ARKit comes to field services with Salesforce

A freshly received nugget of news I wish I’d been made aware of a little earlier comes from US CRM giant, Salesforce, which just recently announced the addition of support for ARKit within its field service tools.

… Sure, blink and you may miss it but the implications here are significant.

ARKit comes to field services

Apple and Salesforce first announced plans to work together back in 2018, when they announced plans to make it easier to use the CRM platform with iOS.

This was seen as significant because 80% or more of Fortune 500 companies use Salesforce’s software.

The following year in 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Salesforce Founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff appeared for an open conversation at Dreamforce conference about their relationship and using business as a platform for change.

You can even watch the video…

Delivering on the AR promise

That relationship evidently continues and the inclusion of AI and AR support within Salesforce’s Field Service GPT shows this.

But what is potentially going to get really interesting is that the AR support in the app so evidently lends itself to becoming a platform for future evolution of useful apps for Apple’s Vision Pro.

The implementation means field service engineers can turn to the Salesforce app and ARKit to measure scan a room, for barcode scanning and more. The software integrates support for Apple Messages for Business and also boasts some powerful AI tools.

Those tools let users of the beta automatically schedule appointments, predict job duration and necessary equipment, provide detailed briefings before arrival at the jobsite, and reduce time spent on invoicing and paperwork.

They also exploit data and cloud services for predictive maintenance and more. The idea is to improve response times for customers and make it easier for field service engineers to figure out how long any particular job is likely to take. You can find out more here.

Taksina Eammano, EVP and GM of Field Service, Salesforce said, “With the latest Field Service innovations, we are empowering the mobile workforce with the AI tools and real-time data needed to efficiently handle jobs and offload time-consuming administrative tasks, so they can focus on their craft, deliver great service, and generate revenue for their companies.”

Think about the future of Vision Pro

Not only this, but moving forward to Vision Pro, the new Salesforce software may well hint at a time when a field service engineer wearing those AR systems will be able to enter a room, look around, and be guided to the precise system or machine that needs repairing.

As they do, the AI will help them choose the right tools, identify the correct problem, and access the appropriate field service manuals to get the job done safely and well.

Navigation in sometimes complex workplace environments should also be improved by these things, which will be able to offer up on screen directions and prompts to get you to where you are going.

Most of these technologies already exist, but what the Salesforce software suggests is that the clock is now ticking rapidly on when these kinds of applications of those tech solutions become mainstream. Probably just in time for Vision Pro 2.

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