The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

Helping Enterprises Remove Barriers for Adopting AI and XR - Shelley Peterson

• Nathan C Bowser • Season 1 • Episode 40

Share episode

Meet the humble leader who used AR to send women to the moon and saved millions along the way! (And that's just one of the impressive things she's done with XR and AI!) Shelley Peterson is the founder of Wizard Wells and a pioneering leader in applying augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and AI to solve real-world enterprise problems. 

Drawing from her deep experience in aerospace and immersive tech, Shelley focuses on removing barriers to adoption so organizations can harness these tools for measurable impact.

Key Takeaways:

  • Bridging the Gap: Shelley helps enterprises move XR and AI initiatives from pilot experiments to full-scale deployment, addressing both technical and organizational hurdles.
  • User-Centered Design: Successful adoption starts by understanding the needs of frontline workers, creating intuitive tools that integrate seamlessly into their workflows.
  • Proof Through Value: She advises starting with a specific, high-impact use case to generate measurable ROI — building momentum and internal champions for broader rollout.
  • Change Management: Technology alone is not the answer; leadership buy-in, training, and cultural readiness are critical for lasting transformation.

Her mission with Wizard Wells is to demystify emerging tech for leaders, help them identify where these tools can solve real problems, and remove the friction points that keep innovations stuck in “pilot purgatory.”

About Shelley Peterson, Wizard Wells 

Shelley Peterson is a pioneer in the XR industry, with decades of experience demonstrating the power of immersive technology across civil, commercial, and defense programs, including Lockheed Martin’s space initiatives. As a former Director in Microsoft’s Mixed Reality organization, she developed strategies to drive ROI and impactful outcomes for industry, government, and education.

Shelley’s career began early—earning her mathematics and physics degree young and teaching college math at just 20. She went on to lead innovations in military aircraft training, electronic warfare, and satellite systems, and today serves on the Barbara Bush Foundation Technology Advisory Board, the AWE Advisory Committee, SMU's Advisory Council, and the HarvardXR Advisory Board.

Her work has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal, and she continues to inspire the next generation through STEM outreach.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Nathan C:

Hello and welcome to The Glow Up! Fabulous conversations with innovative minds. I'm Nathan C and today I'm talking with Shelley Peterson, founder of Wizard Wells. Thanks for joining.

Shelley Peterson:

Thank you, Nathan!

Nathan C:

Could you introduce yourself and the work you do at Wizard Wells for those who may not know you yet at The Glow Up?

Shelley Peterson:

Sure. I'm Shelley Peterson. I'm the founder of Wizard Wells. I started this organization a couple of years ago, to help companies who are working in the XR and AI and emerging tech spaces, or for companies who are looking to bring the technologies in. So if there's barriers to bringing in the capabilities for companies large or small, I come in to help smooth out those barriers and make it a little bit easier.

Nathan C:

Could you share maybe a couple kinds of projects that you've worked on, helping companies think about AI and XR?

Shelley Peterson:

Sure! So, of course the architecture can take some consideration. The platform that you're using, many companies will run trade studies to determine which platform is best and helping them work through that process and identify potential solutions that meet, not only the technology capabilities that are a best fit for their programs and environments, but also the IT and security considerations. How they manage over time, working through the dynamic nature of the hardware. Right now we're in a stage where we're seeing quite a bit of dynamic nature. Where we have certain devices going away and other devices surfacing, and how do you navigate those environments where, instead of building for a device, you're building for an architecture strategically so that you can navigate and pivot when needed. Of course with AI integration, AI is quite the topic these days. The way that we integrate AI into XR, what we do now, what we wait to do when the time is right, how we architect so that we're thinking ahead and we don't know exactly what those AI solutions are going to look like, but we know we want to be able to tie in and take advantage of them. That's an area that we need companies are focusing on right now as well.

Nathan C:

This idea of helping organizations understand how they can start really use these tools in a deep, integrated way into their businesses. But then also understanding that large enterprises or people that are making five and 10 year strategic plans and investments sometimes need to be thinking past where the technology actually exists in your hands. Um. Wow! That's such a expansive and amazing space to be working in. I'm wondering, before we dive into some of these really big, juicy problems, can you walk us back and tell us a little bit of your innovation journey to get to this point? What's your origin story? To be so deep in these companies and to be helping in such a broad and crucial role.

