“Customers are happy to have a real person to talk to, to help solve their issue,” says Jimmy David, a Verizon facilities technician. Equally important for Verizon, technicians are resolving 90% of customer issues when using the new virtual assistant.

An estimated 20 million field service workers in the U.S. maintain and repair industrial and consumer equipment and systems, from HVAC units in office buildings to home routers and cable boxes. But the COVID-19 pandemic, stretching into its second year, has accelerated the move to AR-enabled digital tools that allow technicians to conduct field services remotely.

By 2025, more than half of all field service jobs will include mobile AR and other advanced digital tools, compared with less than 10% in 2019, according to Gartner research. The annual market for field service management software is expected to more than double between 2020 and 2027, a 2020 Research and Markets forecast suggests.