CES 2026: A Show of Relevance, Restraint, and Real Use Cases
CES has always been a circus, but this year the calliope sounded and felt a little different. The spectacle was still there, but the tone was more measured and grounded, with fewer products shouting for novelty and more genuinely trying to solve something. Walking the expo floors, the press suites, the hotel showcases, the Sphere, and the off-site pop-ups offered a broader reminder that CES isn’t just about “the most important announcements.” The real insight came from the hidden gems, the subtle course corrections, and the quiet proof that a few sectors are maturing in unexpected ways.
This year’s story wasn’t just about AI – though AI was effectively everywhere – it was about how different corners of the industry were finally syncing low-level fundamentals with higher-order intelligence. Yes, there were plenty of exhibitors still saying “look at my AI,” but the key was finding the one saying “here’s how and why we’re using it.”
AI Leaves the Billboard Stage and Moves Into the Subsystems
The biggest shift was that AI became tangible. Users could touch it and interface with it in audio systems, automotive platforms, wearables, and OS interfaces as a functional part of the stack rather than the showpiece at the center of the slide deck. Lightweight models handled ANC, beamforming, voice isolation, and mic quality enhancement directly on low-power CPUs. This is exactly where AI should be living – in the tedious and unglamorous edge layers of the experience that consumers don’t want to think about.
Virtual assistants resurfaced with a new identity. Automotive reframed the assistant as conversational and agentic rather than transactional, and the auto manufacturers made a not-so-subtle play to migrate users off Apple and Samsung ecosystems and onto their own. Google Assistant became Google Gemini. Alexa became Alexa Plus. The idea wasn’t just to control media and HVAC – it was to interface with navigation, workflows, and context. Whether consumers choose to engage deeply remains an open question, but the industry clearly decided that assistants needed a third evolution, one that makes them less of a menuing system and more of a life partner.
Taken together, the show floor confirmed that AI is moving out of the pitch deck and into the plumbing. It is no longer the product – it is the substrate.
Platforms and Media Layers Become Serious Again
If AI formed the substrate, then audio and CTV platforms showed how content flows through it. Few categories have reinvented themselves as many times as consumer audio. This year, the reinvention wasn’t about celebrity endorsements or high volumes but about convergence and quality. Yes, there were earbuds everywhere – and one audacious manufacturer was trying to differentiate themselves because of how stylish their case was – but there were some true innovations to be seen.
Dolby Atmos showed up everywhere again, especially in automotive. Atmos is now in more than 150 car models from 35 manufacturers, and crucially it has moved beyond the luxury segment into mainstream vehicles. For years, automotive audio has been a competitive differentiator, but now it feels like a genuine format migration moment. Pioneer’s SPHERA made history as the first aftermarket receiver with built-in Atmos, reminding the world that aftermarket car audio hasn’t completely faded away.
Edifier’s portfolio shift was another subtle signal. By integrating HDMI eARC and positioning active speakers as part of a TV-first experience, the company joined a broader trend of unifying desktop, gaming, and home entertainment audio into a single stack. JLab expanded even further by jumping into gaming peripherals, following a path JBL, Sony, and many others have already validated.
Bluetooth Auracast also seemed to hit its inflection point. With LG and Hisense making Auracast standard across their 2026 TVs and Samsung rolling it into its premium range, the number of source devices finally began catching up to the many speakers already supporting it. Once source devices become ubiquitous, Auracast shifts from an interesting spec to a social audio platform.
CTV platforms made similar moves. One of the most overlooked CES battlegrounds is CTV operating systems. Fire TV, Google TV, Roku, Tizen, webOS, Vidaa, and the minor players have turned into something akin to a new browser war that never ends.
This year, Whale TV emerged as a serious competitor with 45 million monthly active users and five new OEM partners spanning multiple continents. The addition of real-time CDN capabilities over MoQ and a strategic cloud gaming partnership suggested Whale wasn’t content to be a feature checklist platform.
Amazon redesigned Fire TV, leveraging Alexa Plus and reorganizing navigation around content categories. The changes removed meaningful friction. One could almost hear the unspoken admission that the old Fire TV UI had become a dystopian archeological puzzle of monetization layers and abandoned UX metaphors.
TiVoOS made its move as well, rolling out new content partnerships, a stronger recommendation engine that included live TV, and broader availability on set-top boxes, soundbars, and mini-LED monitors. A TV OS that spans both traditional displays and audio peripherals is quietly one of the more interesting platform choices in the market.
Wearables, Health, and Human-Centered Tech Finally Converge
Wearables had a maturity problem for years. Too expensive, too sci-fi, too focused on spectacle over utility. This year they finally came back to earth in the best possible way. The smart ring companies led the charge with devices priced reasonably, running longer on a charge, and offering clinically adjacent insights rather than selling fantasies. RingConn’s third-generation ring pushed into blood pressure tracking. Long-term trend data is useful even without FDA-blessed clinical claims. The bigger story was battery life. Rings are functionally irrelevant if users must constantly remove them. CES vendors finally internalized that “always on” is the real requirement.
The category shift fit into a broader pattern across the show – a quiet retreat from “magic” toward “useful.” Assistive technology embraced this ethos even more directly. eSight by Gentex demonstrated how disability tech should behave – removing the disability from the spotlight and restoring agency to the user. Their glasses supported those with severe visual impairment – a FAR better use for high-tech glasses than the synthetic overlays or cartoonish failed use cases for AR/VR. This device remaps the visual field to the functioning regions of the eye. Few exhibitors exuded more dignity.
