Boz to the Future Episode 28: The Future According to Aparna Chennapragada

Blog|25 sep 2026|

Welcome back to another episode of Boz to the Future. In this episode, recorded at Connect 2026, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth sits down with Aparna Chennapragada, Meta’s new VP of Product for Wearables. The conversation explores agentic AI on glasses, the future of wearable form factors, and why the hardest problems in AI aren't the ones benchmarks measure.

Aparna joined Meta in June and was onstage at Connect twelve weeks later. She has spent over 25 years leading products through platform shifts, including twelve years at Google where she led Google Now and founded Google Lens. She was Robinhood’s first CPO and CPO of Experiences and Devices at Microsoft.

This conversation covers what she's learned in her first three months — and why she believes wearables are the perfect intersection of art, culture and technology. She reflects on growing up as the only non-doctor in a family of physicians. Her mother ran one of the biggest hospitals in India, and her father was a doctor by day and a sculptor by night. As she describes it, there were "lab coats and the stethoscope, but also clay and canvases everywhere." That collision of art and technology is what drew her to wearables — and why she describes fashion as art you wear rather than art you hang on a wall.

Of everything announced at Connect, the feature that moved her most was hearing enhancement on Meta glasses, an FDA-cleared feature Meta built for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. She describes being blown away when demoing it during her second week on the job, and the reason is personal because she’s seen personality changes in her 85-year-old mother and her uncle, both of whom have experienced hearing loss. Aparna argues that hearing loss isn’t only a technical problem, it changes how someone shows up socially. For her, the feature is “the difference between isolation and connection." 

From there they get into Muse on glasses and what changes when an assistant becomes an agent. They discuss how wearables are enabling voice to replace menus and settings, and Aparna’s view is that every time you compress the gap between what you think and what the device does, you win. They exchange stories about Muse helping Aparna with an art project and collaboration that never would have happened without its help, and Boz finally turning digitized VHS family videos into something his relatives could watch: "Muse one shot at it for me… it's a hit with the family."

Both come back to the same conviction: usefulness beats raw intelligence. Most people aren’t looking for an AI that can win a math olympiad, they want one that can help cut down their to-do list and help sort out summer camps for their kids. Getting there means clearing a bar Boz describes as the most constrained he's worked on — the device has to be smart, light, good-looking, affordable, and comfortable for the people standing nearby, all at once. Aparna's view is that the technology is closer than most people realize, and that the limiting factor now is imagination: "right now I think a lot of people are taking the flying car to the grocery store." The future, as she puts it, is model generated, but tastemaker driven.

Watch the episode on Meta's YouTube channel, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Follow Boz on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and X. You can follow Aparna on Substack, LinkedIn and X.