Lenovo’s Vishal Shah on XR Training: Faster Practice, Confidence and Cost Trade-offs

Extended reality training promises a practical advantage: employees can rehearse demanding tasks in settings that resemble their jobs, without the cost or consequences of mistakes in a live workplace. Lenovo XR and Metaverse General Manager Vishal Shah argues that this format can improve confidence and training speed, though the business case depends on upfront investment, usable software and support for employees with different levels of familiarity.

XR combines augmented reality (AR), which places digital information in a physical setting, and virtual reality (VR), which immerses a user in a simulated environment. Shah leads Lenovo’s XR practice, overseeing product management, operations and sales. He brings more than 20 years of experience developing consumer electronics, software and cloud services in the mobile industry.

Practice in a controlled setting

Shah sees training as one of the clearest workplace uses for AR and VR. A simulated environment can let employees repeat relevant tasks, build practical skills and encounter scenarios that would be difficult, expensive or risky to reproduce during ordinary instruction. AR can add guidance to a real setting; VR can create a wholly simulated one.

The approach applies to both procedural and interpersonal skills. A quick service restaurant, for example, can use a virtual restaurant shift to help a new employee prepare for a busy service before meeting customers. Medical professionals can rehearse the use of equipment such as defibrillators or practice surgical procedures. In each case, trainees can repeat the exercise and learn from errors without exposing customers, patients or equipment to the consequences of a beginner’s mistake.

For soft skills, Shah describes scenarios in which employees practice difficult customer conversations with AI enabled avatars that can become increasingly lifelike. That gives trainers a way to expose staff to challenging interactions while keeping the practice environment controlled. The quality of those exercises will depend on how well the scenarios reflect actual work, but the format can make repetition easier to arrange.

Shah cites data from PwC indicating that XR training can deliver soft skills training up to four times faster than classroom instruction. The same figures show learners were 275% more confident applying skills learned in XR, and that workplace injury risk can be reduced by up to 43%. These are reported results, not a guarantee that every training program or job will see the same effects.

What the performance figures show

PwC’s study compared “V-learn,” its term for virtual reality based employee training, with classroom and e-learning formats. Participants who trained in VR reported up to 275% more confidence applying what they learned. PwC described that as a 40% improvement over classroom training and a 35% improvement over e-learning.

The study also found V-learners were up to four times more focused than e-learners. They completed training on average four times faster than classroom learners and 1.5 times faster than e-learners. For organizations weighing XR, these measures point to potential gains in attention and time to completion alongside the confidence results.

Those figures don’t settle questions about retention, transfer to real work or the total cost of building and maintaining training content. They do, however, give employers concrete outcomes to track when testing XR: completion time, learner confidence, task performance and safety. Shah’s case is strongest where practice is repeatable and mistakes in a real setting carry meaningful costs.

Cost and adoption remain the hurdles

Shah identifies high equipment costs, limited compatibility with enterprise software and a shortage of easy-to-adopt XR applications as past barriers to broader use. Lenovo sells the ThinkReality A3 AR headset and ThinkReality VRX headset for enterprise settings. Shah also says that no single company will build the metaverse, and frames collaboration across the industry as part of expanding the platform.

For employers, hardware is only one part of the purchase. The business needs suitable training content, compatibility with existing systems and a plan for getting employees comfortable with the equipment. XR requires an initial investment, Shah acknowledges, but he expects it could reduce training costs over time and make reskilling more efficient. Companies in the US spend upward of $1,000 per person each year on employee training, according to the figure he cites.

That makes the financial case dependent on whether faster or more effective instruction offsets the expense of headsets, content and rollout. A simulated lesson may be most useful when it can be reused across many employees or when a task is hard to teach safely through observation alone. Employers will need to assess those conditions in their own programs.

Workforce pressure and different learning curves

Shah links XR training to the challenge of replacing retiring skilled workers and supporting distributed teams. He points to a Korn Ferry estimate that more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled by 2030 because of a shortage of skilled workers. The report estimates that, if left unchecked, the shortfall could mean about $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue in 2030.

In that context, Shah sees XR as one tool for helping employees learn and work more efficiently. It can offer remote teams a shared practice environment and help preserve repeatable instruction as experienced workers leave. The technology doesn’t replace expertise or solve a skills shortage on its own; its value depends on whether training maps to the work employees actually need to do.

Adoption may also vary by age and experience. Shah says Gen Z workers, whom he describes as digital natives, may be comfortable with connected devices and immersive interfaces. Older workers, including Boomers, may need more time and support. Employers should account for that learning curve when planning rollouts, since different groups may require different amounts of instruction and assistance.

Generative AI could shorten development cycles

Shah expects generative AI to affect XR by speeding up the creation of applications and training content. He says projects that once took months or more than a year can now be completed in hours, days or weeks using AI enabled no-code and low-code tools. Those tools could make XR software less costly to develop and broaden the range of available training applications as headset hardware improves.

The next test is whether faster development produces simulations that are accurate enough to teach real tasks and easy enough for organizations to maintain. For employers considering XR, the practical question is whether a specific training need justifies the equipment and rollout effort—and whether learners can demonstrate better performance after practice.