There’s a narrative that’s been quietly building for the first half of 2026, and it’s worth saying out loud: the three biggest names in enterprise XR hardware have all, in their own ways, walked away from the space. Apple disbanded the team working on a lower-cost Vision Pro. Microsoft quietly killed HoloLens development after years of delayed roadmaps. Meta shut down Horizon Workrooms and pulled back its enterprise sales push.
And yet, enterprise XR spending is on track to hit £9 billion globally this year. Companies are buying more XR than ever. So what on earth is going on?
The problem with big tech’s enterprise XR strategy
Here’s the thing: Apple, Microsoft, and Meta all made the same fundamental mistake. They tried to build consumer-grade devices — premium, polished, designed for a mass market — and then sell them to enterprises that have completely different requirements.
Take the HoloLens 2. Impressive kit, genuinely ahead of its time when it launched. But Microsoft was trying to be all things to all people. The same device that was demoed at developer conferences was supposed to work on an oil rig in Aberdeen, in a hospital theatre, and in a distribution warehouse. That’s a very wide brief, and the result was a device that did many things tolerably well but nothing brilliantly for any specific use case.
Apple’s Vision Pro had the opposite problem. It was stunning — nobody who spent an hour with one would argue otherwise — but at £3,299, it was a device designed for people who prioritise experience over ROI. Enterprise buyers don’t work that way. They have procurement committees, three-year depreciation schedules, and IT departments asking very pointed questions about MDM support and device management.
Meta’s Workrooms experiment showed that social VR in a work context just isn’t something most people want. The novelty wore off fast, and remote workers mostly went back to Teams.
So who’s filling the gap?
The interesting shift in 2026 is that the winners in enterprise XR are companies you may not have heard of — or companies that spent years being dismissed as niche players.
RealWear has been making rugged, heads-up AR devices for frontline workers since 2017 and has never tried to be a consumer product. Their HMT-1 and Navigator series are used in exactly the kind of environments where a £3,000 Apple headset would last about twenty minutes — manufacturing floors, energy facilities, utilities maintenance. They’re not glamorous, but they work, they’re ruggedised to IP66, and they integrate with SAP and Microsoft Dynamics out of the box.
Vuzix is another example. Their M-Series smart glasses are specifically designed for hands-free work in logistics, healthcare, and field service. Again, nobody’s writing breathless tech reviews about them, but they’re shifting units because they solve a real problem for a defined customer.
Xreal (formerly Nreal) has taken a different approach, targeting lighter-weight AR glasses that work as an extended display and for specific industrial overlay use cases. They’ve been particularly aggressive in the European market and have signed several significant enterprise contracts this year.
What these companies have in common is that they didn’t start from “what’s technically impressive” — they started from “what does a specific type of worker actually need, and what ROI can we demonstrate?”
The training use case is still dominating
If you talk to enterprise XR buyers right now, training is still the number one use case by a significant margin. And it’s not hard to see why. The economics are compelling: a manufacturing company might need to train 500 new technicians on a piece of equipment. Traditionally that requires physical access to the machine, an expert trainer, and significant scheduling overhead. XR cuts most of that out.
The studies backing this up have become hard to ignore. Retention rates for VR-based training consistently come in 20–30% higher than classroom instruction. Time-to-competency drops significantly. And critically, the equipment doesn’t get damaged during training.
Beyond training, remote assistance has emerged as the second major use case — particularly following the pandemic, which proved that expert knowledge doesn’t need to be physically present to be useful. A field engineer in Aberdeen can connect to a specialist in Houston and have them see exactly what they’re seeing. That’s a workflow that works today, on existing hardware, with measurable cost savings.
What should enterprise buyers do now?
If you’re evaluating XR for your organisation, the first question to ask isn’t “which headset should we buy?” It’s “what specific problem are we trying to solve?”
The vendors who are winning right now are the ones who’ve built for specific verticals. If you’re in manufacturing or utilities, look hard at RealWear and Vuzix. If you want a lighter, more flexible form factor for office-adjacent use cases, Xreal is worth a serious look. If you need a full mixed reality environment for design review or complex assembly, there are enterprise-grade solutions from PTC (Vuforia), PTC’s Scope AR, and TeamViewer’s Frontline that sit on top of various hardware.
The big-tech retreat is actually clarifying the market. When Apple and Microsoft were in the room, every conversation got distorted by the question of whether you should wait for their next product. Now that they’ve stepped back, enterprise buyers can make decisions based on what exists and what actually works.
The enterprise XR market in 2026 is more mature, more focused, and — counterintuitively — more exciting because of the exit of the giants. The companies left standing are there because they’ve earned it.