BROADCASTS.com

You may not immediately think of XR technologies when you think of Nestl\xe9, who are more likely to conjure the idea of milk chocolate and bottled water. But their immersive technology lead Richard Hess drops by to explain how even a food company like Nestl\xe9 can benefit from embracing emerging tech, on the 100th episode of the XR for Business podcast.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Hey, everyone. Alan\nSmithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we\u2019re speaking\nwith Richard Hess, the immersive experience lead at the massive\nmulti-national Nestl\xe9, making a billion products a year. A day, he\nsaid, but I don\u2019t know, a lot of products. You have them on your\nshelf, you have them in your fridge. We\u2019re gonna be speaking with\nRich about Nestl\xe9\u2019s VR and AR efforts in marketing, sales,\nenterprise solutions, and training. All that and more on the XR for\nBusiness Podcast. Rich, welcome to the show, my friend.\n\n\n\nRichard: Hey, Alan. Thanks for\nhaving me.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s my absolute pleasure.\nYou and I have spent a lot of time kind of talking over the phone,\nbut also spending some time on a panel at AWB.\n\n\n\nRichard: Yeah, that\u2019s right.\nYeah, we\u2019ve crossed paths a few times. I\u2019m just happy to be here, to\ntalk a little bit about what we\u2019re doing at Nestl\xe9.\n\n\n\nAlan: We\u2019re super excited. Why\ndon\u2019t you make an introduction to you, and what you\u2019re doing in XR\nwith Nestl\xe9?\n\n\n\nRichard: Sure. So for myself,\nI\u2019ve been with Nestl\xe9 for about 10 years now. First based out of the\nUS, working for our waters division there. Mostly supporting digital\nmarketing on the technology side. If you go back 10 years ago, the\nmobile phone was becoming big, people were starting looking at social\nmedia as a way to communicate. Through that journey around three\nyears ago, spent about a year in San Francisco, starting with our\ninnovation outpost that we have out there, looking at emerging\ntechnologies. And that\u2019s kind of where I gained a passion for\naugmented/virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, whatever\nkind of acronym comes in the space there. \n\n\n\n\nAlan: Realities? All the Rs?\n\n\n\nRichard: All the realities.\nYeah. [laughs]\n\n\n\nAlan: I actually wrote an\narticle \u2014 you can find it on LinkedIn \u2014 it\u2019s called \u201cThe ABCs\nof R\u201d.\n\n\n\nRichard: Oh yeah, there we go.\nThat\u2019s good, I got to take a look at that. But yeah, that\u2019s when I\nstarted getting a bit more hands on from my under the organization of\ngetting \u201cOkay, I\u2019ve seen a lot of tangible use cases.\u201d And\naround a little more than two years ago I came over here to\nBarcelona, where Nestl\xe9 has set up this global digital hub, that was\nmostly \u2014 at the time \u2014 looking more marketing and sales focused on\nhow do we build centralized global platforms, and products, and\nservices that can serve all of our markets and brands across the\nworld, but now is more holistic across all different use cases,\nwhether it\u2019s in the factories, supply chain, HR etc. It\u2019s kind of\nlooking across the whole spectrum. So the past two to three years or\nso, I\u2019ve been looking at augmented/virtual reality in that way of how\ndo we take all these little different one-off experiences that we\u2019ve\ndone. And when we see a lot of tangible value in leveraging these\ntechnologies, we try to bring them to scale in something that is a\nfull industrialized product, that the rest of the organization can\ntake advantage of.\n\n\n\nAlan: Let\u2019s give an example of\none that you did a pilot, you realized the success of it and now\nyou\u2019re going\u2013\n\n\n\nRichard: Well, I think a really\ngood example \u2014 and