Ep.205 – The Next Edge of CX – Immersive, experiential + Commercial VR with Kevin Sheehan of Cloudlinx

Josh Lupresto (00:00)
Welcome to the podcast. Technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus and this is next level biz tech.

welcome back. We got some spicy exciting stuff for you. We got glasses, we got tech, we got AI. ⁓ On with us today, we’ve got Mr. Kevin Sheehan of Cloudlinx and Customer XR. Kevin, welcome on, man.

Kevin Sheehan (00:31)
Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me on. This is super exciting.

Josh Lupresto (00:34)
So anybody that doesn’t know, know, Cloudlinx, had Frank Wassenberg on a long time ago. ⁓ I don’t even know how many episodes that was ago, but we got a lot of exciting stuff to talk about with you today. And for anybody that listened to the previous episode, you know, we had Brent Wilford on, we started talking about CX conversations and how this kind of stack is modernizing and where AI is plugging in. We’re going to take that to a whole other level today. ⁓ So a little background on Kevin. Kevin has spent 25 years

in the channel, seeing every major wave. We were talking internet, UC, UCaaS AI, and now we are talking about commercial VR. So, Kevin, start us out with a little bit about you. If somebody doesn’t know you, who are you and where did you start?

Kevin Sheehan (01:22)
⁓ Sure. So actually started in technology in 1999, selling internet commercially here in New York City, ⁓ which was about as grunt a door-to-door ex-sales job ⁓ as you can ask for. And it’s been a graduating scale since then. ⁓ Caught the UC wave when it started in the early 2000s. ⁓

We, Frank, myself, our other partner, Michael, we worked for a large TSD in New York City for about 15 years. So we understand the mechanics and the business of channel very, very well. And then in 2014, we recognize the upcoming wave of contact center to cloud migrations that were about to happen after doing one, you

big deal for Five9 at the time. And that was our impetus to jump off and start our own company because we could see what was coming. And in many ways, that’s how we feel about ⁓ extended reality technologies right now.

Josh Lupresto (02:30)
So give us then a little bit of background, ⁓ know, Cloudlinx has been around for a minute. I think people may know that. But we’ve also, we’ve got Cloudlinx, we’ve got CustomerXR. Tell us a little bit about kind of how, you know, what Cloudlinx has turned into, and then what we’re going to really jump into some of the meat of it here of, you know, who’s CustomerXR and how does this all fit together?

Kevin Sheehan (02:41)
Mm-hmm.

Sure. So Cloudlinx is originally about as traditional ⁓ an agent in the TSD world as you can ask for. ⁓ And to this day, we still do a tremendous amount of revenue selling traditional ⁓ carrier services. It still continues to be a backbone of what we do. As I said, in 2014, I caught the wave that was coming. And up until that point in time, it had seemed that I had always been

just a little bit behind all these waves. ⁓ Internet, ⁓ UC, SIP did well with it, but always felt like we were chasing behind someone else. I saw the amount of ⁓ revenue associated with UCaaS long before that acronym was known to anybody in the channel. I will pat myself on the back there. I also recognized that my partner, Frank, had a real particular talent for

building very, very intricate ⁓ RFPs and very successful RFPs in that space. And those two things just came together. And I’m like, all right, this is a perfect opportunity to get out ahead of something and to do it better than anyone had done it before. That’s pretty much CloudLink’s reputation in the channel right now amongst many of the carriers and TSDs. We’ve never scaled to the point where we become an enterprise, but as far as being

a boutique expert in a technology, I put cloud links up against anybody else in the country in the CX space. ⁓ Obviously, that wave, as all waves do, crests and come down. Most American contact centers are in the cloud and now are pursuing a lot of tire kicking in the AI space. And that’s something that Frank and his team are now focused on. We strategically wanted to

continue to try and get in front of new technologies. And we had an opportunity two years ago to buy a small company that was effectively game designers. And then take that, the talent that they had and move it more into a commercial space where we were building commercial applications and not zombie first person shooters, which I think there’s more of those in the market right now. ⁓ And it was very, right out of the gate, was very successful.

