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- From Tables to Tablets
From Tables to Tablets
& AI Wearables are moving from Experiment to Scale
Off-Premise Is the New Core Business
The restaurant industry has crossed a behavioral Rubicon: a majority of meals are now consumed off-premise. Delivery and takeaway are no longer side channels — they’re the main event. Industry data shows that takeout, delivery and drive-thru now account for 50–60% of total transactions across many quick-service and fast-casual chains, compared with roughly one-third pre-2020.
Consumer reliance on food apps has hardened into habit, powered by convenience, digital payments, and algorithmic recommendations that make ordering frictionless. The question is no longer whether people will use delivery, but how often. Large chains now report that 20–30% of total sales flow through delivery apps alone, while drive-thru volumes remain elevated relative to pre-COVID baselines.
The result: restaurants are increasingly optimized for logistics rather than hospitality. What began as a temporary adaptation in pandemic has become a structural reallocation of revenue. In 2026, restaurants aren’t just competing for tables — they’re competing for screen space.
Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Are Blowing Up
Sales of AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled in 2025, jumping from roughly 2 million units to over 7 million sold globally — a rare breakout success in the wearable tech category. The spike helped spotlight what had been a slow-moving segment: wearables that go beyond fitness bands and watches into hands-free AI interfaces.
Meta’s smart glasses combine voice-activated AI with photo and video capture, real-time assistant responses, and seamless smartphone integration; these features appear to be key drivers of adoption among mainstream consumers rather than early adopters alone.
Production forecasts now aim at 20–30 million units annually by 2026, up from an initial target of roughly 10 million, to keep pace with demand in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia.
Uber Bets Big on Robotaxi Solutions
Uber has launched a new unit called Uber Autonomous Solutions, a data-rich operational platform designed to help autonomous vehicle (AV) partners get robotaxis and other self-driving services off the ground and into real-world use. The suite includes fleet ops, mapping data, training datasets collected from thousands of sensor-equipped vehicles across dozens of cities, regulatory support, financing and in-car user experience tools aimed at lowering cost per mile and speeding time to market.
Rather than building its own driverless tech, Uber is consolidating more than 20 partnerships with AV firms — including Waymo, WeRide, Avride, Lucid, NVIDIA and Nuro — and plans to help scale autonomous deployments in 15+ cities by the end of 2026. The company’s strategy is to be the operational backbone for commercialization, using its massive trip and mapping datasets (derived from tens of billions of historic trips) to give partners an edge over competitors.
This move signals a transformation for the ride-hailing giant: Uber aims to be the middleware between autonomous tech and everyday riders. As robotaxi and autonomous delivery services proliferate globally, its model bets that connecting demand (Uber’s marketplace) with third-party supply will be more commercially viable than building robotaxis in-house.