Ben Taylor is the Co-founder and CEO of Cassette Group, an immersive technology company specializing in training, education, and communication solutions for enterprises.
The company utilizes 3D real-time technologies to deliver solutions through animation, immersive web technologies, VR, AR, and the metaverse.
Cassette’s solutions are business-focused, designed to integrate with client systems and improve outcomes while reducing costs compared to traditional methods.
Could you share the story behind the founding of Cassette Group? What inspired you to focus on immersive technology and AI for enterprise solutions?
Myself and the other Cassette directors, Ed and Mike, all come from a marketing agency and client service background, with careers in the agency network Omnicom among other experiences.
Working with large enterprise clients across many sectors we identified an opportunity to innovate digital communication beyond typical websites and apps. We are big believers that digital ‘experience’ is key to not only engaging consumers with brand messaging, but also to improve learning outcomes.
We know that memory retention is significantly improved if the user engages with the content – you are likely to remember 70% of something you ‘do’ vs only 20% of what you watch or listen to. Undoubtedly the best experiences are in real life, but they are not accessible to everyone.
Cassette was founded to create better digital experiences using these principles, improving training and communication content whilst increasing accessibility to broader demographics. Our vision is to democratise access to training and education.
Immersive, interactive technologies and Ai are the best tools to achieve this goal. Blending technologies enables us to create highly engaging content that make complex topics simple. No more is this needed than in the ever-changing healthcare space.
Your AI-powered virtual patients provide realistic training for healthcare professionals. How do you ensure these interactions are as lifelike and effective as possible?
Our conversational Ai solutions are geared for very specific training needs. We are using the technology to enable healthcare specialists to practice diagnosis of patients, deliver tough news, or even to de-escalate heated conversations. Our experiences allow users to speak with Ai characters through any web enabled device. The virtual Ai characters enable users to role play a variety of situations and practice their response.
In each instance detail and accuracy of the experience is extremely important. And feedback from users suggests that realism of the conversation is the most important, not only the accuracy but speed of response from the Ai characters as well as context. Visual fidelity is deemed less important and, in some cases, users want a clear distinction between an Ai character and a real one.
As such, a lot of work goes into the development of character knowledge, personality and conversational framework. Generative Ai is currently unreliable when it comes to consistency, hallucinating at the most unexpected times. This is not accepted in the medical space so there are many guard rails and checks we put in place to keep the experience on track. For an experience to be lifelike we need the characters to know their environment, situation and goal for the conversation. If a player were to ask a patient ‘what’s the capital of France’ in the middle of a medical diagnosis, we want the Ai to know that is an inappropriate question and to flag them up on it.
The effectiveness of the training comes down to learning outcomes. Our experiences track the conversation as well as the sentiment of the Ai character – happy, sad, annoyed etc. We can therefore not only score the user on achieving goals (asking the right questions, suggesting the correct next steps), but also provide feedback on how their delivery and where improvements can be made.
Armed with feedback the user can practice the conversation as many times as they want.
How have Cassette Group’s immersive solutions impacted employee skills development in industries like healthcare? Can you share some success stories?
A great success story is the work we have done with Baxter on their dialysis machine, the Prismax 2 – a device for delivering Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy (CRRT) in critically ill patients in the ICU.
Baxter commissioned us to develop a 3D digital twin of their device along with 10 training modules to educate doctors and nurses in the ICU. The training platform has been translated into ten languages and is available in hospitals across Europe.
Now, in institutions like Thameside hospital in Manchester, Northern England, Nurses equipped with VR headsets can learn how to use the machine in an online course, including videos and assessments of their knowledge.
Through our solution, staff at the hospital can now learn how to set up the machine, input a prescription and patient details, and what to do in an emergency. Nurses and managers can track training progress through an online hub. The hospital says that the VR training has saved it time and money because nurses can learn more flexibly, in shorter periods of time, without having to take days off work for training.
How do you address concerns or resistance from employees or management who may be skeptical about the adoption of AI and immersive technology?
History tells us that with any new technology or innovation there is resistance to change. There was a great story from Gartner on the adoption of email. An innovator was asked to provide a cost analysis and ROI on the use of email across their business. Email was deemed as complimentary to traditional mail rather than replacing it. As such, the innovator was unable to make a solid case for the adoption of email against traditional mail. This seems absurd now but demonstrates how typical ROI analysis can completely miss game changing opportunities, and stakeholders can dismiss an innovation because it is not how things were done before.
Accepting that there will be resistance and skepticism is the first step.
Addressing those concerns requires a tailored approach depending on the innovation and the stakeholder group you are targeting. We have found that with Ai, the adoption has been a top-down approach. Leaders are on board with it, they can see cost savings and productivity gains. Wider employee groups are more skeptical, concerned about Ai replacing them, or concluding that the new Ai tools aren’t all they are cracked up to be.