Shelley Peterson:

It, it's kind of a odd and windy path to get here, to be honest. I grew up in the middle of West Texas. Many people have heard me say our judge was also our barber. So, you know, that gives you context to how small the community I came from was. I had a physics teacher remotely at that time. Big refrigerator size computer system that we connected through at our little school. Had us think into the future and what we thought might be good solutions. And XR came up at that time. Not by name because that didn't exist at the time. But, we were envisioning systems that would equate to VR and MR systems today. And then, I had worked on other projects with defense. That led me to work on the B-1 Bomber simulator. And I started a company when I was 25 to work, distributed mission training, tying simulators together. It was so much fun! They had to kick me out of work every day. It was a blast, but they wanted to tie simulators together and it hadn't been done at that time. They wanted to be able to fly missions. And so I created a spinoff to be able to tie those simulators together and brought a couple of close colleagues over with me at that time. And a month after we opened our doors, September 11th hit and it froze our funding vehicle. So we had this funding vehicle in place that just went poof! And we weren't sure if it was coming back or not. So we needed to tread water for a little bit. And there was a solicitation at that time for a multi-spectral imaging monocular for Special Ops. And so we worked that for a while, and that was kind of a precursor to my XR days at Lockheed. Worked the monocular effort for about two years. And then later on I joined Lockheed working completely different topics. Satellite tasking, mission management, tasking satellites that use infrared to detect missiles. And then ended up over in the business development group working on future satellites, and the VP knew that I had worked with this monocular and said,"Hey, go look at what's going on in Silicon Valley,"(that's where I lived at the time) in the augmented reality space." I hear a lot of people talking about augmented reality in 2011. And so that brought me back into XR. So it's just been kind of like a touchpoint and then another touchpoint. And then in 2011 it became a full-time, heavy effort.

Nathan C:

You can't get away from it. Wow! Of the things that often shows up on the conversations on The Glow Up is the importance of a pivotal mentor, a pivotal internship, an opportunity to just get a peek into something. And I love that in this tiny West Texas community you have access to one of the fabled room-size computers, that was really you know, starting to drive connected experiences. Your journey in computing kind of just always has this assumption of connection and exploration of new modalities just from the start. Even though you're in this sort of traditionally small community. I love it!

Shelley Peterson:

It was fantastic! It was somewhat ushered in by my mother who was a teacher there. And she knew that I liked the math and physics route. She was the English teacher. And I think she hunted down this opportunity to have these remote systems in rural places. And so in our tiny town we got to do that. And it was quite impactful for me. It really got us to think well beyond what we normally would have.

Nathan C:

One of the other things that I think is really notable, and is probably why you always have a line of people waiting to talk to you when I see you at events like Augmented World Expo and others, is that, for so many emerging technologies, government, infrastructure defense are some of those categories that people want to attach their businesses, their innovations to. It's seen as such a large part of the US economy.

Shelley Peterson:

Right.

Nathan C:

And to have this really deep understanding of what it takes to get business done for projects as complex and multithreaded as Lockheed Martin and like major defense projects, when you talk about a founder's journey, some of those defense projects might be two or three years to get to the agreement about defining what the proof of concept is gonna be. And you don't even get to start working on the thing until two or three steps further down. I think that's gotta position you as somebody with incredible important information about how innovation happens, but innovation doesn't happen with just one person. How do you take that experience and that understanding and disseminate it across teams, across partnerships, these multi-threaded vendors, all of these years to actually see stuff get to market or to get into customers and out in the world? How do you manage such big ideas over time to get there?

Shelley Peterson:

Oh, that's a good question! I had the luxury of working with spacecraft and spacecraft programs at Lockheed, and especially at the start. Later on I was working at the corporate level, leading groups across the corporation. But working with the space programs, you're already in an environment where people are thinking big. They're solving challenges and creating technology that hasn't been created before, so that mindset is already there. There's many programs at Lockheed across civil and commercial and defense, and each one has their own unique requirements and groups of people that help solve those challenges. So it's as much of a networking and communicating with organizations who can assist. When I think of you know the topics that were important in the spacecraft manufacturing setting, it was very much a system of systems challenge these spacecraft work. But in creating those spacecraft, especially with emerging technology, that system of systems spans into the people and the organizations. So IT and security and you know, everything from HR to engineering and technicians and executive leadership and all of the different groups, quality. So for one program, if we go into one environment on one program, we would have five different security organizations who had to provide approvals for the technology to be brought in. You know and that didn't count all of the others! So if same program, we go to a different building, there's five people you have to run it through to get into that environment. I was fortunate in having organizations and people who were enablers and who we could work with to sit down at the drawing board and figure out how this was gonna work. And once you get one program up and running with the first scenarios, it provides you a roadmap to shape, you know you take your best practices and, okay, next time we're going to do this and we're going to shape it a little bit. And then the next time we're going to do this other thing. You find a process that works well and as long as it's really bringing value to the organizations, then it picks up pretty rapidly.