Josh Lupresto (05:18)
So how do you, we talked about this a little bit, we talked about the signals, right? Kind of seeing the next wave, when to jump on it, when it’s too soon, when it’s too late. What are the signals that you picked up on that our other TA’s should pick ⁓ up on to kind of tell you about when something is ready to go white hot?

Kevin Sheehan (05:38)
That’s great question. And it’s not an easy one to answer because you can miss a lot. But you always have to be asking.

What are the tools that are available in a greater sense with technology that just haven’t made its way down to the commercial channel? And the reason why I think there’s a gap there is that decision makers on the client side who control budgets around either information technology or customer experience or what have you, infrastructure, security, et cetera, you know.

They’re judged by making smart decisions and they’re a little apprehensive about using large budgets to do something that’s too far out. So as partners, I think it’s our job to be on the lookout for what those technologies are and evangelize around them when we feel that there’s a case to be made and kind of give them the security and a little bit of the courage.

to start not just kick tires, but make investments. And that’s literally how Customer XR got off the ground, is that I really schooled up on what this technology was about, no different than we did with UCaaS and customer experience technology 10 years ago. And then I started going to our clients and looking at what they were doing. ⁓

What are the responsibilities of our clients on a day to day? Again, we started out in customer experience. So most of our clients were originally in charge of the contact center, director of contact center, contact center managers. Those positions have now graduated to become chief customer experience officers. Your job is to connect with our customers better. And technology is obviously the principal way that happens.

So if you look at it from that standpoint, sort of top down, you start as a partner, you start asking, what are new ways that you’re going to need to know on how to connect with customers better, and also how to connect with your staff and employees better? What are the communication tools that would help you? And that led us to immersive technology and using platforms like virtual reality. And you discovered that

Technology is way out ahead and it’s waiting for the world to kind of catch up to it. And I think that’s a partner’s responsibility.

Josh Lupresto (08:18)
You know, entrepreneurs have taught me a lot. Um, I used to think, ah, the sales engineering thing. Ah, not as sales guy. Like, ah, I don’t do that. That’s not my thing. Like, let me stare at a screen. And then I realized, okay, there’s, there’s value here in, translating what people need versus what is out there. Okay. That’s the we can help people with. Great. Um, but I also, what I’ve learned from entrepreneurs such as yourself is there’s a beauty in taking a calculated risk.

Kevin Sheehan (08:38)
Sure.

Josh Lupresto (08:47)
because you’re kind of led to believe that if I take a risk, it’s got to be a hit. And my favorite analogy came from a TA of, you don’t have to be right every time. And as a matter of fact, in baseball, if we think baseball, for example, if you hit three out of the 10 balls that come to you, you can make it in the Hall of Fame. Right. So this idea of just step outside just a tad and take a little risk. You guys have.

Kevin Sheehan (08:50)
Thank

Sure.

Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (09:16)
I think uncovered and kind of stepped into how to solve the future of a new problem. So I love that. And maybe, guess, let’s talk about this a little bit. this idea of what is commercial VR? What is virtual reality? Obviously, you talk about people thinking gaming, but you’ve stumbled into this problem. ⁓ What is the problem that that solves for in the enterprise? Kind of what pulled you in? Take that a little, let’s pull on that for a little bit.

Kevin Sheehan (09:26)
Mm hmm.

⁓

Great, great question. And it’s a really interesting topic. virtual reality, and this is almost the prototypical first meeting I have with almost any client. When I ask people in business, what do you know about virtual reality? I get the same response.

Six, seven years ago, I bought a headset for my kid at Christmas and they used it to play Vader Unleashed. And now it kind of sits in the basement and every now and then the kids, you know, play around with it, which is interesting because.

