For the last few years, Meta seemed to be on the defensive. In 2024, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage of his company’s flagship Connect event wearing a shirt that read “AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL” (basically, “Zuck or nothing”); last year, the event was marred by demos that crashed and glitched . But the 2026 Connect keynote, which aired at 7pm EST on September 23, showed off a much more relaxed and comfortable leadership team; Zuckerberg’s top this time around proclaimed “Building is my Love Language.”

This could be because, despite lawsuits and criticism, Meta knows that its new devices and software are basically inevitable. Its Muse AI agent , which was released a few weeks ago, is at the top of the Apple App Store. It remains the leader in an ever-more-crowded field of smartglasses, and announced a new pair that should quell some of the previous privacy concerns. And despite claims that virtual reality is dead, it announced a new headset that could be a serious competitor to the Apple Vision Pro.

All of this seems great for Meta, but enterprises now face a new question – how to handle and build for these new tools and devices. Companies could write off glasses as fringe technology, or try to ban them outright , but that increasingly seems like it will be about as successful as the camera phone bans passed by some schools in the UK back in 2004. One of the new devices released by Meta is a pair of camera-free glasses, which is unfortunate timing for some competitors who used their lack of a camera as a selling point. Meta also used the keynote to emphasize privacy features, which should make adoption easier for organizations concerned with how their data is handled and shared.

How should a company approach the rising popularity of these new glasses? First off, by building applications for them. Just as people started buying smartphones for personal use and then bringing them to work, enterprises can start building for the devices that people will be using anyway. There are several examples of this already in the market, including applications that let someone see what a user is seeing and offer guidance – this is fantastic for training junior employees who work in maintenance, for instance. Warehouse workers can simply follow directions in their glasses, rather than looking down at a tablet and up again hundreds of times during a shift, and can speak into their glasses to report misplaced or out of stock products rather than taking time out to type into a device.

For white collar workers, a constant conversation with an aware agent can unlock all sorts of shortcuts. During Connect, Zuckerberg asked his agent to schedule a meeting, and this is the type of thing that can be done seamlessly in conversation rather than over smartphones and texts moving forward. Muse already integrates with Granola and will likely add other note-taking apps, and this could create a new and smarter workflow. Imagine two colleagues chatting in a hallway and one mentioning a follow up call – Muse and Granola could simply create that meeting and send invites with no additional work for the co-workers.

Meta almost seemed to reposition that camera capabilities away from capturing photos and videos of people to capturing data to be analyzed. People can object to taking a photo of a person to be shared to social media, but it’s harder to object to capturing an image of an object and asking Muse to find it in a different color or find the best price on it in a ten mile radius. For retail workers, this will make life easier; no more checking databases to find out if another store has an item in stock, or when it will be reshipped. And all that data, which was largely lost to conversation beforehand, can be captured and used to update inventory and product options.

At the start of the year, several smartglasses were showcased at CES, and the buzz began to build. But this fall is when the tide really began to turn. Last week saw the launch of Snap’s Specs, and Google and XReal are expected to launch glasses this fall. On September 22, Vonder was also announced, featuring a pair of AI-powered glasses that can record conversations and create a personal memory graph for a user.

The glasses are absolutely coming, and enterprises need to position themselves to take advantage. Those who move first will reap rewards, while those that hesitate will be left behind.