XR—short for Extended Reality—is an umbrella term for multiple technologies, including
VR (Virtual Reality)
AR (Augmented Reality)
MR (Mixed Reality)
If you’re familiar with these technologies, you might wonder how they can help you reduce your existing costs. If anything, if you invest in technologies like these, your costs might skyrocket.
Though there is a grain of truth in there, the ground reality is more complex. XR isn’t a luxury that tech-forward companies indulge in once in a while. Instead, enterprises are using them to solve real-world problems in their operations.
If you use XR for operational cost reduction, you can reduce costs across your pipeline. Especially in the following ways:
1. XR reduces training costs in the long run
Enterprises spend a lot every year to train their workforces.
A yearly study done by Training Magazine on 152, 572 US companies with at least 100 employees, found that US training expenses reached $102.8 billion in 2025 (a 4.9% jump from 2024).
The same study revealed that US companies spent $874 per learner, on average, in 2025. In 2024, the figure was $774.
The costs themselves aren’t what’s alarming. It’s the fact that it’s a recurring cost that’s likely to go up year after year rather than go down.
Because enterprise training requires you to fly in expert trainers to your different locations, and train your workers on the same material, again and again. Once a new batch of workers leaves the workforce and a newer batch arrives, you repeat the same process.
You can reduce training costs with XR. Because you can re-use the XR training modules you create for years—often with little to no additional investment. You create a module based on your current SOPs and then deploy across all your locations. For most companies, this is a key factor for determining their choice between XR training vs traditional training.
A PwC study on VR training—the most common form of XR training—shows how effective reducing costs using XR training is. The study revealed that VR training reached cost parity with classroom training, at just 375 learners. At 3000 learners, VR becomes 52% more effective than classroom training.
That’s XR’s training cost reduction with just one module. Imagine XR’s ROI for enterprise training when it involves multiple facility locations.
Then, as time goes on, your strategy of using XR training for cost reduction becomes an investment. It compounds over time, saving you huge slices of the budget you would’ve otherwise allocated to classroom training. At the same time, it demands minimal periodic investment, like new headsets and customizations to existing modules.
2. XR reduces errors and incidents
Workplace injuries cost US companies $181.4 billion in 2024 alone.
This figure is from the US National Safety Council’s 2024 report, which also revealed a breakdown of these costs:
Wage and productivity losses: $54.9 billion
Medical expenses: $36.8 billion
Administrative expenses: $64.5 billion
Employers’ uninsured costs: $15.5 billion
Along the same vein, the penalties for safety lapses have also increased. Updated OSHA guidelines show a 2.6% increase across all penalty categories starting from January 2025.
The time calls for improvements in safety procedures and training methods. That’s exactly what the use of XR for operational costs reduction delivers.
For instance, you can use AR to guide your operators in a manufacturing plant during routine maintenance tasks on the machinery you cannot afford to lose to downtime. If your operator wears AR glasses, they’ll be able to see the steps they have to take as part of maintenance, right in front of their faces, as digital overlays. It’ll serve as a reminder to follow the right steps and, as a result, prevent your operator from making errors.
Similarly, VR helps improve your safety standards. Our work with JSW exemplifies this best. From a single conveyor-belt safety module, JSW has expanded its VR training library to additional use cases, training 5000+ workers across 17 plants.
In 2025, not even a single JSW worker trained in VR was part of a safety incident.
3. XR reduces equipment downtime
Per a 2024 report from Siemens, the world’s biggest 500 companies lost 11% of their revenues to downtime. That’s around $1.4 trillion.
Besides human error, the report mentions two reasons for such huge losses. Both connected to one another:
Longer recovery times: In 2019, the average time it took to get production back on track after a downtime was 49 minutes. In 2024, it stood at 81 minutes.
Lost talent: The period post-COVID experienced a phenomenon called ‘great resignation,’ where a lot of companies lost skilled maintenance workers. This created a gap in skills and knowledge, both of which directly led to the increased recovery periods.
In effect, the chief reason is that companies didn’t consolidate all their knowledge. It was all in the heads of a few workers, and once they left the companies, so did the knowledge and skills with them.
You can prevent such scenarios using XR as part of operational cost reduction. Consider the hypothetical scenario below from an oil and gas plant:
You store all the SOP documents and manuals you have in a central knowledge hub.
A critical piece of equipment trips and halts ongoing production at the plant.
You send a field technician armed with AR glasses to troubleshoot the equipment and get it back running.
Once near the equipment, the technician asks the AI inside the glasses to pull up relevant information from the knowledge hub.
The AI pulls the data and relays it to the operator, step-by-step, guiding them along the way and even helping them if they get stuck.
The equipment gets back up and running. Operations resume.
You don’t have to make a hundred desperate calls to get an expert to help you out. Using XR for reducing operational costs means the critical knowledge you have is never lost.
4. XR reduces onboarding time
Companies understand how important onboarding new hires is. In the US, companies that implement structured onboarding programs enjoy up to 82% new-hire retention rates. The average spend per hire, including recruitment and onboarding, is $4,700.
But 30% of these new hires depart the companies they joined within their first 90 days.
The key here is structured. Onboarding plans that are poorly planned leave a sour experience in the minds of new hires. They might not truly understand how your company functions and how they fit into the overall operations.
Structured onboarding experiences achieve the opposite, but the desired result. Your new hire gains clarity about their role and the company’s functions. It helps them get settled and begin work more quickly.
Using XR for operational cost reduction helps you deliver structured onboarding experiences. XR also helps you standardize your onboarding experiences, so that all your employees understand the basics about your company.
GSK, with the help of AutoVRse, has done the same. We created and deployed an employee onboarding experience that showcased the entirety of GSK’s drug manufacturing process in an interactive XR module. GSK put their new hires through the experience, so everyone understands what the company stands for.
