ARBW #7: STRIVR Started Training Quarterbacks: Now It Trains 140,000 Walmart Employees
Back when Robert Scoble and I were writing The Fourth Transformation, we heard about an VR software startup being used at Stanford University to reduce the physical impact on its quarterbacks during team practices. Instead of exposing them to fierce linebackers during practice scrimmages, the quarterback could actually stay home, don a headset, and immerse himself in a real game previously played at Stanford Stadium. After our book came out, we enjoyed hearing about STRIVR just about every time we talked to a sports team about new technology.
But a couple of weeks back I was blown away when a story broke about how Walmart had begun to use STRIVR to train 140,000 mid-level employees in company training academies using the very same STRIVR software.

This came at a time, when conventional insider wisdom was starting to predict that VR would serve very little purpose other than as playthings for affluent, gamers. While I agree that AR will be the dominating mainstream technology, starting with a half-billion iPhones by year end, but I have maintained that VR has a few important applications, one is in medical treatment and the other is in training and education.
If training is a killer app for VR, then Walmart is the ultimate brand for proving that point. Walmart, as far as I can see, has done a better job than any other brick-and-mortar brand at adapting to online channels and using new technologies. It is already the third largest online retailer (after Amazon and Apple) and is growing online faster than Amazon.
It also tickled me, that STRIVR, a Silicon Valley startup that few people knew outside of college and pro sports circles, had leapfrogged so gracefully into the mainstream. If, a prospect has not previously heard of you, they will ask you who you do business with. If the answer happens to be Walmart, you pretty much have a free pass into any retailer with sufficient budget, or so it would seem to me.
This is important because most retailers right now are having troubles modernizing customer experiences. If there is nothing new to see and share with friends online: If there is nothing to attract young people into your stores then you customers age and you become painfully less relevant, as Macy’s, JC Penny, Sears, BestBuy and so many other retailers are learning as they experience continuing atrophy going into this Holiday season.
How did STRIVR land Walmart? Well, there had to be a sports connection, confirming a traditional practice of people who share common recreational interests elsewhere being favorably inclined to do business with each other. In this case, it was sports a very common shared experience. The twist is that involves the Stanford Cardinals and the University of Arkansas Razorbacks, two traditional college football rivals.

