Earlier this year, a partner sent our team a pair of AI glasses. We were not entirely sure what we would do with them.
That is probably where most marketing teams are right now. The category is moving fast: Global shipments of AI smart glasses reached 8.5 million units last year, and is expected to hit 22 million this year, a 157% year-over-year increase. The revenue trajectory is steeper still: The market is projected to reach $6 billion in 2026, a year-over-year increase of 178%, reports Smart Analytics Global. Apple and Samsung are entering the category this year. The demos look compelling, and the use cases seem obvious — until you try to build them into an actual workflow.
At Andava, we spent the past several months figuring out where these devices genuinely help and where they fall short. Here is that account, including the parts the product pages skip.
The problem we were trying to solve
We run a digital marketing agency, which means a significant portion of our work happens in situations where documentation is genuinely difficult: client sessions, field visits, events, conversations that shift the direction of a project. The moments that tend to matter most are almost never the moments when someone has a camera ready.
The research quantifies what practitioners already feel. A 2025 study cited by AirCaps, drawing on foundational memory research by Murre and Dros, found that 56% of meeting content is forgotten within an hour and 70% is gone by end of day. Salesforce’s 2024 State of Sales report found that account executives spend only 28% of their working week actually selling. The rest is consumed by administrative work, including the effort to reconstruct conversations after the fact.
Phones do not fix this. Pulling one out to record changes the conversation. Even reaching for a notepad does. There is a quality of attention in a room when both people are fully present, and trying to capture what you are hearing at the same moment you are hearing it works against that. The settings that produce your best material are usually the same ones where recording feels most intrusive.
We were not looking for a gadget. We were looking for something that closed that gap without creating another.
The first week: What we expected vs. what happened
The glasses arrived in a standard box. The first thing anyone on the team noticed was the weight – lighter than most sunglasses, closer to a normal frame than anything we had associated with the “smart glasses” category. That was the first small recalibration.
Day one was internal. We wore them around the office, worked through voice activation and walked through the camera and recording controls. The form factor stopped feeling unusual by mid-afternoon. The self-consciousness that comes with any new device faded faster than expected. By day two, we stopped thinking about what we were wearing.
The first client meeting with the glasses on was a strategy session with a retail brand we had been working with for several months. We mentioned at the start that we were wearing a recording device and asked if that was fine. It was. The session ran about an hour. Somewhere around the 25-minute mark, we noticed we had completely forgotten the glasses were there — not because they vanished, but because there was nothing to manage.
The insight came the next morning. Reviewing the transcript before a follow-up call, we were looking for a specific phrase the client had used around their fourth-quarter priority. What we found instead was a sentence from about 40 minutes in – almost parenthetical at the time – that turned out to be the actual brief. The client had said it once, moved on, and neither party had flagged it as significant. It was the most useful output from that meeting, and it came from a passive capture rather than deliberate note-taking.
One thing that did not work: the footage backlog. In the first two weeks, we recorded more than we reviewed. By the end of week two, we had a growing stack of files that no one had time to sort. This is a process failure, not a technology failure. It is worth noting, though, because it is predictable and easy to avoid.
We added a simple daily review step of about 10 minutes, tagging and routing anything worth keeping, and the backlog stopped. We built that process after the problem appeared, not before. Anyone deploying these on a team should build the review step first.
What is actually working
Hands-free documentation during client sessions
The recording capability has delivered the most consistent value. Having smart recording glasses on during a client walkthrough means the conversation proceeds naturally.
We were walking a consumer goods client through their distribution facility. The operations lead, not the marketing director, mentioned, almost in passing, that the company had recently changed its fulfillment cycle from weekly to biweekly. That detail reshaped the content calendar we had been planning. We caught it in the transcript. Without the glasses, it would have lived only in whatever notes one of us managed to scribble down while keeping up with a walking tour.
A note on the technical side: the glasses record audio and video locally, then sync to a companion app. Transcription is handled through Meta AI or an external service. It is not automatic out of the box. We export audio from sessions and run it through a transcription tool separately. The extra step takes a few minutes and is easy to build into a routine, but it is worth knowing it exists.
Multi-stakeholder meetings
Client sessions with four or five people on the other side are where conventional notes break down fastest. Different people say different things, conversations overlap and the meeting summary usually reflects whoever spoke last rather than what was actually agreed.
