Key Takeaways
- AI wearables are making waves in marketing through hyper-personalized customer engagement opportunities.
- Currently, available devices include the Humane Ai Pin, Oura Smart Ring, Brilliant Labs Frame AI Glasses, Limitless Pendant, and friend AI Pendant.
- These devices collect user data on a variety of metrics and can interact with users in real time through conversations and suggestions.
- The “friendship factor” of these devices creates a deep level of trust with users and opens up possibilities for increased sales and personalized campaigns.
- With the rise of virtual bot versions of themselves on social media, users may do the legwork for marketers by inputting personal data to create accurate AI clones.
While everyone's been freaking out over generative AI, an AI revolution has been quietly raging in the world of wearable devices. It's poised to change everything about how your organization understands and discovers customers, and how it markets products and services to the public. To keep current in the game, companies need to start exploring the ways they can leverage wearable AI technology to create hyper-personalized marketing strategies for unprecedented customer engagement.
First, let's look at what's already available:
Humane Ai Pin
The Humane Ai Pin website emphasizes user-data capture by asserting users can ask the AI Pin “anything anywhere and at anytime” (sic). Users can “capture the moment, just as you see it.” The pin's “Ai Mic even steps in to remember important information you don't want to forget.”
The examples of conversational interactions include areas marketers would likely target. Just substitute “McDonalds” for “Moon Phases”:
User: “What's that exhibit Ava texted me to go see?”
Pin: “Ava recommended Moon Phases: A New Understanding”
User: “Can I still see it?”
Pin: “Yes, it's open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 7pm.”
User: “Remember that I want to go there before I leave.”
This snippet is essentially an appeal to eBay:
User: “How much is a vintage photograph of a total eclipse going for?”
Pin: “Vintage photographs of total eclipses range in price from $12.99 to $23.90 on your favorite auction site.”
Humane's website says the Ai Pin will “keep your health on track.” As in this exchange:
User: “How much sugar is in this?”
The camera analyzes the object.
Pin: “A whole dragonfruit contains 7.31 grams of sugar.”
User: “Can I eat this?”
Pin: “Eating a whole dragonfruit would exceed your sugar goal.”
It tracks your activity and nutrition goals. Presumably, it will suggest the user buy specific products as a way of “helping you understand the energy you're taking in and the energy you're putting out.”
Oura Smart Ring
You don't need to interact with users to understand them (or improve their lives). The Oura Smart Ring continually collects user data on over 20 biometrics. It also tracks your movements via your smartphone's GPS—so it knows when you're cheating on your diet. Though Oura's website focuses on health and peacefulness: “Oura helps you find and embrace restorative moments throughout your day,” the folks at Oura must understand the value of all that user data.
The more you wear it, the site states, “the more personalized your insights become.” Oura tracks sleep, activity, stress, heart rate, heart health, body temperature, and blood O2. Oura also links with an array of “trusted health apps” to enable an even broader picture of the user's well-being. Just think of all the marketing opportunities!
Brilliant Labs Frame AI Glasses
Frame AI Glasses give users “AI Superpowers” by combining “digital and physical as one reality,” while giving marketers the power to track everything the user sees! Like the Ai Pin, the glasses provide interaction based on the visual and audio analysis of its environment. But unlike the Pin, the multimodal Frame Glasses are generative (e.g., can display your couch in a different color). Users can even search the live web for objects they see. The web copy sounds like more of an appeal to marketers than users: “Allow it to learn more about the places, products, shops, and processes you engage with on a daily basis.”
The localized, hyper-personalized marketing opportunities are insane, and Brilliant Labs wants you to know it:
User: ‘Where can I find those sneakers?'”
Glasses: “Those sneakers are available online and at a store close by.”
Limitless Pendant
Like the Ai Pin and Glasses, the AI Pendant from Limitless provides “Personalized AI powered by what you've seen, said, or heard,” (though it lacks a camera). Limitless ambitiously declares the pendant “augments human intelligence to overcome the brain's limitations.” In actuality, it's a fancy note taker. Pendant “remembers what you say throughout the day.” Notably, the pendant is always listening. “Consent Mode” turns this off, but “is off by default.” Finally, the pendant “Integrates seamlessly with all the technology you already use” (read: your data is liable to go anywhere).
The company promises the device will “eventually” be HiPAA compliant. Just as disturbing, Limitless is working on “agents”—AI personalities that will “take actions on your behalf, doing things exactly the way you'd have done it.”
Friend AI Pendant
For My TabAl, Inc., creepiness is the brand. Their AI “friend” is “not imaginary.” An apocalyptic “Reveal Trailer” features young users talking to their pendant as if it were human (though the friend's response only appears on their phone). One user's pendant trash-talks him as he plays a video game with (real) friends. The scene is strange in two ways. One: the device is somehow aware a game is happening. Two: the pendant seemingly interjects out of nowhere. Why? Because the pendant's mic is always on: “your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts.” And because they “have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
In another scene, when the pendant asks, “How's the falafel?” a user responds, “I could eat one every day.” Another cue to marketers. Though positioned as “memory assistants,” these AI devices could just as easily be called marketing assistants. “The more you talk to it, the more you build up a relationship with it. And that's really the whole goal of the product,” Friend founder Avi Schiffmann told Fast Company, “it's overhearing everything…it's proactively interjecting.”
Unprecedented, ongoing customer insights
Never has a wearable been able to learn so much about a user—and continuously learn more. These devices literally see what brands the user wears, what products they consume, where and when they shop. AI wearables also continuously eavesdrop to learn the user's interests, likes, dislikes, and everything else. Finally, the devices can engage in conversation. They can ask the user questions, offer suggestions, recommend products, etc. All in real-time.
But when it comes to AI wearables, the real differentiator is the “friendship factor.” By infusing these devices with human-like personalities, users develop trusting relationships with them. I suspect the bond will grow deeper over time as the device gains a deeper understanding for the best way to interact with the user to elicit the strongest response. With this bond also comes trust. A recent OpenAi GPT-4o System Card warns, “the ability to complete tasks for the user, while also storing and ‘remembering' key details and using those in the conversation, creates both a compelling product experience and the potential for over-reliance and dependence.”
A new social media trend is the generation of AI “girlfriends” and “boyfriends.” Soon, AI wearable companies will be able to leverage these personas as trusted (even, adored) sales-bots. In time, the integration of data from multiple streams and devices will further inform hyper-personalized marketing campaigns by making connections that enable new levels of understanding (e.g., relationships between emotion, sounds, objects, and locations).
In short, constant conversational interaction transforms an AI wearable into a virtual, trusted traveling sales-bot—one that potentially understands the user better than the user herself.
The final kicker
Instagram users are already creating digital bot versions of themselves. Naturally, they're highly motivated to input personal data (hobbies, habits, likes and dislikes, etc.) to create the most accurate AI clone possible—essentially doing all the legwork for marketers. Marketers would then be able to create highly focused, hyper-personalized campaigns, and let users sell products and services … to themselves!
