Quick answer: At Connect on September 23, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg pulled Muse Charm out of his pocket: a keychain-sized device with a fingerprint sensor, cameras, its own cellular connection, and an animated avatar called Jolly, ready to talk the second you tap it. People compare it to a Tamagotchi. But the pattern is one IoT people have seen for a decade: the device is never the hard part anymore. What it has to talk to, remember, and act on – that’s where it gets interesting. So for anyone building connected hardware: is your roadmap about the gadget, or about the software around it?
The shallow lesson: it’s a toy
Or its mirror, “hardware is the revolution.” Both miss where the work actually is.
The real lesson: form factors get weirder; the job underneath barely changes
Early IoT shipped a foldable phone you wore on your wrist and a smart collar that read your dog’s mood. Azati’s CMO Alena Busko remembers the wrist phone’s first enclosure: cardboard and sticky tape, bent into a bracelet. Half the job was prototypes, half was use cases, and someone always had to wrap custom software around the device.
The sobering part
A cute avatar with cameras is still an always-available listener. Would your clients accept a third “attendee” on a sales call, even one named Jolly? Standalone AI gadgets like the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 already showed how fast trust and usefulness can fail. Consent is now a product requirement.
Full disclosure: Eugene and Alena built hardware-to-software projects back when client requests sounded like dares, and Azati still writes the software that sits behind devices, so we’re biased toward “the software is the product.” See our engineering work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Eugene Volkov, Commercial Director at Azati Software – read the original, and a companion post by Alena Busko, CMO at Azati – read hers. Source: Meta Connect 2026 coverage (Decrypt), September 2026.
