We have been taught to wait. Wait for the qualification, the promotion, the boss or the mentor who finally hands us permission to begin. In this piece, the CEO of Many Worlds argues that AI and VR are quietly ending that era. Drawing on his research roots in VR and psychotherapy and on building immersive and AI tools across wildly different worlds, he makes the case that real growth comes from doing rather than consuming, and that the tools to start now are already in your hands.
A few years ago I was running data collection for my master’s research. We were taking people through visualisation exercises, and I kept noticing the same thing happen.
The ones who sat there guarded and closed off, arms folded, giving me nothing, would change the moment we immersed them in VR. All of a sudden the facilitator wasn’t a person in the room watching them. The facilitator became a narrator of an experience the user was actually living. Their guard dropped. They stopped performing and started doing.
I knew it mattered. I just didn’t understand how far it went until recently.
Because now I am watching the same thing happen with AI, and not in a lab. People who have never written a line of code in their lives are suddenly building their own dashboards and systems to fix their own workflows. They describe it as having a partner in crime. Almost a second version of themselves that helps them manage their own thinking and build on what they already know.
That is the same shift I saw in the VR research. The guard drops. The person stops consuming and starts creating.
Here is what I think most of us still get wrong about learning and training.
We confuse consuming with doing. We hand people videos to watch and PDFs to read and we call it training. But there is no doing in that. Only intake. You can monitor it and capture all the data you want, and you will still be measuring whether someone sat through something, not whether they grew.
The real power is experiential learning. Learning by doing. Even a video needs something to engage with for it to actually stick.
This is exactly why I am so proud of the work being done at Superworker. Most training drops content on people and hopes it lands. Superworker does the opposite. It builds hyper-personalised learning journeys sequenced for each person’s role, and then puts a companion alongside that journey. It is not a chatbot. It is a coach. Built on real behavioural IP and governed by professional coaching codes, it does not just answer questions. It recognises when someone is overwhelmed or overconfident, reframes it, and closes every single interaction with one concrete, doable next step.
Sit with that for a second. The technology is not there to deliver more content. It is there to turn watching into doing. To make sure the person actually moves. That is the difference between training someone and helping them grow, and it is the line almost everyone keeps getting wrong.
This is not just a hunch. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis of immersive VR studies found it produced meaningfully better learning outcomes than traditional methods, with the strongest gains in hands-on, experiential subjects and among younger learners.
This is why I get excited about how different our projects at Many Worlds look on the surface. Rugby. Legal. Golf. Agriculture. Cognitive training for kids. People assume they are unrelated. They are not. The thread running through every single one is the same. It is the desire of an individual to improve, and a piece of technology finally giving them a way to do it on their own terms.
Every time I show someone a demo of what we have built, I can feel it. Their imagination starts to switch on. The excitement builds. And it is almost never about changing the world or making a fortune. It is something quieter and bigger than that. It is someone finally feeling like the idea they were too scared to act on might actually be allowed to exist.
That feeling is the whole point.
For most of us the path was written before we ever got a say in it. Go to school. Go to varsity. Get the 9 to 5. Get married. Have the kids. Stay secure. We were handed a script and told that following it was the responsible thing to do.
AI and VR are quietly tearing that script up.
For the first time, you do not have to wait for your boss, your HR department, your teacher, your professor, or even your parents to give you guidance, approval or support before you begin. You can start something that matters at any point in your life. These tools let you build your own world, the way you have always privately seen reality but were too scared to act on because it went against the norm.
That is the future I am actually working towards. Not better headsets. Not smarter software. Democratised personal and professional growth. A world where the question stops being “who will let me” and becomes “what will I build.”
So if you are early in your career and quietly waiting for someone to hand you permission, I want to save you some time.
It is not coming. It was never coming.
But the tools to begin without it are already in your hands.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the core argument of this article? That most of us are waiting for permission we do not need. The path used to be fixed: study, get the job, stay secure. AI and VR are breaking that open by letting people learn, build and grow on their own terms, at any point in their lives, without waiting for an institution or an authority figure to approve it first.
What is experiential learning, and why does it beat traditional training? Experiential learning is learning by doing rather than by watching or reading. Most training today is consumption. You sit through a video or a PDF and tick a box, and very little actually sticks. The moment a person engages, makes a decision, and sees what happens, learning becomes real and memorable. That shift from intake to action is the whole point.
How do AI and VR actually enable this? VR creates a psychologically safe space where people drop their guard and behave authentically, which means they practise real decisions instead of performing for an observer. AI adds a presence that responds to you in the moment. The strongest examples do not just deliver more content. They coach. A platform like Superworker, for instance, pairs personalised learning journeys with a companion that reframes where you are stuck and closes every interaction with one concrete next step. The technology turns watching into doing.
Do I need to be technical, or own a VR headset, to benefit from this? No on both counts. Some of the most striking change is happening with people who have never written a line of code, who are now building their own tools and systems. And immersive training no longer requires expensive hardware. It runs on the device you already have, whether that is a phone, a laptop or a headset.
I am early in my career and want to begin. Where do I actually start? Start with the smallest version of the thing you have been too scared to act on. Pick up an AI tool and treat it as a thinking partner. Try an immersive or interactive experience instead of another course. The barrier was never your background or your budget. It was waiting for someone to say yes. You can begin without that.