Another thread in this constellation was what I’ll call the “bridge to AI” devices – tools designed to make interacting with LLMs more natural, more portable, or more personal. Plaud offered a wearable AI notetaker that blended meeting capture with contextual summarization, turning verbal information into structured artifacts. TransAI bet on privacy and low latency with a local-only notetaker that processed speech and visual cues directly on the device without cloud dependency. Then there was AiPI, a sub-$25 gadget that let users converse with a tiny “toy” connected to an LLM endowed with personality. (They offer you a pet groomer or workout coach or the like, but didn’t realize that with a few back-end tweaks they could make, they are actually doing what Rabbit and Humane promised but couldn’t deliver.) The sophistication varied widely, but the theme was consistent: users want simpler, more fluid, and more embodied ways to talk to AI without making everything a laptop workflow. These products are embryonic, but the trajectory feels inevitable.
For another example, PLACE Home Solutions took one of the most stale household categories – the smoke detector – and rebuilt it as a room-by-room wellness and safety system. Cameras, air quality sensing, two-way communication, gas detection, and remote peace-of-mind monitoring reframed home safety as ongoing support rather than emergency alerting.
Even appliances got their moment. Euhomy made portable ice makers matter again, proving that not every consumer innovation needs a cloud subscription, an app, or a blockchain. Sometimes better ice is enough.
Innovation doesn’t have to be as big as the Sphere… sometimes it can be as small as the newest version of a Tamagotchi.
Form Factors, Spatial Displays, and the Sphere Moment
Speaking of the Sphere, the Lenovo keynote there offered one of the clearest statements of strategic repositioning at CES. The theme centered on hybrid AI – not as a buzzword but as a way to unify personal, enterprise, and public models into a coherent operational layer. Qira, Lenovo’s cross-device personal assistant, wasn’t positioned as a chatbot but as a contextual agent that executed on behalf of the user across PCs, phones, tablets, and wearables. The assistant that knows the environment rather than just the command is the next logical step in personal computing.
Lenovo also pushed hard into AI infrastructure, emphasizing inference over training. The company wants to become the firm that makes running AI practical. Its ThinkSystem and ThinkEdge hardware fits neatly into hospitals, retailers, factories, and stadiums, and the Nvidia Cloud Gigafactory collaboration pointed toward Lenovo playing a larger role in how AI clouds get deployed globally.
Rollable laptops and concept devices reinforced that Lenovo isn’t done challenging form factors. The Legion Pro Rollable and ThinkPad Rollable XD both demonstrated that screens no longer need to be static rectangles. Experiments don’t always become products, but they reset expectations.
Lenovo clearly wanted to make a stronger impression than in years past, and succeeded in doing so. That said, there is always a gap between messaging and delivery, and Lenovo needs to prove it can close that gap. There is an overall huge question around PC demand in an environment with record workforce reductions that is yet to be resolved. But beyond that, Lenovo itself has repeatedly tripped over its own shadows in the near-and-dear-to-me space of enterprise collaboration, and I’m waiting for them to demonstrate that they won’t repeat the misses of the past there.
In the same thematic family, Samsung’s Spatial Signage represented a related shift in how digital environments are constructed. The technology created depth without 3D glasses, giving static content the presence of holography without the gimmick. Retail, stadiums, and high-traffic environments seem like obvious candidates. Combined with Samsung’s VXT content platform, it was a reminder that digital signage is becoming more architectural and experiential. It was also a reminder that HP and Google’s over-hyped Dimension and Beam concepts will enter a market with significantly lower cost alternatives already taking shape.
Robots That Finally Know Their Place
Robots were still everywhere, still blinking, and still overpriced. But this year they were marketed as helpers rather than entertainers. Instead of performing tricks, they served as quiet assistants for routine tasks, companionship, and awareness. This is where robotics can actually matter – not as anthropomorphic toys but as extensions of household functionality.
Honoring A Legend’s Success
It was also a privilege to be invited to watch Nvidia’s Jensen Huang win the prestigious IEEE Medal of Honor for 2026. It is difficult to think of a better symbol for how far computing has come and how much of today’s technology narrative can be traced through Nvidia’s arc. Huang represented not just a successful company but a shift in the center of gravity of the tech industry – from general computing to accelerated computing, from cloud to edge, and from software to data pipelines. Nvidia didn’t just catch the AI wave – it built the boards, the breaks, and the beach. The award felt less like a recognition of career closure and more like a chapter break in a story that refuses to slow down.
The Larger Context: CES Still Matters
One persistent narrative over the last decade has been that CES is losing relevance. That isn’t what the floor showed this year. What changed instead was the tenor of innovation. The industry toned down the theatrics and focused on systems, interoperability, and utility. AI is no longer the product. AI is in the plumbing.
The hidden gems made the case that progress isn’t always about the next category killer. Sometimes it is about connecting the pieces that already exist into something coherent and valuable.
Still, it was hard to ignore the geopolitical backdrop. While this was the first CES after the completion of the LVCC Central Hall and Grand Lobby renovation, the entire South Upper Hall was closed and unused. That space has traditionally been home to a dense mix of Chinese manufacturers seeking clients, and its absence punctuated what the technology industry is experiencing at a global level.
You can watch my real-time recorded video updates from CES 2026 on my YouTube channel here.