We had a brand strategy session in the spring with five client stakeholders. We thought we had alignment on direction by the end of the meeting. However, the transcript showed two people had said opposite things at different points in the conversation, neither of whom had noticed the conflict. We flagged both quotes in our follow-up. The client resolved the disagreement before it became a problem during execution. That output – surfacing a real discrepancy while it was still easy to address – is the kind of value that does not show up in a demo.
Live events
At a technology conference this year, a product lead from one of our clients said something in a 90-second hallway exchange that became the seed for a three-month content series. The quote was specific, unscripted and said in passing, the kind of thing that sounds different when someone says it naturally versus when they say it into a camera. We had it. The content team had it the next morning.
The best footage from live events tends to happen in exactly the situations where no dedicated camera is present. Having glasses on during those transitions, such as the break between sessions, the side conversation at lunch, has given us material we simply would not have gotten otherwise.
According to Advertising Week, marketing professionals are among the earliest enterprise adopters of AI glasses precisely because of this need for ambient, context-rich capture.
A few things to plan for
Battery life requires honest scheduling. Current devices comfortably cover a few hours of active recording before needing a charge. At a full-day event or a back-to-back client day, we have had glasses run low before we were done. The workaround is simply a charging window during lunch or a session break. However, it requires planning your day around it, not just hoping it works out. The average selling price has settled around $360, which is reasonable for what the hardware does, and battery performance is improving across generations.
Right now, though, it is a real scheduling constraint, not a theoretical one.
Footage volume and the review process. As described above, we built up a backlog in the first two weeks. The fix was a daily tagging-and-filing step that took about 10 minutes. What we did not have immediately available was a single searchable place for transcripts linked to the right client files. We set that up manually. Teams with an established CRM workflow can route transcripts there; teams without one will need to decide where recordings live before they start accumulating. The question is not hard to answer, but it needs to be answered before the first event, not after.
Being clear with people you are recording. Our approach is simple: we mention it at the start of every session. “We are wearing glasses that record; is that fine with you?” In every session we have run, the answer has been yes. Most current devices include a visible indicator light, which handles ambient transparency. The one area that required more thought was events with large, mixed audiences, where individual consent is not practical. For those situations, we stick to recording the space and content rather than directing the lens at specific people in private conversations. That boundary has been easy to hold and has not limited what we capture.
Storage and file management. Footage syncs to a companion app and, from there, requires manual routing to wherever your team stores client assets. There is no automatic integration with most CRMs or content management systems, at least not without custom setup. We handle it manually at the daily review step. It is not a significant burden, but anyone expecting plug-and-play connectivity to their existing stack should test that assumption before a major deployment.
Before you buy in
Integration is what separates a useful device from a workflow change. Transcripts and footage are only as valuable as the system they flow into. If recordings sit in an app that no one checks, they will not get used. Before deploying, decide where recordings go, who reviews them and how they connect to the tools your team already uses. That setup takes an hour, not a week, but skipping it is how you end up with a media silo.
Comfort matters more than the spec sheet. These are glasses. They live on someone’s face for 8 to 10 hours at a trade show. Weight and fit determine whether the device gets worn through day two or ends up in a bag by noon. The Oakley Meta models, the HSTN and Vanguard, represented over 30% of Meta’s Q4 2025 shipments, partly because of their sports-focused weight profile. For long event days, comfort is a real specification.
The window to build experience is narrowing. Samsung and Google both entered the market in 2026. Apple is expected in 2027. As the ecosystem grows, so will the expectation that marketing teams can work in it. Teams building workflows now will have a head start when the hardware improves and the category becomes standard. Teams waiting for a perfect product may find the market has matured around them.
Start with one use case. One person, one type of session, one event. The teams that struggle with adoption are consistently the ones that tried to change too much before they understood what worked for their specific context. The cost of a wrong hypothesis is much lower at a small scale.
The bottom line
We were skeptical before we started. We are not anymore. The glasses address a real problem: the gap between what happens in a room and what gets documented afterward. The smart glasses do it without requiring people to change how they behave in a conversation. That is genuinely useful.
They are also not frictionless. Battery management, footage review, transcript routing and being upfront with clients all require deliberate setup.
None of it is complicated, but none of it takes care of itself either. The teams that get the most out of these devices are the ones that treat it as a workflow question, build the process before the first deployment and start with one situation they want to improve rather than trying to change everything at once.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
Bonus: Here’s another first-hand agency account: Using AI agents in its marketing process.
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