The Pocket Barrier Is Disappearing

There's a moment I keep imagining. Someone walks by me at a conference, glances in my direction, and their glasses quietly pull up my LinkedIn. They already know who I am before I say hello.

That's not dystopian fiction. It's a logical outcome of what's coming, and I'm not sure we've sat with it long enough.

The Fortune article about Qualcomm's CEO frames it as a hardware transition: smartphones give way to glasses, pins, pendants, devices that ride along with you rather than sitting in your pocket (it's already starting - I carry a Plaud). And that framing is accurate. But the more interesting shift isn't the device. It's the removal of the friction we've quietly depended on.

Right now, there's a pocket barrier between us and everything AI can do. You have to pull out your phone, open an app, type something, wait. That barrier is annoying, but it's also a pause. It's the moment between impulse and action where you might think twice. When I say out loud, 'Buy the newest Call of Duty and make sure it's downloaded when I get home,' there's no pause. There's no cart. There's no checkout screen that makes me reconsider. Impulse buying isn't going up by a little. It's going up by a lot.

And that's just commerce. Apply the same logic to travel, to decisions, to relationships. 'Plan a spring break trip to Turks and Caicos' becomes a command, not a project. The cognitive overhead disappears. Which sounds like progress, until you realize that some of that overhead was doing useful work.

Our teams are building the early edges of this. Agents that automate workflows, that act without being prompted, that surface information before the question is asked. The productivity gains are real. But I keep coming back to what the Qualcomm CEO said almost as an aside: the question of trust, and which companies deserve access to the most intimate parts of your daily life, will be the battleground of the next decade.

That's not a technology question. That's a character question.

The companies that win won't just have the best product. They'll be the ones people actually trust to be inside every conversation, every glance, every purchase. And most of us haven't decided who that is yet.