The next big frontier for AI is integration into the physical world

Wrapping up my retrospective on Austin Tech Week: a diverse range of presenters and panels offered further evidence that AI and spatial computing are intertwining ever more tightly.

Here are three themes I heard at Austin Tech Week:

🌎 AI models will be integrated with the physical world.

Presenters from Meta shared their enthusiasm about “spatial AI,” which is what they’re calling AI that can impact your environment. Meta isn’t the only company attempting this: others like Archetype AI, Ramblr.AI, and Sanctuary AI (not to mention robotics-adjacent heavy-hitters NVIDIA and Toyota) are tackling this from various angles. Whether you call it “spatial AI,” “physical AI,” “large behavior models,” or “contextual AI,” there’s enormous appetite to take AI out of the chat window and into the real world.

💲 The highest-value opportunities for AI are spatial.

Meanwhile, investors are eager for AI penetration into markets like logistics and manufacturing: businesses with physical workflows and lots of paper, relatively untouched by traditional information technology. AI presents new opportunities to design information tools that complement these businesses’ existing workflows, rather than trying to shoehorn in screens. In the words of Sentiero Ventures Managing Partner David Evans, “[Until now], we’ve architected business processes around the tech that we have,” but AI can enable us to “rethink how work is going to get done from first principles.”

👋 Hands-free work is already providing value.

When asked about their own primary AI use cases, half the presenters (in the panels I attended) discussed the ability to work hands-free. AI voice communication has gotten to a point where it is a real, viable productivity tool, even while using your hands or body to multitask, further unshackling users from screens.

AI is revitalizing spatial computing

With renewed attention to smart glasses thanks to Meta’s Orion and Apple’s own recent explorations, spatial computing is once again on people’s radar, and with good reason: there are large, untapped B2B opportunities if tech can break away from traditional screens. AI’s natural interface capabilities and multimodality are proving to be powerful, leverageable tools for doing just that and bringing information technology into the physical world.

As a researcher, strategist, and consultant, I’ve spent my career understanding how spatial computing can provide value for users. If you’re a product leader looking to build a more defensible strategy for spatial computing, AI, or other emerging tech, here are three ways I can help:

⁉️ Answering your “unanswerable” questions through specialized customer research (like “will people actually use this?”)

🚀 Workshopping innovation tools and techniques with your team

🏎️ Accelerating your design process through coaching and targeted problem solving

I’d love to help you take the next big step on your emerging tech product.