Nathan C:

You talk about helping organizations understand the value of these future technologies. And we also kind of alluded that one of the things that you're pushing uphill against is this very long timeframe. You're trying to help people understand the value of things that exist only in paper and schematics in many cases. How do you, when you're working on such big ideas, such long things, systems of systems, how do you help organizations like this really measure the impact of the work that they're doing? I feel like measurement has to be key in how you stay focused on those end results over such long time. Can you talk a little bit about measuring impact?

Shelley Peterson:

Sure and you know, I think one of the first things that we did that was most impactful was we turned down use cases until we found the right ones. And that's hard to do when you're trying to get into an organization and some people want you to support a certain use case, but you don't feel like it has, you know, it has value, but not enough value to really convince the skeptics and turning down those opportunities is hard when you don't have the high value one set up yet. But we did that and found the use case that was significant. The very first one was a 50% touch labor reduction. When we looked across the use cases, it spanned the full manufacturing lifecycle from the design phase to manufacturing, to tests, implementation, operations. But we wanted to find the ones that we could put numbers on. Error prevention is hard to put a number on'cause it's hard to prove that an error would've happened when you're working not in an assembly line. I decided to start with the manufacturing, the production of the spacecraft because we did know how long certain activities would take and then we could go in and show without a doubt what the savings were. And that very quickly turned into a scenario that we could take to the technicians and to the engineers and the leadership. And the technicians very quickly came back and said,"You know that's great, but if we could do this other use case over here. I would save a significant amount." And it was simple! It was just locating the fasteners where they are adhered to spacecraft panels. You know, it's kinda like replacing the light bulb with the better light bulb. And from that use case, we were saving$38 per fastener, and Lockheed was purchasing 2 million fasteners per year. And that got a lot of attention really quickly. Everyone was rightfully a skeptic at the start, and within several years we didn't really have any skeptics in Lockheed space left.

Nathan C:

As innovators there is often this push to find an idea that feels like it can work and just go make it happen. And that being really strict about what is a use case that is important enough for us to be tackling, I think is something that so many people kind of have issues of scale understanding, especially when they talk about enterprise, right? Because a million dollars to an enterprise company is a very small amount of money to invest if you know it's gonna be delivering a return.

Shelley Peterson:

Right.

Nathan C:

But the return also has to be at that same kind of scale.

Shelley Peterson:

Right.

Nathan C:

And so a 2% increase, a 15% increase wasn't enough. You were stoked to find this 50% reduction in labor, and if I understand you correctly, we're talking about like rocket science, scientist labor. So it's not an insignificant amount of money. And by being able to prove that really valuable use case and that there was utility and that you could move the number, the client actually came back to you and said,"Okay, now that I believe you, what I really want you to help me fix is this other problem over here." And they pointed you at an opportunity to like save them$75 million yearly?!

Shelley Peterson:

Yes!

Nathan C:

I feel like you'd have a hard time convincing anybody not to join on to a project that's gonna save that much money!

Shelley Peterson:

I was hesitant to tell leadership at the start because they're not gonna believe me when I say we're saving 93% touch labor. They're gonna think I am making things up. And then we ran an activity at Kennedy Space Center inside the Orion spacecraft that's going up to the moon. And then we ran an activity in Denver that was very similar, and all of them were 90 something. I think two of them were 92% or 93%, and one was 91%. I was getting ready to pull all of that into a data package to take to the VP and the executive leadership from the Orion program had already reached back to my leadership, and they called me in before. I was like,"Well, I'm either in a lot of trouble or this is gonna go really well. I'm not sure which." But it was a request of how fast can we move and what do we need to do? And that was around the 2020 timeframe. So scaling during the age of COVID was an adventure.

Nathan C:

That's amazing! You seem to have a little bit of this patience to, build a plan, go out and test it, and then kind of learn from whatever the moment is and see how you can, build to the next. I'm curious, even after all of this time, working with these large organizations, working on these giant projects, saving millions and millions of dollars, are there times that you've walked into a situation thinking oh, this has gotta be it. This is the moment, and the customer has shown you something completely different, right? Like, it can't all be roses. And like how do you, when you're working on such big projects, such big missions and budgets, how do you respond to maybe less than great feedback or, you know, a different problem comes up that you weren't so prepared for?

