It starts with genuine excitement. 

A business unit sees the potential of AR/XR to guide technicians through complex tasks, overlay instructions in real time, and connect remote experts to frontline staff. A small batch of devices is purchased. A pilot is run. The results are promising. 

Twelve months later, half of the headsets purchased are in a cabinet. 

The issue isn’t that AR/XR “didn’t work.” It’s that the initiative was scoped and procured as if the device was the whole story. 

AR/XR isn’t just a device problem 

In enterprise environments, AR/XR lives inside a dense ecosystem: 

  • Logistics and lifecycle across sites and regions. 

  • Device enrollment, updates, and monitoring in your existing MDM/EMM stack. 

  • Security, privacy, and data residency constraints. 

  • 3D and spatial content creation, optimization, and upkeep. 

  • Ownership of the fleet and roadmap after the pilot. 

When those pieces are left out of the RFP, they show up later as friction. 

Bringing the real stakeholders into the RFP 

Some of the best AR/XR programs start with a simple move: get IT, Security, Operations, Learning, and Procurement in the same room before writing a single question. 

Ask:  
“If this works, what does year two or three really look like, and who owns what?” 

Those answers can turn into better prompts for vendors about lifecycle services, integration with existing tools, spatial content workflows, and support models that match your footprint. 

Thinking beyond the pilot 

The simplest test is to assume success. If the pilot overdelivers, are your RFP and vendor choice set up for scale, or will you have to start over? 

A checklist for real world AR/XR deployments 

CGS Immersive developed its AR/XR checklists side-by-side with clients who had previously lived through both successful and stalled deployments, and this AR/XR Hardware & Managed Procurement Checklist reflects those practical benchmarks. 

If you want your next AR/XR initiative to become a scaled capability, the way you write the RFP is one of the most important design decisions you’ll make. 

Download the AR/XR Hardware & Managed Procurement RFI/RFP Checklist →