With Immersive technologies we have seen adoption led from the bottom up. Business units are seeing value in a new form of communication, while senior management needs convincing that it is more than just a video game gimmick.
In the first example the approach was to implement education programmes that dispelled common Ai myths, provided base level training on the tools, and visualised the potential.
In the second example the approach has been to demonstrate the technology solving real business challenges with a data and analytical approach combined with anecdotal feedback from wider stakeholder groups.
In each case the approach is one of education. The messages need to be clear and consistent, and tailored to your target audience.
How do you approach designing user interfaces and experiences in AR/VR to ensure they are intuitive and effective for users? What feedback mechanisms do you use to continuously improve these experiences?
Designing immersive experiences starts with the same question as any digital experience – who is the end user?
However, when designing for immersive technologies there are a number of other criteria that must be considered. These start before we even get to the user interface – Where will the user be engaging with the experience? What hardware are we using?
When designing educational VR training experiences in the healthcare space, accessibility to the experience is a massive consideration.
You can have the most amazing VR experience but unless the end user can easily get hold of a headset and log into the content, it will gather dust. It seems simple but often our content is aimed at doctors and nurses working in hospitals. Managing hardware (and software) in that environment is extremely difficult, just ensuring a headset is charged and ready to use can be tricky.
Any barrier to engagement with the training content must be ironed out. From access to hardware and also engagement with the content itself.
Understanding our audience are healthcare professionals and not VR gamers helps our team to design user friendly experiences that ensure users are learning about the chosen content and NOT how to use VR. Controls are simplified as much as we can, users complete a comprehensive onboarding experience before the training content starts, and visual guides are clear and step-by-step.
Intuitive design comes from years of expertise coupled with ongoing feedback, gathered through in-experience questionnaires and attending live sessions with the end user. Our secret comes from the ‘mum’ test, if I can hand an experience to my mum and she can work it, we’ve passed (sorry mum!).
What emerging trends in AI and immersive technology do you believe will have the most significant impact on training and development in the next five years?
I think we have seen the major technologies that are going to have an impact in this space over the next few years. The biggest impact will be the greater integration of these technologies into business.
For innovations to be adopted at enterprise level they need to be robust. That often means that while new technologies can come along and disrupt the space, large enterprise businesses will take time to adopt and integrate them. Adoption is not instant for reasons discussed previously, as well as general aversion to risk in the digital space.
The immersive technology space is fragmented, with largely a ‘start up’ perception. Providers have been geared towards consumers, without the requirements in place to implement at an enterprise level, whether that be the security protocols or general working practices.
The industry needs to, and is, maturing, producing solutions that are fit for purpose in this space, which doesn’t always mean right at the bleeding edge. A great example of this is Microsoft’s metaverse platform, Mesh. Mesh allows for rich, immersive experiences from a laptop or in VR, fully integrated into the 365 suite, and soon will be accessible through the Microsoft Teams app. This removes many barriers to adoption. Onboarding a new 365 feature is easier for a large enterprise than a piece of software from a new start up. Accessed through teams via the 365 log in, plus experiences viewable in desktop and in VR ensures content is easily available to everyone in the organisation.
Simpler role out to the end user will reduce the overall cost of content delivery, increasing potential use cases, and overall volume of production. We believe this will drive a blending of technologies, leading to training and learning experiences that combine visually immersive worlds with Ai driven content and characters. Think of the role play example on steroids.
The most exciting prospect here is the potential improvement in the quality of training and education. Often, education or career paths are defined by the quality of education or training available. The better the content we can create and the easier it is to access, the more people will benefit.
With an ever-growing crisis in industries like nursing (who are predicting a shortfall of 140k by 2030), something needs to change, and these solutions can be part of the answer, democratising access to training for all.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs or companies looking to integrate AI and immersive technologies into their operations?
Find the time to make it happen. Often innovation or deviation from the norm can take a back foot, deemed too time consuming or expensive to look at. Those that don’t innovate will inevitably lose out longer term.
For enterprise, or any business for that matter, our advice is to always take a strategic approach to adoption and integration. Throwing mud at the wall is not going to cut it.
Start by creating a long-term vision, considering what the business could look like if the technology was widely adopted. How does that affect the business? What improvements are the result?
Then consider the barriers to getting there, potential concerns, and the stakeholders we need to take on the journey.
From there a plan can be drawn up to overcome those barriers and concerns, identifying use cases for the technology to address them, rolling out slowly and effectively to get it right. One poor user experience can set things back a long way.
Finally, jump headfirst into these technologies, they are incredibly exciting with huge potential to make a massive impact. And it’s fun!
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Cassette Group.
