Beyond the laptop

For decades, office work has happened in front of a screen. First the desktop, then the laptop, then the phone in every pocket. Each of them asks us to stop, look down, open an app and type.

That arrangement is not going away soon. But the largest companies in technology are now spending billions on the idea that it is no longer enough. When OpenAI bought Jony Ive's device startup io in May 2025, NPR reported Sam Altman's reasoning: laptops and phones were not built for AI. Seventeen months later, the outline of what comes next is visible. It is less about one new gadget than about where the assistant lives.

OpenAI's third device

The io deal was worth just under 6.5 billion dollars, NPR reported, then OpenAI's largest acquisition. Altman described the mission as a family of devices that let people use AI to create. Court filings in a trademark dispute added detail. In June 2025, io's head of hardware declared that the prototype was neither an in ear device nor a wearable, and TechCrunch reported that Altman had told staff it would fit in a pocket or sit on a desk, a third device next to the phone and the laptop.

The timeline has slipped since. In a filing reported in February 2026, OpenAI said its first device would not ship to customers before the end of February 2027, and that it would not carry the name io. The company that started the race has not yet shown its entry. Its software has moved faster.

Meta bets on the face

Meta has the head start. EssilorLuxottica, which makes the Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses with Meta, said it sold more than 7 million AI glasses in 2025, up from 2 million in 2023 and 2024 combined. Counterpoint Research counted shipments of AI glasses up 263 percent in the first half of 2026, with Meta at about 94 percent of the glasses that have no display.

In September 2025 Meta added a screen: the Meta Ray-Ban Display, with a small display in one lens and a wristband that reads the muscle signals of the hand, for 799 dollars. At its Connect event on 23 September this year it showed audio glasses without a camera, lighter VR glasses for next spring, and a keychain sized device called Muse Charm, built for one thing: talking to Muse, Meta's new personal agent. In December 2025 it had already bought Limitless, a startup that made a pendant recording conversations, and moved the team into its wearables group.

Google, Apple and Samsung

Google is building the operating system rather than the frames. Samsung's Galaxy XR headset, launched in October 2025 at 1'799 dollars, was the first device on Android XR, and in April Samsung added the management tools companies need to roll it out in training, manufacturing, healthcare and retail. At its developer conference in May, Google said the first Android XR audio glasses, made with Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Samsung, would arrive this autumn, with display glasses as the next step. The same keynote introduced Gemini Spark, an agent that works in the background and acts on the user's behalf, designed to check before major actions.

Apple is the cautious one. In June the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that it had dropped the planned successors to its Vision Pro headset, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman describes the category as on ice. Gurman reports that Apple now aims for glasses without a display in late 2027, with cameras, speakers and Siri, and real augmented reality years further out.

The agent is the product

Put this autumn's launches side by side and a pattern appears. The hardware is modest: glasses that mostly listen and speak, a charm on a keychain, a pocket device still in development. The ambition sits in the software behind it.

Meta launched Muse in September as an agent that runs on its own secure computer with a browser, connects to email, calendars, payments and shopping, and keeps working after the user has left the app. On 29 September OpenAI introduced Dots, agents that pursue goals in the background, and TechCrunch noted that they are meant to work independently of any particular device. Instinct, an assistant people simply text, raised money at a valuation of 10 billion dollars in September, a month after its previous round.

The device becomes a window. The assistant is the same on the glasses, the phone, the laptop and the phone line, and it remembers what you asked yesterday. For companies that is the real change: not the frames, but who now stands between them and their customers.

How companies reach people now

A screen shows ten options and lets a person choose. An assistant speaking through a pair of glasses gives one answer, and an agent with a card on file may simply book. Instinct's founder said in September that more than half of the transactions on his platform are travel. Instinct now gives every user's agent its own email address, so the guest who writes to a hotel may be software acting for a person.

This moves the work upstream. The facts an assistant needs have to be stated plainly and the same everywhere: what you offer, for whom, at what price, when you are open, how to book. A booking that only works through a long form built for people may be skipped by an agent that can book next door without one.

Inside the company, the same assistants are arriving on every desk, and they are only as good as the knowledge they can reach: the prices, the rules, the clients, the way the company writes an offer. This is the work we do with Twin. A company's knowledge, rules, skills and integrations are built once and delivered as source code, so they work in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex today, or privately on Eigna, and travel with the assistant instead of staying inside one app. Cited covers the outside half: whether the assistants name you when buyers ask.

What does not move into the device is the part customers remember: the person who took the call, the judgement about what to promise, the taste in what is offered. The assistant can carry the facts. Someone still has to stand behind them.

What to do now

No company needs a strategy for glasses yet. Most need three plain things. Write down the facts about your company in one place and publish them the same way everywhere. Make the routine actions possible without friction: booking, ordering, asking for a quote. And connect your own assistants to your own knowledge before your customers' assistants start asking the questions.

The laptop will stay on the desk for a while. The assistant has already left it.