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.