The kids who were kids 10 years ago are now coming into the work world. And they understand VR because they grew up with it because of the gaming platform. ⁓ Palmer Lucky was the founder of Oculus and he an incredibly forward thinking technologist if ever there was one. ⁓ He ended up selling that to Meta.

about seven years ago because Meadow wanted to kind of pioneer what’s going to be the next level of social media. Where are the kid going to connect? And, you know, it was a good attempt at saying, it’s going to be virtual reality. So their intention with the, with what is now the MetaQuest platform was to create a gaming platform that could also bridge to a new form of social media. That’s where the technology has sat.

for the last 10 years up until about maybe about two years ago. One of the things that has happened that people have missed is that the technology behind the headsets, the meta platform for sure has gotten much, much better. So they have continued to invest in the actual technology, the processing power of this gaming headset. It has now become quite advanced. And one of the things that I discovered two years ago is that it’s capable

of doing many more things outside of just gaming. being a legacy telephony professional, you can almost apply the same reverse engineering to how the phones have come in the last 25 years. Going from the phone on your desk was the most important aspect of your job or your career to

Now it’s a mobile device that people don’t even have phones on their desks anymore. And the mobile device has become more of a connection to social media and other platforms than it is actually for communicating with people. ⁓ So I believe that’s the route that these devices are also going to follow. The long be forgotten as being a gaming platform. And if you follow Meta in the last six months, they’ve effectively come out and said,

That’s the course we’re pursuing. They’re leaving ⁓ their world’s program behind. What was Horizon Worlds? What was supposed to be the VR version of Facebook? They’re leaving that behind and they’re pursuing more of an application strategy on the headsets with a particular focus on building applications for more pragmatic household ⁓ uses. ⁓

So you can see, know, I’ve seen this dance before ⁓ and where it’s going. The headsets themselves now have incredible processing power that allows for developers like CustomerXR to build internal training applications, internal communication platforms using VR for businesses and ⁓ to great success. know, immersive technology has a way of

connecting with people and forcing a focus that no other two dimension technology can achieve right now. So you take that ability to eliminate distraction and completely immerse someone into a communications platform and you build business applications around that. That’s where I’m excited about it.

Josh Lupresto (13:56)
Yeah. Yeah,

there’s a lot to unpack there. I think it’s just this like, you’re addressing this general opportunity of the Darwinism of technology. You know, I’m a big, you know, got got an EV early because I love tech and it was just and I’ve always been a car guy. And so, you know, I had no desire to get an EV. I didn’t care about ⁓ whatever. Those things were not my priorities.

And then I got in one of these cars and realized, my gosh, this thing is like 10 years ahead of the market. This thing is on another planet. and it’s fast? Okay, cool. I’m in. But you think about, okay, that’s not for everybody. And so then you think about how does a product like this, it’s just product evolution and it’s ⁓ how do you deliver the product that solves the problem, but also solves the problem that people don’t know that they have yet and they can’t live without.

Kevin Sheehan (14:31)
Right.

Josh Lupresto (14:52)
you know, hindsight brilliance of it. And, you know, it’s I’ll never forget this conversation. And as I was at a family function, you know, big burly man, Ford F350 guy

Kevin Sheehan (15:02)
you

Josh Lupresto (15:03)
is there. And we got to talking about, you know, EVs and stuff like that. He’s like, listen, I think this is great. And we were talking about, you know, the Cybertruck at the time, but he’s like, I don’t know that I’m going to drive a truck that looks like it came out of Roblox. And I’m like, OK, so the appeal is not there. But he has to buy a, you know,

Kevin Sheehan (15:18)
Sure. Aesthetically.

Josh Lupresto (15:22)
hybrid F-150 because ⁓ it’s not this like gigantic pivot out to something new and crazy and obscure. We talked about, earlier we were talking about the HoloLens, the first crack at AR VR. People aren’t gonna wear that. But now look at kind of where you are with what you’ve got with Meta, what we’ve got with some of these smart glasses. It feels like we’re finally at a maturity level where you’re able to commercialize these and you’re not asking for this crazy foreign thing.

