineries and pipelines, realized last year that almost half of its field technicians used personal email accounts and cellphones to communicate, said Tracy Terrell, Team's chief information officer. The company's leaders decided that was too risky.

The HoloLens reads bar codes to calibrate its augmented reality programs with physical objects and spaces. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
The HoloLens reads bar codes to calibrate its augmented reality programs with physical objects and spaces. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

"We don't want to be emailing to Yahoo accounts or sending technical information via text, because that's kind of our trade secret," Terrell said.

Any new tool has to be as easy as consumer apps for workers to adopt them, he said. His company's field technicians can have little patience for impractical solutions, so his team has been easing them into a version of Microsoft Teams, a messaging platform, designed specifically for firstline workers.

It took a year to get everyone to sign up for the corporate logins needed for Teams. And because old habits die hard, the system automatically sends the technicians a text message to check the app when they have a message to read. There, managers in the office can communicate directly with people in the field. Some technicians have created group chats, like one for mechanical bolt specialists, to help troubleshoot repairs.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
A screen displaying the view from a HoloLens. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
A screen displaying the view from a HoloLens. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

More than 500,000 organizations use Teams, though Microsoft doesn't break down how many use the version designed for frontline workers. That version can sync with programs that schedule workers, letting them swap shifts, or only send messages to people working at a particular time.

"There is no question this will work," Brad Reback, an analyst at the investment bank Stifel, said of the push to reach frontline workers. "The speed at which companies decide to roll it out? We'll see."

While Teams is already gaining traction, the HoloLens effort will most likely take years to develop, because of the investment required to buy the headset and put it to use.

The field for equipping so-called frontline workers at companies like Kenworth is wide open, a Microsoft executive said. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
The field for equipping so-called frontline workers at companies like Kenworth is wide open, a Microsoft executive said. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

When Microsoft introduced the HoloLens, it was marketed for both gaming and corporate use. But Microsoft quickly learned that a $3,000 consumer product was not likely to take off, so it focused on businesses that might have budgets to buy them in large numbers.

Microsoft's biggest known HoloLens customer is the military. In November, the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $479 million contract to provide "increased lethality, mobility and situational awareness" to soldiers in training and on the battlefield. A group of Microsoft employees objected to the ethics of working on weaponry, but Nadella defended the contract, saying Microsoft was "not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy."

The HoloLens can help with tasks like making sure cables are connected correctly. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
The HoloLens can help with tasks like making sure cables are connected correctly. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

The latest version of the device is more tailored to workers. Microsoft made the headset better balanced so workers can wear it longer. It also made the HoloLens easier for an in-house IT department to deploy, like letting workers log in to it with their regular corporate account and password and building basic applications for key uses.

One, called Remote Assist, lets a worker in the field interact with a specialist somewhere else. ZF, a large automotive supplier, has been using the HoloLens to help with plant maintenance.

In the past, when something broke in South Carolina, an expert might fly in from ZF's headquarters in Germany to fix it. Now, the German expert can look at exactly what a factory technician wearing a HoloLens sees and help troubleshoot a problem.

Rod Spencer, the manager of the Kenworth plant, said the HoloLens had overcome his initial skepticism. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times
Rod Spencer, the manager of the Kenworth plant, said the HoloLens had overcome his initial skepticism. Photo / Andrew Spear, The New York Times

"You can circle it and say, 'This is what I'm talking about,' " said Robert Copeland, who leads the HoloLens adoption for ZF.

When Paccar experimented with an earlier version of the HoloLens, it was bulky and required developers with skills in building video games to make the right applications.

"The initial reaction for us was, 'Cool gizmo, but so what?' " said Rod Spencer, who runs the Kenworth plant in Chillicothe. "We couldn't figure out how to get it applied in the real world."

Spencer said his view had changed with the new version and the corporate tools that Microsoft built, like an application that makes it easier to build step-by-step training.

Bouska thinks most of his colleagues will warm to donning a large headset in training, though a few may resist.

"Some," he said, "still use flip phones."

Written by: Karen Weise

Photographs by: Andrew Spear

© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Latest from Business

Premium
Opinion

Roger Partridge: The Dutch lessons NZ needs for regulatory reform

02 Jul 09:00 PM
Media InsiderUpdated

Inside the mind of a TV genius: The desperate tactic to get The Casketeers to air

02 Jul 08:46 PM
Business

UK bond rates, toll roads and scrutiny of SOE pay

Audi offers a sporty spin on city driving with the A3 Sportback and S3 Sportback

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Business

Premium
Roger Partridge: The Dutch lessons NZ needs for regulatory reform

Roger Partridge: The Dutch lessons NZ needs for regulatory reform

02 Jul 09:00 PM

OPINION: Dutch workers produce 51% more output while working 300 fewer hours annually.

Inside the mind of a TV genius: The desperate tactic to get The Casketeers to air

Inside the mind of a TV genius: The desperate tactic to get The Casketeers to air

02 Jul 08:46 PM
UK bond rates, toll roads and scrutiny of SOE pay

UK bond rates, toll roads and scrutiny of SOE pay

KidsCan founder on how an abusive relationship shaped her empathy

KidsCan founder on how an abusive relationship shaped her empathy

02 Jul 07:00 PM
Gold demand soars amid global turmoil
sponsored

Gold demand soars amid global turmoil

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP