AI hardware is in its “Put Up or Shut Up” era.

Whether any of them will implement chatbots and agents well or in new and exciting ways is much harder to say. While the addition of AI may be enough to raise the investment needed to build a device, it may not be enough to get people to actually buy the thing. Chatbots and AI agents you don’t provide enough of a use case to justify people sticking to their shirts en masse. We are also at an AI saturation point where the technology is in everything. So, what makes your AI earphones special?

“That’s the problem that a lot of these startups have; if AI is their differentiator, then what happens when they all have it?” Sag says. “Now it’s a board game.”

Wearables and devices built specifically to provide some services powered by artificial intelligence may seem like the next logical step in the evolution of AI, but so far the utility we have from them does not push boundaries.

“The reality is that we don’t need dedicated hardware for the kind of functionality or use cases they’re showing,” says Ubrani. “Your phone can do most of these things.”

In the space of a year, AI has gone from being a selling point on its own to something akin to a slightly more potent form of vanilla.

Make a Dent

There are AI hardware success stories, of course, like the Meta-Ban Ray smart glasses, which have done well by incorporating AI as one of many features in a device that offers use cases—taking pictures, listening to music—well beyond what AI can do on its own. (This will certainly be a year full of smart glassesand the CES is obliged to drink with them too.)

Meta, of course, is one of those giant companies with resources to put into incorporating AI into their services. Smaller manufacturers don’t have the financial stamina to compete, but they feel the pressure to get into the same game.

“It’s going to be hard to see how those smaller startups survive,” says Sag.

Sag says there are ways to stand out from the big devices and the abundance of other AI gadgets in 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 sucks up almost every bit of information about its users that it can. Sag points towards competitors like Even Reality o Looktech.AIthat make smart glasses that allow users extensive control over privacy settings and don’t necessarily just send every bit of data to the mothership. He says that startups like those can use the safest approach to differentiate their products, offering users an alternative to the big data mining platforms.

No matter how safe and secure the technology is, people have always wanted something that fundamentally does something beneficial for them.

“The next kind of wave of this is like, well, what does AI do for me now other than tell me I have AI?” Sag says. “A lot of AI is not necessarily driving sales, because it’s not really changing people’s lives.”