Brock McKeel, senior director of operations at Walmart’s Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters was watching a Razorback practice, when he saw players wearing headsets instead of helmets that were making all the right moves to avoid opposing players who were not there. They were immersed in a STRIVR game and thus avoiding potentially dangerous contact that STRIVR makes unnecessary.
“It got me thinking about how Walmart could use STRIVR for the same purposes. We can teach virtually to make Walmart safer and have our associates learn faster,” he told me, “while lowering costs.” Walmart has only completed a pilot program of about 35 trainees in one of its tech-infused Walmart Academies. STRIVR trained future department managers and sales associates with what Black Friday will be like this year by immersing them in a 3D video of last year’s Black Friday. Each classroom only uses one headset. One person wears it, and the rest of the class watches it on a large screen. It is the same technique that started showing up at tech shows in 2014, when almost no one had tried on AR or VR headsets.
Better and Lighter
Derek Belch, co-founder and CEO, developed the software while simultaneously studying at Stanford for an advanced degree in VR and serving as an assistant coach on the football team. Bringing STRIVR software to the Razorbacks is perhaps the only time in recorded history that a Stanford football staffer ever helped the Razorbacks, a traditional rival on the playing field, and it paid off with what Belch told me was a “fortuitous inbound,” in the form of McKeel’s inquiry.
Belch told me STRIVR has started to see significant business beyond sports and even Walmart. It counts a bank, an automaker and United Rentals. The common denominator, he said, “ was that employees are being trained better in less time and at lower cost.
He also said it was “lighter,” training in that STRIVR entertains where other training tools such as 2D films and text manuals generally bore the students. “People learn better by experience, rather than sitting and watching,” he told me. “I think anyone who actually experiences VR training will realize that the observation becomes almost immediately self-evident.”
Walmart is rolling STRIVR training to all 200 Walmart Academy training centers where about 140,000 employees should be STRIVR trained in time for Christmas season next year. He praised STRIVR for the speed and effectiveness of the VR training. “Everyone wants to participate.” While he declined to predict, he thought STRIVR would contribute favorably to employee loyalty and retention.
Ultimately, Walmart — like any smart merchant — is more interested in customer experience than any other single thing — including short-term profits. What STRIVR ultimately teach staff is customer empathy. “STRIVR helps our managers and associates feel the customer’s pain when they aren’t being waited on in the Black Friday video.”
Retail Armageddon
Ultimately, Walmart remains the world’s largest retailer overall, but it faces an eventual Armageddon against 5,000 megaton gorilla named Amazon.
This may be overstatement, because I don’t really believe either of these two retail giants will defeat the other any time soon. But, like the Cardinals vs. the Razorbacks, they will make concerted efforts to gain ground at the expense of the other on the playing field.
Walmart has seen the importance of contextual technologies such as data, social media, the IoT, location technologies AR and VR and has been aggressively adopting them for year. Last year, it acquired Jet.com, an e-commerce company for $3 billion and Jet plays a role in the updating of Walmart Academies.
As Walmart moves into tech, Amazon is moving on a similar trajectory toward bricks. After experimenting with a few Amazon stores, it recently acquired Whole Foods, a chain of elite supermarkets for $200 million. More significantly in any competition against Walmart is that it puts Amazon into the grocery business: Walmart is America’s largest grocer by all measures.
Ultimately, this battle will be won or lost not online or off, but in which company offers the best customer experiences. Amazon focuses on making it the easiest place to buy and with infinite shelf space, perhaps the only place. From what Walmart folk told me, their strategy will be to provide the best human-to-human experience possible and STRIVR is an obvious piece in that puzzle.
IDC’s Narrow Estimate
IDC last week, has been issuing increasingly bullish forecasts for AR, but somehow, I don’t think it just isn’t quite bullish enough.
It recently forecast total AR/VR sales growing from $11 billion in 2016 to a hefty $215 billion industry by 2021, which certainly seemed sufficient for me, until I noticed a meager forecast for retail of $422 million during that period.

But, IDC only sees product showcasing as a place for AR retail growth. This is the use of technologies to let customers see tagged information on products such as user reviews, or product data as well as 3D product demos or marketing offers. This, of course will be huge and soon, being triggered by Apple AR that should come out as soon as next month when the new Apple iPhone and iOS 11 will make an estimated half-billion AR-ready smartphones by this holiday shopping season. I think product showcasing alone will be far bigger IDC estimates, but then, I’m not very good at counting beans.
Where I’m certain it falls short, is in its failure to mention other ways retail and consumer brands will use AR and to a lesser degree VR such as STRIVR training software. I recently spotlighted CEO Vision, LLC, an AR plugin for Excel spreadsheets that will enable data visualization. In fact there are several promising AR data visualization companies that could someday replace spreadsheets altogether, this alone would be worth over the $422 million IDC estimate.
That in itself could be worth over $100 million in four years. Then there is training, the value of which Walmart and STRIVR demonstrate. Then there is the use of order fulfillment and logistics, that PWC says is already improving enterprise logistics at places like Boeing and DHL which inevitably will find its way into retail stockrooms.
I’m reasonably certain that executive recruiting will use AR or VR the way the Golden State Warriors used it to show Kevin Durant how San Francisco differs from Oklahoma City and how much his future teammates wanted him to join them.
Then there’s mobile software that just makes it easier for shoppers to find what they want more easily. Aisle411 is one of several internal mapping mobile apps. It works with malls and big block stores to let shoppers find precisely what they want by following AR arrows on real floors that guide shoppers to their destinations. Nathan Pettyjohn, founder and CEO told me he hopes eventually to have celebrities escort the shoppers and suggest accessories that might go well with their desired blue jeans as shopper and 3D luminary stroll together.
With deference to IDC, they may have covered some of these numbers in other parts of their report, but I very much doubt that they have considered all of these aspects of the retail transformation that requires a certain level of omniscience. AR is perhaps the most dynamic market in history and no one can really project how big it will be even before this holiday season closes.
In fact, no one can just yet because so much is happening so very fast, and it’s changing so very much. In fact, it is even putting the time honored tradition of Christmas Shopping in upheaval.
