The Business Automation Strategy No One Talks About

Author

Lori-Lee Elliott
September 29, 2025

But First…Cool, if Real

The trains in Spain stay mainly on the [spatial] plane:

Is Spain really operating trains with VR? Scroll to the end of this newsletter to see.

Becoming Dauntless

When I stepped off the stage at Augmented Enterprise Summit and checked my phone, I saw an Apple News notification alerting the world that 3,500 more Americans had just lost their jobs to AI in a recent tech layoff.

How odd.

I had just spent 45 minutes behind a microphone, taking questions from managers and directors at corporations that do everything from food manufacturing to management consulting on how to integrate AI, augmented reality, computing vision, and wearables.

The headlines scream that AI is killing jobs, but when I talk to the people trying to integrate AI and XR, they don’t know where to start.

Which makes me ask: Is AI really replacing workers at these companies announcing layoffs? Or is an AI Layoff headline just the latest corporate flex? Because we don’t have time for that nonsense.

Hearing questions from those actively working to inject tech into a business to streamline and automate, here is the strategy a consultant will charge you $100M for:

  1. Digitally document all workflows. Ensure you include where data is referenced or created. The more routine, the more important it is to document.

  2. Use your company data to train a custom AI model. If you don’t have enough homegrown data to reliably train an AI model, use synthetic data. If you aren’t sure where to start, Dauntless XR can help with both AI training and synthetic data creation.

  3. Determine where you still need a human-in-the-loop. That is the human you will augment with all the tech.

Now you’re ready to implement. It's easier to figure out how to leverage your data with AI, XR, wearable, etc, if you know where it all is within the context of your business operations first.

Tech News to Make You Smarter

  • Unity Announced a No-Code XR Editor (Unity). This announcement puts us at a decided advantage as we will immediately incorporate this into our no-code authoring platform, Katana Pro. Other companies were not as thrilled as this announcement killed their business. Lesson learned: build products, not features.

  • Augmented Enterprise Summit Wrapped on Thursday. The unofficial theme this year was integration: integrating XR into your org, integrating AI into XR, and integrating XR with the real world. Watch our session here. (YouTube)

  • Apple Continues to Flounder in the AI Race With Secret App (Bloomberg). Apple started testing its own ChatGPT-style app codenamed Veritas (Latin for truth, and given how much GPTs hallucinate, I assume this name was sarcastically given). AI Siri 2.0 is expected in spring 2026 as part of an iOS 26.4 update. Apple dropped the ball on AI, and if the company is to survive, it will likely have to acquire an AI company, like OpenAI or Anthropic. Apple has the money to do it. But even if such a deal occurred, I’m uncertain that a startup would survive inside a company as corporate as Apple.

Saved on Socials

The posts, memes, job postings, and videos that caught my attention this week:

Overheard on Slack

Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…

  • “ I think it’s just really impractical to commit crimes.” - after getting some insight on how much info the various three-letter agencies have.

📸 This is real! This video is from the Railway Infrastructure Training Simulator (RITS), built on VIROO and used by the Spanish National Rail Company.

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