VR & AI for Training and Human Performance with Alex Young, Virti Founder

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti. Alex, and I talk about the impact of new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence on the training and human performance space, and some of the challenges and opportunities facing companies in the changing world of work. Let's get, started. 

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Interview Transcript with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Dr. Alex Young. He is the founder of Virti. Virti helps HR teams and organizations using things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality to improve and measure training. So welcome to the show, Alex. 

Alex Young: Thanks so much, Brian. It's great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you come from a different background. You were a trauma and orthopedic surgeon before you became a entrepreneur founder. So how did you go from being a surgeon to being a founder of a virtual reality training type of company?

Alex Young: Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey. I mean, my interests have always been around how to improve learning and the performance of people really in any sector. And my original degree, as you mentioned, was in medicine. And then I specialized in orthopedic surgery, working in the UK and also in the US for a little while.

And I've always, always been a bit of a tech nerd as well. So had a couple of companies when I was actually training to be a doctor. And taught myself how to code. Pretty terrible coding skills but managed to build a few companies around that. And then really with Virti, what I wanted to do was build a deep technology company, which tackled one of the major problems I was seeing. Both in healthcare, but also in every other sector, really on the planet which was how do we democratize and scale soft skills type of training for the workforce of the future. 

And when I trained as a doctor and a surgeon, often we do communication role-plays and things to train people really how to be more empathetic. How to be better communicators. How to do things in health care, like break bad news to patients, or explain a diagnosis. And in the operating room about how to make decisions under pressure and lead teams. And often those sort of training sessions, were not very scalable. They weren't hugely engaging, and they were quite biased and not that data driven. 

So, as you mentioned with Virti, what we do is we use AI and tools like virtual reality to put people into these very scalable, very measurable scenarios, where they can fail in a safe environment and run through lots of soft skills trainings senarios whether that's on a sales team training. Whether it's for managers or leaders, to understand how to deliver feedback. Or it's on your hiring or HR side, where we can actually find if people have some innate biases in the questions they ask during interviews. Or how they deliver team performance. So really, really interesting journey and lots and lots of parallels between healthcare and being an entrepreneur. 

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The whole concept of this metaverse and some of the new things that are coming in when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, what are some of the things that you're seeing in that space? How has it changed and evolved since you've started the company? And what are you seeing? 

Alex Young: I think the whole VR space has been on a bit of a rollercoaster. Really, you know, going back all the way to the 1980s when NASA first started using VR tech for some of the training that they were doing. And in the healthcare sector there's always been lots of, kind of, sort of use cases of virtual reality for things like surgical training. But it's never really seen mass adoption. 

And I think now with some of the newer headsets coming out and with companies like Meta, which of course rebranded from Facebook. Putting kind of billions behind the type of technology. We're seeing some of these PR teams like the Metaverse really galvanizing businesses and people behind this idea of a shared space. Where people can go, communicate with others. Practice in safe environment. Or just go and relax. And, you know, play games with each other. 

And I think on the back of the pandemic where everyone was very isolated and teams still work remotely, it's really, really interesting having that projection in a shared space where you can build rapport a little bit easier than perhaps that of over Zoom, looking at your camera. And you get a bit more inclusivity with team communication.

And I think, you know, for us as a training company, we were founded back in 2018. Really under that premise of how can we scale role play or in-person training. And make it more affordable, more scalable and more data driven. And for us, it's just been a great time to sort of execute on that vision and help lots of companies to upskill their people. 

Brian Ardinger: You mentioned you started the company before COVID and that. But obviously we've seen a massive shift when it comes to this change with COVID. And the fact that everybody's now trying to up-skill cross sell, figure out new ways to do work and that. Are you finding particular industries or jobs settings that are more conducive to this virtual reality environment? 

Alex Young: I think it's really interesting, just the diverse views of kind of sectors and categories. Kind of find, you know, helpfulness from immersive technology. It can be used throughout absolutely everything. For us specialization, which is obviously soft skills, I think, you know, we're seeing a big uptake by people like sales teams. Particularly in industries like franchises, where they got to upskill new franchisees from a playbook and have a certain way of doing things.

The traditional method there obviously was doing in-person meetings or in-person webinars and, you know, live webinars and things like that. And it just wasn't either that engaging or that scalable. We've seen big uptakes there. Other industries outside of healthcare, where we've seen big uptake, things like aviation, which again, anything that kind of has infrequent, but very impactful hazardous outcomes. We found that putting people into virtual reality scenarios to be really, really helpful.

So, things like how to communicate with a passenger on an airline who might be rude to the staff. Or, you know, disruptive to other passengers. Being able to deescalate them. It doesn't happen too usually often, but, but it can be incredibly disruptive and cause flights to be landed in places other than their destination. That kind of thing is just great for running people through that talk of repeatable training, 

Brian Ardinger: The trend of VR, seems to be just on the early stages of that. What's holding this back fro...