Is there a future for wearable AI?

The short answer is yes.

At Mobile World Congress, Lenovo unveiled an AI-powered ring that lets users rotate, zoom and interact with 3D environments on their 3D laptop. Meanwhile, Google and Samsung previewed their XR headset, Project Moohan, which is capable of running Gemini and set to launch later this year. Yet, glasses to replace your phone, pins that bring AI to your daily life without a screen—many of the wearable devices built on the promise of bringing AI to millions have spectacularly flopped over the past years. Is the market doomed?

“There’s plenty of market for hardware AI,” says Ash Saulsbury, an entrepreneur who served as an executive at Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, in a recent interview with IBM Think.

Saulsbury believes that one of the biggest mistakes AI hardware companies can make is not thinking deeply enough about how people will feel wearing them. “Nobody wants to wear something that makes them look dumber, uglier or makes their job harder,” he says.

The user and the use case should be at the center of any product design, Saulsbury says—especially in a field as promising as AI hardware, where many concepts seem exciting in theory but not always in practice.

“It’s the use case that makes the product,” he says. “It’s not the product. It’s not the technology. It’s never the technology.”

At this early stage, the strongest argument for wearable AI may be in the B2B market, says Gregory Thomas, Director of the Center for Design Research at the University of Kansas, in an interview. “Wearables are really important, especially in healthcare where they need to be seamless,” Thomas explains. “Patients don’t want to feel trapped or like guinea pigs.”

In his work, Thomas has explored smart devices in automobiles, and how new technologies can enable diagnostics and patients’ treatments in rural Kansas. “We’ve looked at things that work well for us. There’s promising tech that weaves sensors into fabric. So my shirt, your blouse—it could be loaded with sensors that monitor heart rate, temperature and other vitals while the patient is just lying in bed. Wearables have an incredible future if they’re paired with the right technologies, like language processing.”

When Humane announced its wearable Ai Pin two years ago, it promised to be an “intelligent companion” that frees users from screens by using voice control and projections in the palm. But things didn’t go as planned. Co-founded by two former Apple leaders, the Humane Ai Pin received poor reviews at launch last spring, and the company recently announced that it was partially acquired by HP. Still, Thomas says he immediately saw potential use cases for the tech—such as assisting nurses with administrative tasks.

“Wearables have an incredible future if they’re paired with the right technologies,” Thomas says. “AI, of course, drives everything, so it has to be deeply embedded. There’s no shortage of what AI can do.”