Let's predict the future of smartphones in the workplace (and beyond!)

About 20 years ago, I was doing my vocational training, and my colleagues and I had to design a futuristic product that a telecommunications provider might sell in the future. Today, our idea exists as a (niche) product: what we now know as a modern smartphone with a built-in projector. It was really amusing to see how, over the course of three years, we’ve witnessed the early days of smartphones and the miniaturization of projectors. But it’s almost a pity that the other teams’ ideas haven’t become a reality yet. If they had, we’d have teleportation and would be making video calls using holograms projected from a ring. 😄

At this point, it’s really difficult to predict what the future holds. In terms of design, smartphones and tablets seem to have reached their final form. A major technological leap and smartphone challenger would be the development of market-ready, minimally invasive BCIs (brain-computer interfaces). But I don’t see that happening in the near future. Instead, smartphones and tablets will likely take over more of the desktop and laptop market. Thanks to a desktop mode (😉), more and more everyday tasks can be handled using a single device. (personal and workplace) Accessories like smart glasses will likely remain a niche product, even though they’re becoming an increasingly valuable aid for example for people with visual challenges thanks to more AI-powered features. (like Gemini live)

My prediction is as much effort is being put into glasses, pins, camera enabled earbuds etc, we won’t see a true mobile phone killer emerge. The mobile phone and/or tablets didn’t kill off laptops or the need for them. They just became a new tool optimized for different environments and many use cases were then developed around them. Once you had a camera, touchscreen, and GPS, connected to the internet you could build so many new paradigms on top which then led to Instagram, Uber, etc being built on top of those rails. Uber led to Uber Eats (and other delivery services), Uber Eats led to ghost kitchens. The mobile revolution truly changed the landscape of the world in that regard, but despite all that, people still ALSO have laptops for other use cases.

Looking forward, we obviously see more conversational UX and personal context within AI platforms driving new modern paradigms. We will see more temporal apps and user interfaces emerge layered on top of these systems and a desire for the technology to become increasingly frictionless and to disappear more into the background. Despite these shifts I still don’t see any of them being mobile phone form factor killers. An AI assistant enhanced set of earbuds that have cameras for added context will help unlock new use cases and drive friction down, but I still firmly believe we will have phone style devices in our pockets for years to come. 

Here is a dystopian prediction that I do have however. Smartphones have so much personal context about us. They in theory know more about us than we even know about ourselves. Every photo we’ve ever taken, geotagged and timestamped. Every app we’ve ever installed, opened, forgotten, and deleted. Every hobby we’ve started and abandoned etc.

The same very much applies in a work setting. Every meeting every attended, message ever sent etc. This personal knowledge graph and context will be something that enterprises will want to own, and mine. We see Meta already getting patents on virtual avatar memorials of an individual you can interact with post death as form of metaverse afterlife. I would predict this is very much going to apply to enterprise settings, not just when people die, but when they leave a company.

Imagine a company being able to ask “you”, or at least a virtual clone of you, that has your entire work history about the history of some client relationship or work project, long after you have gone. I am already asking my own employees that are rolling off an account to use extensive prompting to generate an account transition report for the next person picking up after them. The same applies to employees that are leaving, in good standing, I ask them to provide as much of a download as possible through AI prompting. The thing is I am currently asking permission for all of that. It won’t surprise me to see in the future employers wanting to own all of that directly, without asking for permission, It will become a requirement of employment that all interactions you have with company technology while on the job will be recorded, indexed, and searchable by an AI tool. this way regardless of if you leave, all of your personal context will be preserved. Smartphones, either issued by an Enterprise, or BYOD and managed by a corporate EMM will be one of the primary mechanisms through which that context and data is collected. 

I think, i can agree to nearly all which was written here already (you guys wrote a lot text 😅).

In my opinion, we won’t move away from smartphones or so in general but they will develop further, maybe change their physical appearance several times. Also new devices will be added to them, as already mentioned, to work together (some do already) like connected screens, watches, ear buds and so on.

But outside of this, just to focus on home office from my point of view, think of more and more houses/appartments getting smart (i personally just rebuild my smart home and still ongoing). So, you could think of the house itself being included smart into home office (light adjustment, smart speakers/microphones or even camera turned on/off on predefined but automated scenarios, same maybe for the connected (wireless) display smartly switched when switching rooms and so on).

Just to be clear: I don’t say i need or want that (I’m quite oldschool in some of that stuff) but there are possibilities which also could take effect in offices as well for example in meeting rooms fully prepared (non physical) when you arrive.

I just wanted to show up even more possibilities will rise, some will make sense, some maybe not and scrapped again.

But for the business side, the things i’m most likely looking forward in future is: To please get full access/control on fully managed devices soon, including versioning on apps and firmware updates. This will give us already a huge improvement.

Sorry but this side node needed to be mentioned 😁

I have to agree with ​@Moombas here, so much text but all of them I can fully relate to. ​@Alex_Muc , you truly are a great visionair haha! 

For me, I think new developments would not beat the phone, I think its more in how we life our day to day lives. As mentioned, smart homes are a big development that’s getting more and more common. Maybe even more for smart buildings. So much stuff gets automated in our lives, yet I truly believe we haven’t reached the top regarding automations. I really think the next “ one more thing” moment will be around some sort of automation / AI development. Something that truly makes our live easier. The smartphone will be a part of that, i’m sure. But i’m think about something that thinks for us, that does not require interaction via a device. 

But thats the positive side of automation, i’m also worried about the downside like automating weapons like DoD wants to accomplish with Anthropic currently being sued for saying no to this. 

But back to the original question, evolving of smart devices, I don’t think there is much evolving going to happen anytime soon. The development on that level has been stuck for years now. I really think it would become just a client to something bigger.