Shelley Peterson:

I actually love critical feedback and you know, spacecraft engineers are not shy about giving that! They will tell you what they think, in quite the unfiltered manner much of the time. Some of them will say, I have a concern with using this in this environment. And they'll give you the reasons. Many of the times it's because they've been brought a technology and IT and security were not involved. And so groups have to go back to the drawing board because it's not built with that in mind. Especially for defense programs or the environments that are more strict. You know, it's one thing to have the enterprise layer, it's another thing to have the defense layer and the spacecraft manufacturing environment. When they would find that we were doing the best we could to design with that in mind and bringing in those teams and really trying to do the right thing, that helped a lot. We did have a manager who was very hesitant to use it because of the time it took to build the content, which is fair. At the very early stages, it would take us about two days to build content that would save a couple of days worth of shop floor activity. That's still a decent ROI when you look at the metrics, you know, a day of delay on a spacecraft is a million dollar cost per day. So that would still be okay, but he wanted to see that streamlined because there's also the process of how much training time does it take to get the engineers eventually to build their own content. And so we went and worked with the platform provider, that was Scope AR. They helped us optimize it where it would be very efficient to build the content. You know, I'm talking 45 minutes to build the content from, you know, now that's because Lockheed already had the models of the structures. But if we have that in place, we could take it and make use of it very quickly. I still remember the point in time, several years after I started the effort and I brought him back in. Because he was a absolutely"No, I'm not gonna put this in my environment!" I said,"Okay, I wanna show this to you now." We've made some modifications. I just wanna get your thoughts because I know you're not going to tell me that it's just great and you know, if you have the"no" answer, I wanna know what that"no" looks like. And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and then he went in and took a look at the capability and I think he was impressed with the changes that the teams had made. And so then he was one of our greatest partners. You know, he brought the technology in and was one of the best leaders I think, because he was looking at it critically and could get past being enamored by the instant immediate glow of the technology. And he was really thinking in the systems of systems, you know, what all is gonna be involved and what are the risks. So I love working with the people who are willing to think in that way because it helps us figure out what we need to shape to make it even more robust.

Nathan C:

I suspect that funny glance that you got was partly because in a lot of large organizations, especially when new initiatives are being pushed, new ideas, that's where a lot of silos, a lot of egos and protective domain, can really come into play and being, so honest of like, I know what you're gonna bring and that's why I'm asking you to be here is such a lovely approach!

Shelley Peterson:

And he's gonna laugh if he sees this! He had taken the sledgehammer and kind of squashed us, you know, and here I'm coming back going, Hey, I wanna show you this again. And it's like, what are you thinking?! But I think he knew that, if I was willing to do that, I was confident that I might have solved at least some of the issues that he had with it.

Nathan C:

I love that! Anytime somebody gives me advice and I'm able to consume it and incorporate it into what I'm doing, I always make a point to let them know. So we've been talking about some past successes, how you have this deep history of helping organizations consider and adopt with these kinds of technologies. I'd love to pivot us and start to look forward a little bit, and as you're continuing your work with Wizard Wells, the show is called The Glow Up, and we use this idea of rebirth and transformation as a way to talk about six month goals. Short term, but audacious goals. So I'm curious, what are you looking to glow up in your work in the next six months?

Shelley Peterson:

So there's interesting pursuits by companies and organizations. Some of the organizations that I work with are large aerospace and aeronautics companies. Some are very small organizations. Some are working in the education space, and I am so excited what the technology is doing right now in the early stages of bringing it in for education. Government organizations are recognizing the the power of these technologies, and especially with the combination of XR and AI. And right now, you know, not just in the US it's, it's broad. I get requests from other countries on how do we use the technologies for workforce development? How do we train and certify more rapidly? I heard just this week there's an organization who is taking training that would normally take two years. They're completing that training now in 25 days. I was shocked! Now I think that one is a special case, but there's definitely optimizations and we need it right now with the number of people that are needed in so many different roles. You know, aircraft maintenance to vehicle maintenance to truck drivers, to medical, to I mean, name a trade. And we need more workers and we need them to be certified and brought up to skill level more rapidly. So this technology's perfect for it. I'm excited about what it's gonna do, and thankfully right now I have the opportunity to work in some spaces where we can help grow that and not just at a school by school level, but at a state by state level or other scenarios at the higher level.

Nathan C:

Oh my goodness! I can't help but think back to your mention in the previous answer about optimizing content development for immersive learning tools can be one of those big hurdles, right? I've said for a long time, if you're trying to pitch, you know, immersive solutions as a development and learning solution, it has to be about as easy to develop and edit and deploy as what those teams are already using.

Shelley Peterson:

Yes.

Nathan C:

In a lot of cases that might be like slide decks!

Shelley Peterson:

Yes! You

Nathan C:

know, web portal. And so, I love this combination of the technology being more accessible and more optimized and just this extreme need for workforce support, right? Whether it's healthcare, whether it's construction, whether it's high tech, there's potentially a lot of manufacturing, that's gonna be needing support and beyond. Just amazing! When you think about goals like this and from a career with a bit of perspective, I'm curious, how do you know when you'll have made it? How do you define success for Wizard Wells?

