Though Apple Vision Pro’s marketing emphasizes consumer use cases – such as immersive entertainment through massive virtual screens – practical adoption in its early days is enterprise-weighted. You could mostly guess that by simply looking at the device’s $3,500 price tag.
As we noted in AVP’s launch-day analysis, enterprise adoption includes developers. The device is essentially an expensive dev kit. Developers want to start building muscles for the design language and native user experiences that will shine on Vision Pro. TikTok is one best-practices example so far.
And this is what Apple wants. Though consumer use cases are sexier – classic Apple marketing – it wants developers to gain native footing. The company knows that a scaled and crowdsourced developer ecosystem will engender all the apps that help sell AVP. The same cycle happened with the iPhone.
Beyond developers, the other enterprise use cases starting to gain traction involve productivity and design collaboration. These are the very use cases that the broader AR and VR worlds have used as lifeboats as they wait for consumer markets to develop. Enterprises are less cost (and style) sensitive.
Show Rather than Tell
Supporting this theory is Apple’s latest press release that plays up some of these enterprise productivity use cases. They include everything from team collaboration to workplace productivity through floating virtual monitors (if you’re into that sort of thing) and immersive training. Here’s a fuller list from Apple.
Customized Workspaces for Productivity
SAP Analytics Cloud helps streamline the process of gathering, integrating, analyzing, and presenting data-driven insights to enhance business decision-making. On Apple Vision Pro, the app enables employees and executives to access their data dashboard and arrange business workflows, apps, and cards in their space. They can also drill down into the data with contextual 3D maps and graphics.
Microsoft 365 productivity apps (including Copilot AI assistance) on Vision Pro are meant to help users get more done. This includes a “focus mode” in Word, immersive data and slideshows in Excel and PowerPoint; and fast switching between meetings, chats, and shared content in Teams.
Webex by Cisco offers meetings that fill the space around the user and tap into AVP’s native Personas and Spatial Audio to make the experience feel more natural.
Zoom also has a native Vision Pro experience that likewise taps into immersive audio and video.
Box’s Vision Pro app brings file management into a 3D environment, which is useful for things like 3D product models and remote design collaboration.
Design and Collaboration
The Porsche Race Engineer app helps Porsche race engineers collaborate on real-time decisions such as car performance, track conditions, and driver vitals.
NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs let developers stream large 3D engineering and simulation data sets from the cloud to Apple Vision Pro. The high-resolution displays enable detailed and immersive renderings that can be viewed and/or manipulated in real time.
Lowe’s Style Studio lets in-store customers work with kitchen design consultants to visualize and design their new kitchen.
JigSpace’s Vision Pro experience lets users share and examine 3D models together, which has applicability in product design, engineering, and education.
EnBW (Energie Baden-Württemberg AG) uses Vision Pro to visualize renewable energy infrastructure projects including vehicle charging stations, wind turbines, and solar farms.
Training and Simulation
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines uses Vision Pro to improve technical maintenance and airline operations. The Engine Shop app lets technicians train in simulated environments. This immersive learning reduces errors through greater spatial understanding while saving time and speeding up plane turnaround times.
Taqtile Manifest makes digital work instructions more dimensional and line-of-sight. It also makes them more interactive and actionable through AVP’s native inputs (glance or hand gesture).
PTC’s Onshape Vision app elevates the ways product designers and engineers can view, interact with, and collaborate on complex 3D models.
Guided Work
FireOps app, developed by About Objects and DigitalCM, uses AVPs infinite canvas for a unified operational view of incident action plans. This enhances coordination and decision-making.
TeamViewer Spatial Support enables remote experts and service technicians on the ground to troubleshoot repair and maintenance processes with greater interactivity and speed.
BILT supports 3D interactive instructions for things like product repair. This includes voice, text, and animated guidance.
Will Enterprise Device Management Boost Vision Pro Adoption?
AVP for SMBs
Stepping back, all the above begs questions about SMB adoption. How will that subset of the enterprise world embrace Vision Pro? Apple knows it has to reduce friction for SMBs, which can be seen in its device-management moves. It wants to take headaches and risk out of the equation for businesses.
Specifically, as we recently examined, Apple will include Vision Pro in the existing enterprise device management program (think: Apple Care for enterprise). This lets businesses manage Vision Pro in the same workflows they currently use for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and wearables like Watch and AirPods.
This includes support, repair, and easy employee onboarding. Businesses can also remotely wipe devices in the case of loss or theft. Apple knows all of this will be required to get SMBs over the adoption hump, as it can ease uncertainty and de-risk the decision to adopt an unproven technology.
Either way, Vision Pro’s adoption curve (and its learning curve) will be long and winding. Apple realizes that and is playing a long game. Enterprise adoption will be similar to past technologies in that we’ll see early adopters – using the device in many of the above ways – then decades of trickling SMB adoption.
