Some of the largest crowds at MWC queued outside Meta, Google, and Qwen to try on AI smart glasses, highlighting again that 2026 is likely to be a huge year in AI wearables.

While smartglasses may have dominated the AI wearable space at MWC, many other form factors are possible. Qualcomm, the semiconductor company whose chips power the most popular smart glasses on the market, the Meta Ray-Bans, launched its Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform, enabling AI wearables across a range of form factors, including pins, rings, pendants, earbuds, smartwatches, and more.

I sat down with Qualcomm veteran Alex Katouzian, GM of Mobile, Compute & XR, to ask which form factor has the most potential. It turns out that I may have been thinking too narrowly.

“We are moving towards a world where it's not just one device, it's multiple,” said Katouzian.

A device ecosystem serves people in ways a single wearable can't. It accommodates personal preferences, distributes computing needs, and expands the capabilities of each device.

Photo credit: Sabrina Ortiz

For instance, Katouzian gave the example of riding a bike and telling your glasses to look for an address within a WhatsApp conversation on your phone. Then, the address and directions automatically populate on the glasses to guide you to your destination. This could also apply to other actions and devices, including your car.

“So you see, two or three devices, the ones you already have around you, can give you information that you otherwise wouldn’t have [on] one device. And I think if you have just one device, all you do is go to the cloud, and all it does is record or transcribe your audio,” added Katouzian.

In this future, actions taken on each device might also depend on the needs of the task. For example, Katouzian explained that there might be a hierarchy in which immediate needs are addressed on the wearable, while more demanding tasks are offloaded to a phone or puck. He adds that it wouldn’t compromise the user experience, since even if it takes longer to retrieve the answer, it can still notify the user and provide a good answer.

Our Deeper View

Having multiple wearable devices on your body at all times makes sense. Ultimately, AI is only as good as the information you provide it, and more devices mean more input and context, enabling more opportunities for assistance. However, that requires people to be comfortable wearing more devices than they already do, and that may be the biggest obstacle to adoption. It took years for smartwatches to take off, and still, many people (myself included) refuse to wear one for reasons of comfort and aesthetics. There is also the challenge of paying for connectivity for each device, another major barrier on top of the cost of the hardware itself. Making this vision work will require something like a Body Area Network or Personal Area Network.