Shelley Peterson:

You know, the answer to that question has changed over time throughout my career. When I was in high school, if you had asked me that question at that time, I would've thought through titles and numbers and, how do we define success? That's not how I define it now. Now it's more of, instead of what is my title and what are my metrics, it's more of the metrics of what am I able to help and to influence and does that fit with my value system and what I'm wanting to pursue. It has to do with the organizations that I'm working with have fantastic opportunities now to work with groups who are doing the right things for the right reasons. And to me, that feels like success. You know, being able to be a part of working in the areas where there's a challenge that needs to be solved and we're able to solve it and rapidly. But it, it's a hard question to put a statement with a checkbox to say, here's what it means when I've made it. To me it's more of a feeling over time. I'm really enjoying the work that I'm doing right now, and I think it has a lot to do with the people that I'm working with and their motives.

Nathan C:

That's gorgeous. Thank you! One of the things that we like to do every episode is make some time to share a community spotlight for a nonprofit, some other org that's making an impact. I'm curious, since we're on this topic, do you have an organization that you'd like to share a spotlight with?

Shelley Peterson:

Oh, the challenge is there's so many! I've had the opportunity to be on advisory boards for organizations that I'm just really impressed with. You know, from Harvard XR and the XR Women. The Literacy Barbara Bush Foundation. Some literacy organizations are using the eye tracking in our XR devices to advance literacy. And there's a metric— 54% of American adults read below the sixth grade level. And that metric was taken like 15 years ago. And we know it's gotten worse. We know it hasn't improved. There's some serious work that needs to be done there. And while our devices bring lots of capability, I think that they strangely impact our literacy levels. So there's work that needs to be done and it's impressive to see that the work that Reading XR is doing with Dollar General. They are huge supporters of literacy. They do significant work in that space, so I'm a fan of what they're doing. I'm always a fan of seeing this technology being used for good purpose. There's a group here in Colorado that has schools to train students on the autism spectrum. Teaching the autism community traits and such a fan of what Danny Combs has done there.

Nathan C:

I wanna start a miniseries with you that's just Shelley's favorite impact orgs!

Shelley Peterson:

Oh let's do it!

Nathan C:

Shelley shout outs and we'll give some space for these impact orgs. I love it! Is there a call to action that you have for the audience about anything that you're looking for, whether it's network, connections, opportunities?

Shelley Peterson:

There's a lot of talent available right now and there's a lot of groups looking for talent right now. And I love playing that matchmaker role between groups and organizations that are looking. And I just do that informally as,"Hey, I know that this is going on over here." If there are groups who are needing people or if you're looking for opportunities, reach out. I would love to hear from you. Any organizations that are working in the education space in the XR or AI or the combination of the two. There are schools and organizations looking for capabilities. So I would like to hear more from the groups that are working in those spaces so that I'm aware and I can make those connections. But yeah, this industry is fantastic and working with the people in this industry. It's more like a family than an industry. We, know each other and we like to help each other. Even groups who are competitive are also synergistic, and they treat it that way. It's one of the things that keeps me in this space and excited to be in this space.

Nathan C:

I could not agree more! The technologies, the hardware, the pop culture of the moment will all change. But, the conversation I had just recently with Alex Rühl, that launched today, the whole conversation was the working through it together with people that you trust and adore is the best part

Shelley Peterson:

Yes!

Nathan C:

of the whole journey. So fantastic! Shelley, I'm curious, how can folks learn more if they'd like to follow up with you?

Shelley Peterson:

I can be reached on LinkedIn. That's really the primary social media platform that I use for enterprise. So that's a good place to reach me and to see some of my past work. I'm very busy, but also have free time, and I love to hear from new people and industry colleagues alike. I enjoy having coffee time with people in the industry space.

Nathan C:

So incredibly generous! Shelley Peterson, long time almost XR entrepreneur from early childhood practically! An innovation journey from rural West Texas, to some of the highest points in the world and beyond, maybe even the moon here shortly! I love how you think about these new technologies in terms of value and impact and are yet, still open to that long tail innovation that takes time and patience and partnership. Your new focus on impact, giving back to the community and supporting both the orgs and these vendors and technologists that you've come to know so well, is just so heartwarming. It is always a pleasure to chat with you. I can't wait till the first episode of"Shelley Spotlights." Thank you so much for joining us today on The Glow Up!

Shelley Peterson:

Thank you! It's always fun having the conversations with you!

Nathan C:

Amazing. Thanks so much!