Kevin Sheehan (15:51)
Yeah, this I’ve noticed in doing a lot of demos over the last year with people who’ve never necessarily been in VR before that the stigma is much less than it was probably five years ago because they’ve seen kids using it. People are a little bit more acclimated to it. ⁓ Being a channel guy, you know, I can remember very vividly selling against the idea of putting your

commercial voice traffic over the open internet. I remember in 2000, selling against someone who was going to a Cisco, the first Cisco IP hosted phone system, internal, not even hosted in the carrier’s cloud. Their own EVX is gonna put calls over the internet and obviously selling traditional TDM telephony, just route beating my client, dealing, how can you?

possibly think that this is a safe way to communicate. That’s the way that, as you said, the Darwinistic nature of technology seems to be, is that you’re always going to have these early adopters who are pioneers around trying something for the first time. And eventually, as you said, you only have to get on base three times before you’re in the Hall of Fame. ⁓ So with the maturity that comes with a lot of experience in tech,

I can absolutely assure you that that is what’s going to happen with virtual reality.

Josh Lupresto (17:23)
⁓ So a little reset here for TAs maybe just jumping in. This is about you, Kevin, as a TA have figured out an incredibly unique angle and figured out the timing of how you’re able to help innovate not just customers environments, but you’re able to have a different wedge in that others do not have, a different evolution of a talk track.

Kevin Sheehan (17:29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Josh Lupresto (17:51)
of how to move the conversation along in these mid-market and enterprise accounts in a way that ⁓ they did not think that there was a commercialized solve for, right? So I want TAs to take away of this. Obviously, not every TA is going to be able to have a company like you started, but everybody needs to kind of think of their own innovative way in as to how they can evolve these conversations along. And I think you’ve done a great job of not only doing that,

but stitching it together. So maybe what we come back to is this, you know, we’ve given this foundation of kind of what you’re doing,

Kevin Sheehan (18:28)
you

Josh Lupresto (18:28)
what AR is, what VR is, ⁓ and I guess tie it together here. How does this immersive experience connect to CX? Where does it plug into the stack? And what are these kinds of conversations that it’s walking you into?

Kevin Sheehan (18:45)
Sure. as the legacy TA, and I know this, we all have those logos that we’ve tried to pursue, like those big accounts that you want to get into. ⁓ I don’t think

you can do that anymore by pitching the same thing over and over again. And that’s certainly that’s very true in the CX space. The CX space now is inundated, not just with partners, but with new startups. You know, don’t need a tremendous amount of funding to start your own CX AI agent. know, there’s hundred we Frank and his team. They’re regulars now on the conference circuit for CX technologies.

I mean, there’s 400 vendors all pitching an AI bot now, and they’re all blasting their clients with the same messaging. That’s not going to get you into a major account. I have never gotten meetings easier than I have had by reaching out to a major US brand and saying to them, what’s your VR strategy?

They’re like, great, now I need another acronym strategy. I’m barely getting my AI strategy together. And now I need to worry about VR. But you’re always going to get a follow-up question, well, why do I need one? Because they know what it is. It’s not in use. And most people at this stage understand technology is always evolving. And if they’re good at their job, they recognize they’re going to need to have an answer when the CEO comes in says, how come we’re not

connecting with customers, ⁓ immersively, or how can we’re not training using VR? Because now you’re going to start seeing more and more supporting stats, which are incredible by the way, the amount of time and the amount of money that is saved, how much faster it is to train someone entry level using virtual reality. It’s mind boggling that it hasn’t taken off more than it has. And it quietly is taking off. It just, they’re not doing a good job of marketing it.

But if that’s not the job of TA, then I don’t know what is.

Josh Lupresto (20:57)
So, as you think about, ⁓ I guess, maybe let’s think about timing, right? Like, so many of these things are so important. Some have been too early. We joked about some of the earlier tech that was just like, way, nobody’s going to do this. But what’s changed, right? Is it just the prevalence of AI that’s kind of pushed everything? The dust is settling a little bit? why timing? Why is this so opportunistic?

Kevin Sheehan (21:24)
Yeah, that’s a great point actually. AI is sort of VR’s kind of older cousin. ⁓ But VR itself, the technology has, as I said, has gotten much better. And you’ve had other entrees into the field. you know, this is the Apple Vision Pro. This is Apple’s equivalent. ⁓ This retails for about $3,500. So this is very expensive device.

