Whether any of them will use chatbots and agents well or in new and exciting ways is very hard to say. While the addition of AI may be enough to raise the funds needed to build a device, it may not be enough to get people to actually buy the thing. Chatbots and AI agents don’t provide enough of a use case to justify people pinning them on their shirts in droves. We are also at the point of AI saturation where technology is in everything. So, what makes your AI earbuds special?
“That’s the problem most of these beginners have; if AI is their differentiator, then what if everyone else has it?” Sag said. “Now it’s tableware.”
Wearables and devices specially designed to provide certain AI-powered services may seem like the next logical step in the AI revolution, but so far the service we get from it does not remove any boundaries.
“The truth is we don’t need dedicated hardware for the kind of features or use cases they’re demonstrating,” Ubrani said. “Your phone can do a lot of those things.”
In about a year, AI has gone from being a stand-alone selling point to something more like a more powerful version of vanilla.
Making a Dent
There are AI hardware success stories, of course, like Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses, which have done well by incorporating AI as one of the many features in a device that offers use cases—taking photos, listening to music—in addition. AI can do it alone. (This is going to be a year full of smart glasses, and CES will be full of them too.)
Meta, of course, is one of those big companies that has the resources to put AI into its services. Small producers may not have the financial strength to compete, but they feel the pressure to get into the game just the same.
“It will be difficult to see how those small startups survive,” said Sag.
Sag says that there are ways to stand out from larger devices and the influx of other AI gadgets into the mix. Privacy, for example. Meta may have the most successful smart glasses right now, but the company’s platform is a data vacuum that absorbs almost all the information about its users that it might have. Brush points to competitors like Even Realities or Looktech.AI, which make smart glasses that allow the user extensive control over privacy settings and don’t just send all the information to mom. He says startups like that can use a more secure way to diversify their products, giving users an alternative to big, data-mining platforms.
No matter how safe and secure technology is, people will still want something that does something useful for them.
“The next kind of thing is like, what is AI doing for me right now other than telling me I have AI?” Sag said. “A lot of AI is not really relevant to marketing, because it doesn’t really change people’s lives.”
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