It’s much harder to say whether any of them will do a good job of implementing chatbots and agents in stimulating novel ways. While adding AI may have been enough to raise the investment needed to build the device, it may not have been enough for people to actually buy the device. Chatbots and AI agents don’t yet provide enough apply to justify people pinning them to their shirts en masse. We are also at the point of artificial intelligence saturation, where technology is present in everything. So what makes your AI in-ear headphones unique?
“This is a problem for many startups; If artificial intelligence is their differentiator, what will happen when everyone has it?” Saga says. “Now it’s all about table stakes.”
Wearables and devices built specifically to provide certain AI-based services may have seemed like a logical next step in the evolution of AI, but so far, the utility we get from them is pushing no boundaries.
“The reality is that we don’t need dedicated hardware for the features and use cases they demonstrate,” Ubrani says. “Your phone can do most of these things.”
Over the course of a year, AI has gone from being a marketable item in itself to being something of a slightly stronger form of vanilla.
Making a dent
There are, of course, success stories of AI hardware, such as the Ray-Ban Meta shrewd glasses, which have done well by incorporating AI as one of many features in a device that offers apply cases – taking photos, listening to music – well beyond what AI she can do it herself. (It’s definitely going to be a year full of shrewd glasses, and CES is sure to be filled with them, too.)
Meta is, of course, one of those giant companies that has the resources to devote to incorporating AI into its services. Smaller producers may not be financially forceful enough to compete, but they still feel pressure to get in the game.
“It will be difficult to see how these smaller startups will survive,” Sag says.
Sag says there are ways to stand out from the substantial devices and the glut of other AI gadgets. For example, privacy. Meta may have the most effective shrewd glasses today, but the company’s platform is a data vacuum that sucks almost every possible piece of information about users. Sag points to competitors such as Even Realities or Looktech.AIwhich create shrewd glasses that allow the user to have broad control over privacy settings and not necessarily just send every bit of data back to the mothership. He says such startups can take a safer approach to differentiate their products by offering users an alternative to gigantic data mining platforms.
No matter how secure the technology is, people will still want something that will fundamentally benefit them.
“The next kind of wave is, well, what does AI do for me now other than tell me I have AI?” Saga says. “A lot of AI doesn’t necessarily drive sales because it doesn’t actually change people’s lives.”