AI will be everywhere this year, unlike 2025.
Artificial Intelligence
- CES 2025 was surprising in that, despite the hype of 2024, AI was largely absent at the trade show.
- I had expected everyone to sprinkle their products with AI pixie dust to make them more appealing but it was not to be.
- This sent a strong signal that the industry thought that AI was not ready for the consumer, and given how the end markets developed in 2025, it was mostly correct.
- AI has had no impact whatsoever on almost all consumer electronics devices, which was the main reason why Apple was able to escape relatively unscathed in 2025.
- I expect that this will continue to be true for most consumer electronics segments in 2026, but the industry is beginning to experiment with in-development or commercial products.
- This is evident in the marketing traffic that bombards every analyst’s inbox over the Christmas and New Year period.
- This year, it is almost all about new ideas, products and services that incorporate AI to enable a new use case or bring a previously unrealistic product to life.
- Here, I expect that robotics and smart glasses will take up most of the airtime, but I will be on the lookout for the dark horses hiding in the dark recesses of the show.
Robotics
- World models, physical AI and robotics are going to be big buzzwords this week, which with the hype stripped out, add up to robotics being on the horizon but very far from being a commercial reality.
- The ability to use natural language as an effective man-machine interface has had by far the most impact on bringing the robotics proposition closer to reality, but there remains a very, very long way to go.
- This is because there is still no such thing as a general robotics model which would allow any configuration of robot to navigate the human world safely without retraining.
- RFM Research (see here) has concluded that the lack of a general model is the single biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome to bring domestic robots into the realm of commercial reality.
- Hence, the show will be full of single-purpose robots (lawn mowing, pool cleaning), which actually work quite well and lots of humanoid robots that will struggle to stand up or do anything that is not explicitly programmed or remote controlled.
- China is making a big effort here, and so it will be very interesting to see how much of China decides to visit CES this year, as last year was limited to some retail brands with a US presence and exporters of components out of China’s neighbours.
Smart glasses
- Smart glasses is the category that saw the most development in 2025 and with competition heating up, I expect a lot to be on offer at CES 2026.
- The two leaders in the West are Meta, which has almost all the market share from its first mover advantage and from being the first to engage the retail glasses brands and Google.
- Google clearly has designs on this segment and has the advantage of an ecosystem of digital services and its competitive position in AI with Gemini.
- AI remains Meta’s weakness as I can’t really see users wanting to use Meta’s AI for navigation or identifying surroundings, although for messages, it will be pretty good.
- However, its position with Luxoticca, of which RayBan and Oakley are rapidly increasing their options, will help to offset the AI and ecosystem shortcomings.
- These devices are all pretty expensive, and so what we are also going to see is a large increase in offerings from China, aiming squarely for the volume end of the market.
- Hence, I expect to spend a lot of time with silly-looking glasses on my face, as well as nosing around in the south hall, looking at the Chinese options, who are keeping a low profile at the show.