But this, if you haven’t tried this, you have not experienced media or what the future of media is going to be. This platform has rendered both televisions and, break my heart here, going to the movies almost irrelevant. You’ll never watch a movie like you can in this. ⁓ The MetaQuest platform, which retails for about $400,

The processing power that that device has now is four times what it was six, seven years ago. And as I said earlier, with that, the quality of the experiences have become much, much better. The developers, the team of developers who we have working for us now, who we purchased two years ago.

You know, these guys have been doing it for 10 years. They started out as teenagers playing around in VR and it ignited a passion in them. And they’re now much, much better at what they do. So you have a, you have a field of talented developers who have had time now to get really good at their craft. It’s like any other technology, you know, like goes back, when Voight first came out, it had a lot of ⁓ drawbacks to it as, as, you know,

older TAs will remember. Now it’s the de facto technology that the whole country uses to talk to each other. So with time and passion, the technology gets better. And that’s what’s happening with VR right now. What the kids are making is incredible.

Josh Lupresto (23:31)
So ⁓ we always make sure we incorporate in some sort of probing questions, right? So what are Kevin’s questions to kind of uncover this conversation or just crack in through a different way?

Kevin Sheehan (23:36)
Yeah.

Well, the opening one is almost ubiquitous in that, you ever looked into using virtual reality as either a training tool or a marketing tool? And the answer is almost always no. Why would I do that? And then that is the perfect, know, that’s the…

Perfect answer you want to get from a client because it gives you the opportunity to explain to them all the things that are happening right now. A typical meeting ⁓ initially usually goes with, let me give you a very high level overview of what is possible. And now you tell me, dream your VR dream. What would you use it for? And then let them come at you. And they always have ideas.

Our first business engagement was exactly that with BatFitters, where we said, listen, here’s some of the things you can do with VR, but what would you do with it? literally, they almost ran the meeting at that point. They said, we would love to be able to show potential customers, either at home shows or in-home appointments, a before and after of what their kitchen looks like now.

And then what it could look like, eventually we did this for Kitchen Sabres as well, but Bath Bidders was the first one. A before and after experience where they could pick from our entire portfolio of ⁓ bathroom countertops and finishes and colors and experience what it would be like to walk around in that bathroom. that’s exactly what we built for them.

It was not a complicated project and they were overwhelmed with the success that they’re having. So if you go to any home improvement show for where bath fitters are, you may notice that at their booth, they’re one of 50 bathroom remodeling companies, but they’re the ones who have a headset that can show people before and after. So right there, it’s not just an effective sales tool, but it’s distinguishing.

know, technology that makes people wanna come over and learn more. ⁓ And they did 75 % of the selling on that. All we had to do is build whatever it is that they dreamt. And that’s what we do.

Josh Lupresto (26:14)
I love it. ⁓ Final couple thoughts here. So you talked about the, I think you said, love this, think you said AI is the older cousin. ⁓ So we think about the way that AI, foundational AI models work, right? We know Anthropic, we know OpenAI, we know ⁓ Gemini, but we know them as these, I can chat with them via text, I can talk to them via audio, cool, know, Nano Banana, these guys can generate images and videos, so.

Kevin Sheehan (26:22)
Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (26:42)
How does this evolution of AI, does it amplify VR? We’re not quite to the future. We’ve got a juicy future question coming after this, but where do you see these two come together?

Kevin Sheehan (26:55)
OK, so when ⁓ our business applications really took off, when we learned how to integrate AI into VR, here’s an example. ⁓ Any training application, ⁓ especially if it’s a front of house training application,

And sometimes that can be defined as building a de-escalation training app for law enforcement. Once you’re able to embed an AI agent, make a character, which is what we do. We build the characters, we build the environments. And now we embed one of, think we have 15 different AI platforms that we integrate with. And you can script out sentiment and obviously,

tone, verbiage, stripped out 12, 15, 30 different scenarios into that AI agent. Now it’s almost taken on an organic experience where someone is being either ⁓ trained or tested on how to deal with another person and that other person is a thinking, listening AI bot. Now you have an effective training tool because you

Listen, you can do it 30 times in a row and have a different conversation with that AI agent. And if you’re sticking to your training, that’s how people learn. We have a whole program that’s doing OSHA certification. So we have all 60 OSHA certifications now done in virtual reality with many of them having embedded AI agents, challenging that person to see if they’re actually paying attention to what to do.

