Inside the Tech Shift That Will Define Restoration’s Next Decade

Five or six years ago, Leighton Healey watched a demonstration of a virtual reality training program designed for roofers.

The pitch was compelling. New hires could practice in controlled environments; no weather delays, no fall risks, no liability. The technology was impressive. The company was confident.

But Healey kept circling back to one question: “Have you ever seen how a roofer gets trained?”

Because no restoration company is going to leave a new hire alone in an office with a VR headset while experienced workers are on actual roofs doing real work. Training happens shoulder-to-shoulder, in real conditions, with someone who can grab your arm before you make a costly mistake.

In a recent Cleanfax webinar, Leighton Healey, CEO at KnowHow, joined Jeff Cross, Media Director at ISSA, and Travis Martin, VP of Product at KnowHow, to forecast which training technologies would be mainstream, niche, or irrelevant by 2030. The verdict on virtual reality was unanimous: Either irrelevant or extremely niche at best.

But underneath that prediction was clarity about where restoration companies should actually be placing their bets with regard to technology.

Cross opened with a prediction: “By 2030, we’re going to see a big split. Those who are going to be at the lead of the pack making it work, and the others are going to be like, ‘I should have done something about it.’”

The $1.2 Trillion Signal You Can’t Ignore

Over the last five years, $1.2 trillion has flooded into AI infrastructure. Healey offered context: “Enough money adjusted to today’s dollars to rebuild the entire US freeway and road system twice, or you could buy all 151 global professional sports leagues and still have $800 billion left over.”

That capital isn’t funding virtual reality training programs.

“When I look at what military spending is doing on wearables,” Healey explained, “it’s not really heavily focused towards virtual reality. It’s focused towards enhancing or augmenting the real-time visual landscape.”

The distinction matters. Virtual reality replaces what you see. Augmented reality enhances it. And in restoration—where every job site is different, and workers need to respond to what’s actually in front of them—augmentation beats replacement.

The infrastructure investment is going toward visual wearables, and cultural readiness is already there. When Healey was shopping for frames, he asked whether people bought glasses without needing vision correction. The salesperson’s response: “Oh yeah, like at least 50% of our sales are people that don’t need glasses.”

The form factor problem that killed Google Glass has been solved. Meta partnered with Ray-Ban. Apple invested in wearables that look normal. “This is as bad as [the technology is] going to be in the next five years,” Martin said of current smart glasses.

The technology works, the aesthetics work, and the applications for restoration are immediate: real-time access to processes, remote expert guidance, information overlays, all without pulling out a phone.

The Restoration Arms Race Starts With a Single Box

Picture a building manager’s desk with an elegant branded container from a restoration company. Inside: smart glasses. When a basement floods, the manager—knee deep—in a CAT 3 event puts on the glasses and connects immediately to an experienced water tech who sees exactly what they see.

“Have your people move those carpetings. Power down that floor. Kill the power to that elevator,” the remote expert directs in real time.

“The question is not whether it is a good idea,” Healey said. “The question is what happens when someone offers that to the market, it catches on, and then it creates an arms race.”

That’s a new revenue stream: emergency readiness packages that create relationships with commercial properties long before loss occurs. Instant crisis support that competitors without wearables can’t match.

What Your Company Structure Looks Like in 2030

“Competence and experience will be decoupled from tenure,” Healey predicted. “Training will collapse from months to days.”

By 2030, successful restoration companies won’t organize by hierarchy. They’ll organize by function, with some functions owned by AI systems handling customer communication, receivables, and sales support, not replacing people but managing the overflow that office workers already can’t finish.

“I have not met an office-based person in the restoration/cleaning industry that does not feel like they have 40 more tasks than they have time for in a week,” Martin noted.

Technicians equipped with visual wearables will have access to expertise that previously required years of experience. Project managers will support multiple job sites simultaneously through remote visual guidance. Emergency response will shift from reactive service calls to proactive readiness packages sitting on building managers’ desks.

The split Cross predicted at the start of the webinar will become obvious. Some companies will have invested in wearables that their crews voluntarily use because it makes them better at their jobs. Others will have VR headsets gathering dust, wondering why impressive conference demos never translated to job sites.

The question isn’t whether to adopt new technology. It’s whether companies can distinguish between what looks impressive at trade shows and what actually changes what’s possible at 2 a.m. on job sites.

By 2030, that distinction will be the difference between leading the market and explaining to clients why your emergency response takes longer than competitors who can see through building managers’ eyes from the moment a crisis begins.