Starting with smart glasses, Awear gives people greater control over their AI agents while enabling brands to create differentiated experiences across devices

MAUI, Hawaii, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Awear emerged from stealth today at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit with a cross-device, context-aware, multimodal intelligence layer for personal AI, built around a simple idea: your AI agent should belong to you, not to a device, an app, or a technology company.

Starting with smart glasses, Awear lets people create and shape their own private AI agents — agents that can move with them across different devices and different brands.

For device makers, that creates a new model. Rather than surrendering the customer experience to a third-party AI assistant, brands can build their own distinctive experiences around the customer's agent, differentiate their products and maintain a direct relationship with the people who buy them.

"Devices are becoming companions," said Dr. Ash Saulsbury, founder and CEO of Awear. "They'll know us, talk to us, and be with us all day. But the memories at the center of that relationship shouldn't belong to the company that made your glasses or your phone. They should belong to you."

"You should be able to shape your agents around who you are and take them with you as your devices change. At the same time, the brands you choose should be able to create extraordinary experiences and build their own relationship with you. Awear is building the platform that makes both possible."

That distinction becomes increasingly important as AI moves beyond phones and computers into the devices people wear throughout the day. When AI can see what people see, hear what they hear and understand the context around them, an assistant is no longer an application. It becomes a persistent interface between people and their digital world.

Awear is designed so the interface is controlled by the individual.

Saulsbury founded Awear after a career spent building many of the technologies now converging in AI-powered eyewear. At Apple's Advanced Technology Group, he worked on core technologies behind products including AirPods and Apple Watch. At Meta, he spent two years incubating the technology and design behind its Ray-Ban smart glasses. At Microsoft, he led the AR1 silicon program.

Smart glasses are the starting point, not the boundary.

Awear is building its platform so a person's agent can ultimately move across the devices they carry, wear and drive — and into the robotic systems they interact with — while preserving continuity of identity, preferences and context.

The hardware can change. Your agent remains yours.

For brands, that portability does not mean becoming invisible. Awear gives each device maker the ability to create experiences unique to its products, design, and customers. An eyewear brand can define how its glasses look, feel, and behave. An automotive company can create experiences specific to the vehicle. Another device maker can build entirely different capabilities — all while interacting with the same agents the customer has chosen and shaped.

This gives brands a way to participate directly in the AI era without handing their customers over to someone else's ecosystem.

Saulsbury is joined by three co-founders bringing expertise across trust, AI, technology, and luxury consumer brands.

Jan Eißfeldt, former Global Head of Trust and Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation, has spent his career building trust systems at global scale, researching AI architectures, and helping define industry standards. Jennifer Van Beek has shaped brand experiences for LVMH and other leading prestige houses. Lila Tretikov, former Deputy CTO of Microsoft and former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, has built and led major technology and AI organizations.

Eißfeldt and Tretikov are leading Awear's privacy and trust architecture. At Awear, privacy, trust and safety are not features added after the product is built. They are part of the architecture from the start.

"AI will only fulfill its promise if people trust it," said Eißfeldt. "And trust starts with who is in control. Your agent will know more about you than almost any technology you have used before. That information should work for you, not become the product."

"Follow the money: if your business depends on advertising to people and monetizing their attention or data, privacy will always be in tension with profit. We have a chance to establish stronger norms before AI-enabled devices become ubiquitous. That requires a different kind of company, built from the beginning around a different set of incentives."

At Snapdragon Summit today, Saulsbury took the stage to announce Awear's technology and preview how personal agents can move across smart glasses while brands create their own differentiated experiences around them.

Built on Snapdragon® AR1+, Awear is already working with its first group of device and eyewear partners.

"Great brands build worlds. They give people a way of seeing, a way of carrying themselves, and a sense of who they are when they wear them," said Jennifer Van Beek, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Awear. "Until now, adding AI meant handing the most intimate part of that world to someone else. Awear lets brands bring the most advanced intelligence to their customers without giving up what makes them distinctive: their design language, their values, and their point of view."

For more information and to be the first to receive product release updates, visit awear.ai.

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