⁓ in their training. And that’s how people will learn. It’s not watching a Zoom video once. And that’s the magic that happens when AI and VR come together.

Josh Lupresto (28:55)
I love it. All right. Final thoughts here. So we’re talking about future proofing the future. So this is going to go crazy here. So if we try to look out just a couple of years, what should we be paying attention to? What should we start to learn in addition to what we’ve already talked about, what we should already be doing? And then if you go to one of Sam’s talks in one of our AI sessions, you know, that strategy to have those conversations. What’s next?

Kevin Sheehan (29:02)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Lupresto (29:23)
What else should they start learning about and thinking about future proofing?

Kevin Sheehan (29:31)
Not having a specific answer ⁓ because I spend so much of my time in VR. I mean, I would say VR absolutely is something that people need to understand. More philosophically,

And this has served me well over the last 10 years of my career and with ⁓ how much cloud links has grown. ⁓ Cloud links now, you know, we’ve made the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing companies in America three times in a row.

PAs are overwhelmed with guidance and strategy from the carrier partners who we work with. But you can’t rely upon what the big companies are telling you to sell, to market. You have to always be thinking bigger outside, I hate using the expression outside of the box, but you have to think bigger because every one of those carriers is kind of.

they have a reason why they want us to sell certain things. And I SPFs wouldn’t exist if that wasn’t the case. You have to ask bigger questions. You have to really look at where the world is going and kind of have the character in what you’re doing and your client relationships to look beyond what is the next.

thing this year and look three and five years out always. And that’s not an easy thing to do. You know, it requires a lot of work and a lot of focus, but it has served us well because technology really is like a massive snowball that’s just getting faster and faster and bigger and faster. And like to stay ahead of that is in 2026 and beyond is very challenging. It’s not the world that we had in the early 2000s where you sold voice, you sold internet.

You sold when maybe if you were going to get cute, you know, you start selling storage, maybe a little security. Um, the world is, is operating much faster than that. And you have to look outside of what’s coming, you know, things like robotics for an example. mean, that’s going to be a major industry. That’s going to touch all aspects of business. Um, you know, and that’s where we see a virtual reality and immersive technology going.

Josh Lupresto (31:53)
You know, I love that. it’s not that what the enterprises do is for everybody and that these large, know, Fortune 10s, Fortune 50s, I’m just gonna pick on Tesla for a second. ⁓ You know, somebody that has amassed this fortune that they have done has not done it because they are dumb. They have done it because they are forward thinking, they see a problem, they are first principles, right?

And so if somebody like a Tesla says, guys, you know what? The Model S was the means to the Model 3. The Model 3 makes it into production. OK. They just announced a couple of weeks ago. The S goes bye bye. ⁓ And the X goes bye bye. So now we have the Model 3. We have the Model Y. Who knows whatever with the Cybertruck. If that stays or goes, I don’t know. But why are they doing that? ⁓ One, because they’ve

Kevin Sheehan (32:41)
Mm

Josh Lupresto (32:50)
they’ve gotten to this spot where clearly that is the vehicle that people want. The adoption has kind of come down from this, hey, only one person in my neighborhood used to have one to now a lot of people in the neighborhood have one, right? Because they became more affordable, people understood it, they got comfortable with it. So then for what? ⁓ So when you hear that it’s being done also to make way for the Fremont and other factories to produce the Optimus robot, ⁓ this thing that

Five years ago, you’d been like, yeah, right. This is a sci-fi movie. This dude is out of his mind. And you can still believe that Elon is out of his mind. That’s fine. But what you have to pay attention to is what’s happening and where capital is being allocated. And so to these points of, never would have thought that we would have autonomous vehicles. Never would have thought that we would have, you know, augmented reality headsets. Never would have thought that we will have robots. Who knows?

Kevin Sheehan (33:30)
Yes.

Josh Lupresto (33:42)
what we’re going to have here in the next couple years, right? Robots in the channel, whatever. I don’t think we’re that far off. Like, I’m not a… I will not promise things before they are light years

away to this channel. I just, don’t see those things as far off.

