In high-consequence career fields such as flying, maintenance, and medicine, people can finish their training and still not be ready to perform the job for real. What closes that gap is reps: doing the task enough times that it holds up under pressure.
That is often the hardest part of readiness to deliver, and one of the most expensive. Aircraft, airspace, and instructor time are scarce, and hours spent training are hours those assets are not supporting the mission. Much of what an Airman needs to learn is locked in technical manuals or in the experience of seasoned instructors, while opportunities for hands-on practice depend on limited equipment, facilities, and instructor availability. The result is a bottleneck: Airmen wait for access to the information and repetitions they need.
What we built
The core idea is simple: the people who know the work best, an instructor or the team around them, should be able to create the training and keep it current without relying on a developer every time the job changes. An instructor can build an immersive training scenario (an engine to tear down, a fuel system to trace, a procedure to rehearse), then deliver it for hands-on, collaborative instruction that students can repeat as many times as it takes.
A maintainer can take a system apart and reassemble it as many times as needed, in minutes, on any device, without a hangar slot or a spare part.
From SBIR to Air Force scale
AFWERX and the Department of the Air Force have supported this work from its early stages. It has also been featured twice: AFRL SBIR success story in 2021 and again in a published success story this year. The path there was built one contract at a time, each widening what the platform could do.
In 2018, an AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award let us evaluate and adapt our augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) authoring platform for training pilots, medical practitioners, and maintenance crews, with the goal of reducing training cost. In 2022, an AFWERX Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) contract funded us to scale that authoring platform.
In 2022, Enduvo received an Air Force SBIR Phase III contract to integrate the platform with DARP/MOTAR as a core element of the training ecosystem, so trainers could build immersive content in their digital classroom and connect it with MOTAR. The following year, we were awarded a $10 million sole-source Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for an immersive learning platform, since extended through September 2028.
What comes next
We are now in a second TACFI effort to bring generative AI into the authoring, with the aim of cutting the time it takes an instructor to build and update training content. It is being built to stay bounded: the workflow is designed to ground generation in the Air Force’s approved source material rather than relying on a model’s general knowledge. Generated content is presented for instructor review and approval before reaching students. That design, keeping the human in the loop, is how we make AI-generated training trustworthy where being wrong is expensive.
In early testing, nearly all Enduvo content creators completed their authoring workflow in 60 minutes or less, demonstrating creation times 4-12 times faster than their normal workflows.
The same approach runs through all of it: capture expertise once, keep it current as procedures and equipment change, and put it in front of any Airman who needs it, on any device. We have been building upon our underlying approach since 2018, with patents filed before the current wave of AI tools existed.
The Air Force has given us a demanding environment in which to prove this works, and the same problem exists wherever expertise is scarce and mistakes are costly. For Air Force programs with an in-scope readiness requirement, Enduvo’s SBIR Phase III IDIQ provides an existing ordering path through September 2028. For primes and integrators, we can also bring the capability into a larger pursuit as a teaming partner. If you are carrying a readiness requirement and need a practical path to the technology, let’s talk.