How companies like Kenworth, ZF, and Team Inc., are using HoloLens and Microsoft Teams for employee training, and communication with frontline workers
Karen Weise / New York Times : Tweets: @shiraovide , @sub8u , and @shiraovide Tweets: Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : Maybe Google Glass or other consumer AR will eventually be a bigger deal for technology, but the HoloLens strategic positioning was very, very savvy. https://twitter.com/... Subrahmanyam Kvj / @sub8u : Some tech is best suited for enterprise applications than consumer markets. No issues around how clumsy it looks, or how limited its feature-set is. The case of Microsoft HoloLens is instructive in this regard. Good read. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : I will never not be amazed that Google Glass was a ridiculed consumer tech flop while Microsoft quietly went after industrial/commercial applications for HoloLens, and look. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands five months after Microsoft repositioned HoloLens entirely around the enterprise: the $3,500 ARM-powered HoloLens 2 shipped with lighter hardware, double the field of view, and Azure-tied subscription bundles starting at $125/month. The Kenworth, ZF, and Team Inc. deployments are the customer proof for that pivot — headsets doing guided training and remote-expert sessions over Microsoft Teams on factory floors, not living rooms.
The strategic logic was visible years earlier: consumer smartglasses stumbled with Google Glass, while Apple and Google chose to put AR in phones and software rather than sell expensive headsets. Microsoft took the opposite bet, and this reporting tests whether real industrial workflows can carry it.
First-order effects
- Kenworth, ZF, and Team Inc. frontline workers get hands-free instruction and remote expert assistance through HoloLens paired with Teams, replacing travel-heavy or paper-based training workflows.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft gains reference customers that make the $125/month Azure-bundled HoloLens 2 subscriptions sellable to other manufacturers, pushing rivals like Apple and Google to justify their software-only AR roadmaps against a working enterprise alternative.
Third-order effects
- If industrial adoption holds, AR splits into two durable markets — cheap consumer phone-based AR versus costly enterprise headsets — though the later record complicates the thesis: by 2022 the WSJ found Microsoft had spurned its early AR lead and ceded ground to Meta, blaming underinvestment, so enterprise demand alone did not guarantee headset leadership.
The trend: Enterprise and industrial workloads are emerging as the near-term proving ground for AR headsets, even as consumer AR waits on cheaper, better hardware.