I recently read a TechCrunch article about AI-powered wearables suddenly getting a lot of attention. (https://lnkd.in/gb5Jasuv)
Devices of this kind aren’t actually a new product category that just appeared out of nowhere. Doing OI (open innovation) work, I’d come across plenty of startups and companies with similar ideas for a long time now.
What feels meaningful now, though, is that the market’s reaction is shifting from ‘fun product’ to ‘useful product.’ There are several reasons behind that, but personally I’d say the biggest driver of this change is AI’s progress rather than hardware evolution.
I see three meaningful changes here.
First, on-device AI is becoming real.
As large models keep getting lighter, hybrid services that blend cloud-based and on-device models have become possible. Where wearables used to just collect data and hand it off to a smartphone or the cloud, the device itself can now deliver meaningful insight and service instantly.
Second, services are gaining their own identity and differentiation.
Early wearables were often just smartphone functions repackaged as ‘something you wear on your body.’ But recent wearables are clearly moving away from competing with or merely supplementing smartphones, toward delivering experiences a smartphone simply can’t. (Glasses-form devices seem to be the leading example.)
As XR glasses mature further, these glasses-style accessory AI devices will likely replace part of what smartphones do, but I still think a niche market will remain, with real potential to expand into a linked, complementary ecosystem.
Third, multimodal-based context awareness.
There’s a clear trend of collecting and learning from a user’s behavior, situation, location, and environment through a wearable’s various sensors to deliver personalized service. Multimodality has become a core keyword in AI lately, and wearables line up quite closely with that direction. The more context understanding becomes possible through combinations of sensors, the more a wearable’s usefulness — its actual ‘utility’ — will rise.
It struck me that devices of a kind that have been around for a while are now evolving at a noticeable pace and creating a new market vocabulary, so I put down these brief thoughts. Personally, I think the wearable competition ahead will come down less to how cool the device looks and more to how well it understands me.
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