Ask an average executive to think about enterprise use cases for smartglasses, and they’ll likely come back with some version of the following: a tech wears glasses that are functional (read: ugly) and gets some sort of remote guidance, either by listening to someone who can see what they see or by following augmented instructions on the lenses. And while this use case is certainly valid, it’s not exactly the most exciting, nor does it invite many thoughts about scale. Smartglasses could be written off as a “nice to have” with some interesting applications, something that will be gotten around to right after they figure out all the other new technologies.

But with the launch of Snap’s Specs on September 16, this could all change. Kicking off a packed fall for smartglasses (Meta is rumored to be announcing a new mixed reality headset and camera-free glasses at Connect next week; Google is launching audio glasses this fall; XReal’s Aura glasses are also releasing soon), Snap is racing to the front of the category. And while CEO Evan Spiegel talked specifically about smartglasses and enterprise in his keynote, the more interesting part of the event came earlier, with the announcement of Specs Intelligence.

“Specs are part of an intelligence system that lives across your Mac and your iPhone, and we call this Specs Intelligence,” says Spiegel. “Specs Intelligence provides proactive recommendations based on your real-world context. It connects to the apps and tools that you already use, it learns your goals and priorities, and it helps you focus on what matters most.”

A promotional video went on to explain: “Most software waits for you. It waits for you to open an app, remember a task or figure out the right [next step]. This is Specs Intelligence. It connects across three [devices]: Mac, iPhone and Specs…Under the hood, Specs builds a private context layer around your life: your portrait, your key corners and your long-term goals. Your portrait is Specs’ understanding of you, your people, your work, your patterns and the things you care about. Corners help Specs organize different parts of your life, like work, family, travel, health and relationships, so the right things surface at the right moments. And goals help Specs understand the bigger things you’re working toward, not just the tasks in front of you. When it handles busy work, like drafting a message or canceling a subscription you’ve been meaning to cancel, it always asks before taking action. You stay completely in control. That trust is built on privacy. You decide which apps and devices to connect to, so you decide what Specs sees and what it does.”

All of these capabilities are what will take Specs from a nice-to-have on the shop floor to a must-have for every white collar worker. When organizations want to deploy new technology, they want to do it at scale, and with the idea that devices can be used for multiple purposes across multiple departments. Specs could be the first glasses to be adopted by everyone from the C-Suite to the frontlines. The same context layer briefing a VP walking into a client meeting and surfacing the right work order for a technician, on the same fleet of devices managed by the same IT team, is a huge win.

There are some significant challenges for Snap, however. The high price point ($2,195) is easier to swallow for enterprise than for individual consumers, but still a barrier. And while Specs are certainly more fashionable than some legacy glasses, they’re still fairly large and clunky. A few generations from now they’ll likely be smaller, but there could be pushback to wearing them all day in their current form. And while Snap doesn’t have the baggage around privacy issues that Meta does, there is some negativity around the form factor as a whole that could slow adoption.

Another issue for the category at large is the lack of design principles and experts who are building in the space. Snap showed off several interesting demos and has done quite a lot to build a strong developer ecosystem, but there’s a lot of daylight between making a cool demo for a hackathon and deploying an experience across a Fortune 100 business. With shifts in the VR market, it’s likely that folks who built for enterprise in that space will transition to smartglasses. They already have experience explaining new tech to legacy players, building spatial workflows, and understanding how people interact with 3D objects. The key to success is understanding how to design useful experiences that don’t cause cognitive overload and, in Snap’s case, use Specs Intelligence to deliver the information someone needs at the moment they need it and nothing more.

Even in a crowded market, Specs is set up to be a leader and potentially own a category. The company that wins might not be the one with the most fashionable glasses, but the one that everyone can wear and use on a daily basis.