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It may have taken more than a decade, but smart glasses are finally taking off. Sales of Meta Platforms’ Ray-Ban AI specs more than tripled last year to more than 7mn units. Yet shares in EssilorLuxottica, the €110bn Franco-Italian eyewear maker that makes the devices, have been falling. Squint a little, and that isn’t so strange after all.
It might seem like partnering with the Facebook owner on its next big thing is a win. After the false start of earlier models such as Google Glass, it’s now possible to see a future where smart eyewear — which allows consumers to receive notifications, access navigation and interact with AI from within their field of vision — could become ubiquitous. Smart glasses helped drive an 11 per cent increase in EssilorLuxottica’s sales in 2025.
And to the extent that the devices offer a valuable service to consumers sick of walking into lampposts as they peer into their smartphones, they will expand the market for all-day specs beyond those with impaired vision. EssilorLuxottica already has a big slice of the market, with brands including Ray-Ban, Oakley and Persol, alongside luxury licenses such as Chanel, Prada and Versace.
But there’s another way of seeing it. While the value of a pair of Ray-Bans comes from the brand itself and the quality of the frames, a big chunk of the value of a pair of smart Ray-Bans comes from something else: the software and apps being piped into the wearer’s pupils. As users prize the function more and more, they may care less about the form.
That’s already starting to happen with electric vehicles, where the real differentiator isn’t the engine but the software and screens that are loaded on to the chassis. It’s why newer upstarts such as Tesla and BYD have put a dent in legacy carmakers’ business. Smart watches, too, have reduced sales of ordinary mid-market timepieces: the number of Swiss watches sold globally has halved since 2000, according to the Swiss Watch Industry.
EssilorLuxottica already makes less profit on smart glasses than on its more traditional eyewear. Its operating margin fell 70 basis points to 16 per cent in 2025. And the market is getting crowded. Huawei and Alibaba already offer their own smart glasses. Apple may follow, and Google could try again. If glasses were merely stylish chunks of plastic and glass with brand cachet, they would have little chance. That’s no longer the case.
The big picture goes way beyond smart glasses. Investors have focused lately on the impact of AI on directly comparable services such as software. But as technology takes up more of the heavy lifting, physical and industrial goods, too, will face disruption. Glasses, cars, fridges, combine harvesters — even sectors that now seem far from AI’s reach will have to be viewed through a different lens.
camilla.palladino@ft.com
