Jenny Taylor
Jenny Taylor is an experienced leader in Digital Transformation and Extended Reality (XR) at Duke Energy, specializing in immersive technology solutions in the energy space. She manages teams, product delivery, and strategy, fostering innovation across utility industry operations and training initiatives.
For the magazine CIO Applications, she shared invaluable insights on how Duke Energy’s XR program (38 internal and external software development applications since 2018) delivers measurable training savings and higher qualification rates, while tackling funding, ROI measurement, hardware gaps, and data driven refinement.
● Can you briefly walk us through your role as the Lead of Digital Transformation and Innovation in XR/VR at Duke Energy Corporation? What are your core responsibilities today? I lead all internal and external XR projects, marketing, business development, software development, managing the team building these applications and much more.
● How has Duke Energy integrated XR technologies into its operational processes, and what were the critical challenges and opportunities identified during early adoption? Since 2018, when the XR Lab was created internally within Duke Energy, the team has built over 38 different XR software applications ranging from use in the field, office, DC offices, conferences / recruiting events and much more. Duke Energy has used these applications in several business units across Duke Energy, including but not limited to: Nuclear operations, Natural Gas Business Unit (NGBU), Transmission,
Commercial Renewables, Distribution, and more. Some of the critical challenges we continue to face are funding challenged throughout Business Units who pay for our team to custom build these products. We assist the Business Units in creating and presenting business cases as well as measuring ROI and business metrics that tell the story of safety, allowing for more intuitive training & qualifications, and how to measure full value of these products to make sure they get funded. Everyone wants to use this new, innovative technology, but there is still fear surrounding it (new technology) enough to challenge budgets.
● Which XR/VR use cases across Duke Energy’s divisions have delivered the most significant improvements in reliability, workforce efficiency, or customer experience?
One of our products that has shown to deliver the most value has been our qualifications suites in both the Natural Gas Business Unit (NGBU) and the Commercial Renewables Electrical Operator 1 & 2 qualifications. They showed not only cost savings (time to complete and travel cost savings) but a huge uptick in employees finalizing qualifications and more asking to qualify in XR.
● How does Duke Energy measure the return on investment (ROI) for its XR initiatives, both in terms of cost savings and value creation for customers and employees?
It’s difficult to effectively measure ROI when it comes to XR software, since some items such as saving lives and employee satisfaction in this training vs. traditional training methods are tough to track / measure. Even with those challenges, we have been able to effectively measure cost savings, showing for one pilot in the NGBU, showing O&M saving of $126.50 in savings per user, with a projected overall O&M savings of $500k for that suite in a year. We also do an NPS-like survey that showed of the field technicians, 96% weren’t familiar with VR, and after their first VR Qualification experience, 92% provided positive feedback and 78% of those technicians would recommend this VR Qualification experience to their peers. That’s a huge number as who really recommends training or qualifications?
● How are insights and data collected from XR platforms being used to refine training, enhance decision-making, or anticipate operational risks?
There are several different kinds of metrics that we track and use to refine and enhance these training methods varying in metrics from our Technical Development Team and / or our Business Sponsors. For the Technical team, we like to measure things such as where users might struggle in the application (pause, can’t figure something out, close the application before finishing the training, qualification or sandbox experience), user experience items, etc. Whereas the Business Sponsors that hire us to build these apps, they care more about completions, number of attempts before passing score, etc. We measure all of the above, and more, but specify it to each application, our tech needs as well as the Business Unit’s needs.
● How do you envision the role of XR and immersive technologies evolving within the energy sector over the next 5-10 years, particularly in addressing workforce safety and reliability challenges?
I see hardware being a challenge and I’m hoping that the industry catches up with better enterprise XR hardware options, especially in the area of Mixed Reality (MR) in the field. Software seems to be developing quickly in this area, but hardware seems to be at a standstill with a lot of options coming out, but none that really fit the needs we are looking for, such as Mixed Reality, light-weight headsets that can easily be developed on using XR development software, as well as custom built AI integration and having integrations within our cyber-secure systems.
