Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in Strivr, a leading provider of virtual reality-based, immersive learning and training solutions for enterprises.
Based in Santa Clara, California, Strivr has trained more than one million workers at some of the world’s largest companies using its proven, proprietary immersive learning platform. Strivr’s VR training platform helps enterprises increase the efficiency and efficacy of their employee skilling and upskilling initiatives, while also delivering data-driven insights that further inform and enhance their broader enterprise talent development efforts.
“The projected global shortfall of workers’ technical skills due to exponential technology and industry changes, combined with increased employee retention challenges and the ineffectiveness of conventional training methods, has created enormous opportunity for the advancement of immersive learning,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director of Accenture Ventures. “We anticipate that global demand for Strivr’s VR-based learning solutions will increase as employers look for ways to more effectively upskill, engage and retain their increasingly remote workforces. In fact, immersive learning is a terrific way for employers to begin leveraging the power of the metaverse continuum.”
As the core capabilities needed for workers across industries change and new skills are increasingly required, more than one billion workers are expected to need reskilling by the year 2030, according to research from The World Economic Forum. A recent Accenture study found that 90% of executives believe that their existing training methods need to be more effective and efficient, and 94% of workers indicated they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. Immersive learning using extended reality (XR) technologies offers opportunities for employees to participate in “hands-on” learning that has been shown to lead to greater learning retention.
“Like many disruptive technologies in the enterprise, VR training is rewriting the rules on how to calculate the impact of corporate training’s fusion with experiential learning,” said Derek Belch, founder and CEO of Strivr. “Using quantitative and qualitative data from Strivr’s enterprise-scale deployments across millions of VR training sessions, we are demonstrating the value of VR from hiring, to onboarding, to training and development. We’re confident that combining our platform with the depth and breadth of Accenture’s learning organization will create new opportunities to show the power of VR-based immersive learning in elevating workforce performance.”
Accenture recently announced the launch of the Accenture Metaverse Continuum business group, which combines metaverse-skilled professionals and market-leading capabilities in customer experience, digital commerce, extended reality, blockchain, digital twins, artificial intelligence and computer vision to help clients design, execute and accelerate their metaverse journeys. As shared in the Accenture Technology Vision 2022 report, entitled “Meet Me in the Metaverse: The Continuum of Technology and Experience Reshaping Business,” the metaverse continuum is a spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities and business models that will transform nearly every aspect of life and business in the next decade and beyond.
Strivr is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on investing in companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. In addition to funding, Project Spotlight connects emerging technology software startups with the Global 2000 to fill strategic innovation gaps, and offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and enterprise clients, helping startups harness human creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
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