Kevin Sheehan (33:56)
It’s amazing how we don’t learn from past technology adoption that we still have a little bit of this almost 20th century way of looking at like, well, that’s never going to happen. Flying cars, come on. Like, it ends up always happening. often within our lifetimes, ⁓ I had a chance to go out to Cupertino and meet with one of the top executives at Apple.

in their immersive division. ⁓ And I went in like a legacy TI guy thinking that I was going to be, like I’m boots on the ground in the trenches. I’m going to point out all the things you’ve done wrong with the App Division Pro. So, you know, and I said, I love it. I use it daily, actually, myself personally. But, you know, what were you guys thinking releasing a $3,700 massive headset thinking that people were going to run out and buy them?

And they literally, they laughed me out of the room. They’re like, well, you may not have noticed this about Apple, but we tend to be operating 10 years ahead of where we think technology is going to go. We heard the same thing when the Macintosh computer came out. Like who would spend all this money and have this big machine in their home? Technology gets adopted when initially it’s put out there and then the early adopters chase it, try it out.

see what works. They wanted to see what developers like customer XR would make for it. And we’ve actually made some really incredible apps for the Apple vision pro ⁓ because the next version comes and now all those apps translate to that next version. And then the next version after that comes. And that’s how, as you said earlier, sort of technological Darwinism occurs is that it’s technology pulling us along and you have to have

partners and companies who are that forward thinking. Otherwise we’d go nowhere. ⁓ I expect to see a flying car in my lifetime.

Josh Lupresto (35:59)
I mean, you got these Joby Aviation guys, got these EV tolls, they’re buying landing spaces. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s real. And it’s just a matter. It seems like just like anything, just like any investment thesis, it’s how capital intensive does it need to be, how long until we have mainstream adoption, and is it about product one or is product one really about product two, and what’s the means to what end? That’s it. And just balancing that with capital cycles, man.

Kevin Sheehan (36:28)
You know, and now just kind of bringing it back to ⁓ sort of a TA conversation as far as why would I be looking at virtual reality right now beyond wanting to be cool and forward thinking as a pragmatic answer to that. There’s a tremendous amount of revenue that is being made right now by building immersive experiences for commercial clients. As I said,

On the training side, if you’re a TA and you have a fast casual or quick service restaurant as a client or any major franchise as a client, the cost savings and time savings from training staff and virtual reality is staggering, staggering. Of all the verticals that we’ve had, QSRs are the ones who’ve almost been jumping into the boat asking us to build applications.

a very heavy upfront application build cost, which we’re paying out in line with what normal carrier partners are paying out. And then more importantly, there’s a monthly license subscription on every single headset that goes out. We have to maintain obviously a lockdown private headset and push updates. There’s a monthly recurring charge that goes along with that.

So what we’ve been seeing with a lot of ⁓ retailers or quick service restaurants is that there’s usually a small footprint of locations that first do a proof of concept with success then that goes out to thousands of locations. To me, that’s no different than unified communications and that model and that revenue model exists right now. And it’s a, it’s a revenue stream that no one realizes is there.

Josh Lupresto (38:21)
I love it. I love your innovation. Love your edge. ⁓ Keep forward thinking. Good stuff, I appreciate you coming on. This has been fun. We could go for a long time on this. both passionate.

Kevin Sheehan (38:27)
Thanks very much. Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, absolutely. I’m forward to it. We’re super excited about, you know, partnering with TLRS and pushing this new technology out to your community and being part of that. TLRS has been a fantastic business partner to Cloudlinx over the years. And we’re super excited to see what the next 10 years of that partnership is going to look like.

Josh Lupresto (38:53)
Love it. Okay. All right, everybody. As always, don’t forget wherever you’re coming to us from Apple, Spotify, these drop every Wednesday, so be sure to go subscribe so you get these ⁓ automatically as soon as they go out. And ⁓ that wraps us up for today. So I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering here at Telarus. We’ve got Kevin Sheehan of Cloudlinx and CustomerXR. Until next time, thanks, everybody.