Will AI Glasses Replace Your Phone?

Mark Zuckerberg says AI glasses are the future, and if you don’t wear them, you might fall behind. Yep, while you're still pulling out your phone, others could be chatting with their glasses and getting real-time advice from AI. It sounds like sci-fi. It also sounds a lot like marketing.

Meta isn’t just launching cool glasses that play music and take selfies. Zuckerberg wants these glasses to eventually replace your phone. They’ll see what you see, hear what you hear, and give you AI help in real time. Picture walking into a meeting and your glasses quietly reminding you who everyone is and what they said last time. Meta’s spending tens of billions to make this vision real, even though Reality Labs, the division behind the glasses, has already lost nearly $70 billion since 2020. That’s not “just another product,” that’s Meta trying to build the next big computing platform.

And they’re not alone in the race. Apple has the Vision Pro. OpenAI just teamed up with iPhone designer Jony Ive to build a new AI device. Google’s still experimenting. Startups are trying AI pins and handheld gadgets. Everyone’s chasing the next big thing after the smartphone, and Meta’s betting it’s glasses.

If you're a CEO, you might soon expect your team to use these tools to be faster and more efficient. If you're an employee, you might be trained to work with AI glasses instead of screens. If you're just trying to keep up with life, well, you might start to feel left behind if everyone else is using wearable AI and you're not. Like smartphones a decade ago, this could go from "nice to have" to "essential" pretty quickly.

Who gets access to this tech? Who controls the data? What happens to privacy, to equity, to the people who can’t (or won’t) join this AI arms race?

This isn’t just about glasses. It’s about who’s building the future and whether you’ll have a choice in how it affects your job, your kids, or your daily life.

Think this is all hype? Or is it the next step we all have to prepare for? Share how you think this could affect you, your team, or your community. We want to hear your take.

- Matt Masinga