The quantified self-movement started in 2007. Users and tool makers shared an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking. This led to the advent of wearables.
Failure of Wearables
Wearables promised to lead to data-driven healthcare, greater health and fitness awareness, and a self-improvement culture. Cut to 2024, and we’re more obese and living more sedentary lifestyles than ever. It turns out that it’s pretty simple to understand what is healthy or not healthy.
The dessert will spike your glucose. The drink will make you sleep worse. Being healthy is a simple, hard thing. Eat healthy (until you’re 80% full, and if you don’t have allergies– low carb, high protein), and exercise. That’s all. We don’t need wearables to tell us this.
That’s not to say the wearable revolution was useless.
The Success of Wearables
There has been innovation in sensor technology, aesthetic design, and form factors of wearables. Data collection has improved. When running studies, wearables are more accurate than self-reporting activity.
The wearable market has grown. It’s a subset of enthusiasts who use wearables, but many of them exist. Similar to cars, each generation of wearables incrementally improves.
The Future of Wearables
Looking forward, what’s going to be game-changing is incorporating LLMs into your life. Picture the perfect life/work coach. They don’t have enough info even if you meet them multiple times each week. Our words fail us:
A successful CEO described every detail of his work to a CEO coach. The coach followed him for a week— half the things the CEO told the coach the CEO didn’t actually do. Half the stuff the CEO did, he never mentioned to the coach. Actions and words are different.
Someone can’t advise you unless they watch you play the game. Similarly, you can’t tell a player how to improve from reading the news reports.
Imagine wearing a sensor that records all your activity. You tell it your goals. The sensor knows when you exercise, how you talk (cadence, tone), and how others respond. It knows your calendar, what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it.
The audio and video content will be processed securely and unable to be seen or reviewed by anyone. With all this data, you can have the best life coach of all time.
It will be real-time, optimized around your personal goals. Optimized around who you want to be. It can baseline you off your past self, tracking how you treat others, spend your time, and what you say vs what you do.
The most competent people are constantly iterating– running experiments and altering their worldviews as they get more info. An AI associate will make it drastically easier for everyone to be competent, happier, and healthier.
Applications in Real Estate
Using the same framework for real estate institutions– right now, no institution has the data necessary to optimize their workflows. Few even track how fast they respond to prospects or tenants or the NPS score of tenants. Most importantly, no real estate group knows at a granular level how much each function of real estate costs from a time and spend perspective.
These details are impossible to break down because the technology doesn’t exist. To collect this data, we don’t need managers, vendors, or tenants sporting wearables; we need a singular system of record. The existing myriad of point solutions and shoddy API integrations make this impossible.
The purpose of tools is to augment our abilities. An AI associate will be the ultimate tool. On the owner’s side, they should be able to set and track KPIs. On the management’s side, competence can be trained. Operators will have an AI associate nudging them to make better decisions while monitoring the results.
Catching people in the moment of a decision can make all the difference. This is only possible by having the data in one system. That’s why we’re building Ender.