Airwave

RIP HoloLens. Despite MSFT investing $1 billion into the product, it never delivered what technicians actually needed: quick access to the right information. For most industrial machinery, you’re not going to find any useful answers on google or chatgpt. The fastest solution is to call an expert. The next best option is to search through a file repository for the relevant manual. With HoloLens, you had to power up, log in, connect to Wi-Fi, and navigate multiple menus to get to the most useful app, which was reportedly a video call. FaceTime does it better and faster. And while Microsoft teased holographic overlays and step-by-step guides, the reality was that content almost never existed. Instead techs were zooming in on scanned PDFs and typing on an air keyboard. Tack on a $3,000 price tag for a fragile headset with a 2-hour battery life, and it’s no wonder this tech was dead on arrival for field technicians. The best products take the user to the point of value faster, while improving the experience all without needing to learn something new. The phone call is tough to beat. But there are opportunities to dramatically improve the experience. For example when the expert explains the fix and the call ends, the tech has to remember all the steps, or the expert stays on the call as the tech goes through them 1 by 1. Experts will often share part#s (ex: B43DSF-SD23) or other complex nomenclature that often takes multiple attempts to get right. Another issue is the expert often gets similar questions, so they repeat themselves all the time. Solving these problems was the starting point for Airwave. Also, what the heck is this guy even working on?

“Prepare to be disappointed,” the service manager said. We had spent the last five months iterating on the product, and I was on my way to give it to a skeptic for a test. I felt nervous but excited, like driving to a big game you're about to play in. Airwave started as a push-to-talk reboot. I aimed to integrate all the latest tech advancements, including real-time transcription and fast audio transmission over 5G, into the powerful smartphones everyone carried, creating a better version of Nextel. Three months after our initial product launch, ChatGPT took the world by storm. It became possible for technicians to ask questions and get responses from specific product documentation. Airwave went from a nice-to-have to a must-have. However, the field adoption data was inconclusive. It was unclear whether technicians would want to chat with their documentation. Calling an expert or texting a friend when stuck has intangible benefits. Being alone in the field can be isolating, and a phone call can break up the monotony. We arrived at a milk processing plant outside Indianapolis, where I met Bob. He shook my hand and looked confused, as if I was in the wrong place. I explained that I had an app I wanted him to try. He responded, “I don’t like apps.” The service manager chuckled. I didn’t blame him. Work mobile apps often promised the world but delivered shrunken versions of websites that required multiple taps to do anything useful. I asked him to download Airwave. He glanced at the service manager, who nodded. He reluctantly shrugged and began. I started recording. You can watch his full initial reaction below. Building a 0-1 product is hard. You simply don’t know how it’s going to land. And in fact the first adopters who tried Airwave (mostly knowledge workers who use slack/teams/zoom daily) didn’t get it. But when I saw Bob’s reaction I knew we were on to something. I now see this reaction regularly and it never gets old. See Airwave in action: https://lnkd.in/gtC3WXby