A Carolina Beach-based startup, Skillmaker.ai, can cut down the time it takes to train an auto technician from two years to just 25 days, according to the company’s founder and CEO Robin Cowie.

The platform uses extended reality (XR), including immersive technologies like virtual reality and mixed reality, to train workers. Skillmaker.ai won the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) Venture Connect pitch contest in the AI and Machine Learning category in Raleigh on Thursday. 

The startup also launched its website on Thursday and, earlier this week, was named a semi-finalist in NC IDEA’s spring 2025 SEED grant cycle.

Cowie started his 30-year career in the entertainment and content business as a producer on The Blair Witch Project. He went on to make video games and eventually began working with various forms of XR technology. 

He founded Skillmaker.ai last year and said he sees the company as combining his own experience with XR technology with his father’s 50-year career in developing worker training programs.

 “I’m helping basically create skilled workers much faster than has ever been possible before,” Cowie said. “Anything where people use their body and their hands and their brain, Skillmaker’s a really good solution for accelerating those skill sets.”

NAPA Auto Parts was the company’s first client, Cowie said. Skillmaker.ai is working with NAPA to create a program to train its auto technicians. The training process is split into three parts. The first assesses the incoming technician’s skills.

“We put them into a mixed reality headset … we give them an assessment,” Cowie said, “and by the end of that 30 minutes, we know what their capabilities are.”

That can help guide training for the technicians by focusing on any identified skill gaps. Next, the technicians go through accelerated training using mixed reality. In mixed reality, trainees receive guided training through a headset while using real-world tools.

The final step is developing what Cowie calls a “chatGPT for auto techs.”

“You are going to always have lots and lots of other questions when it comes to the details of the job,” he said, “and for that, we are basically creating a knowledge base around that job, and we're putting that intelligence into smart glasses.”

The function allows technicians to quickly ask and get answers to questions without interrupting their workflow. “It gives you the answer immediately in your smart glasses,” Cowie said, “and then we can integrate that into all of their ordering systems, as well.”

Other Skillmaker.ai clients include certification company Automotive Service Excellence and vocational training group FedCap, Cowie said. He sees potential for Skillmaker.ai in a range of industries, from transportation and energy to critical infrastructure and telecommunications.

The startup is currently raising a $3 million seed round, Cowie said. If Skillmaker.ai receives a $50,000 SEED grant from NC IDEA, the money would go toward growing its employees.

“Now that we're getting into the heart of what we're doing for NAPA, we've got to expand and build,” he said. “I applied to the grant because that'll help me hire more people locally, faster.”

Cowie said Skillmaker.ai currently has three employees, including himself, with a few others who do part-time work for the startup. Developing and growing Skillmaker.ai has allowed Cowie to learn from his father, who, at 82, is retired from a career in worker training, in a new way.

“It's really been kind of neat because I'm picking up where he kind of left off,” Cowie said. “I'm a technologist at heart, and he's a teacher at heart, and so I'm really bringing technology to his teaching.”