For years, CES felt like a parade of clever prototypes: bendable screens, concept cars, and smart home devices that promised to change everything “someday.” The early read on CES 2026 suggests a different theme. Instead of trying to impress people with futuristic one-offs, the show is leaning into applied artificial intelligence features that ship inside laptops, TVs, appliances, and cars within the next product cycle. Engadget’s preview notes a packed schedule that puts AI front-and-center, and vendors are framing products around what AI can do in daily life rather than what it might do in a lab.
That shift matters because the consumer market has become tougher. Phones are mature, smart speakers plateaued, and buyers have learned to be skeptical of anything that requires a dozen accounts and constant cloud connectivity. “Applied AI” is a way out: it can add new value without forcing customers to learn an entirely new device category. At the show, you can expect PC makers to pitch AI PCs as productivity accelerators, TV brands to sell personalization as a core feature, and robotics companies to emphasize autonomy and reliability over novelty.
The AI PC story is especially revealing. ASUS has already teased CES announcements built around “Workspace AI,” “Creator AI,” and “Everyday AI,” essentially segmenting AI features by job-to-be-done. That’s a marketing move, but it also signals an engineering reality: these systems will blend local processing (for speed and privacy) with cloud calls (for heavy lifting) and will need clear user controls. The practical question isn’t whether a laptop can run an AI model it’s whether it can do so without killing battery life, overheating, or leaking sensitive data.
Displays are another pressure point. Engadget highlights new TV tech on the agenda, including announcements around Micro RGB. The interesting angle isn’t just picture quality; it’s what happens when your living-room screen becomes a computing platform with a dedicated AI stack. Expect more “ambient” features dynamic art, contextual information, and smarter recommendations driven by on-device or edge models that can interpret voice, gestures, and room conditions. The downside is obvious: the same mechanisms that personalize can also surveil. If vendors want trust, they’ll need clearer privacy settings and a commitment to minimize data collection.
CES 2026 also arrives at a moment when robotics is quietly becoming mainstream. Industrial robots are old news, but consumer-facing “physical AI” is closer than it looks: robot vacuums that map rooms, lawn mowers that navigate without boundary wires, delivery bots that share sidewalks, and warehouse fleets that coordinate like swarms. The big challenge is not intelligence per se—it’s the long tail of edge cases. Robots need to cope with messy real-world environments, varying lighting, wireless interference, and unpredictable humans. When CES companies demonstrate real deployments rather than choreographed demos, that’s a signal maturity is improving.
Underneath all of this is a compute supply chain that’s finally catching up to the AI boom. Higher-efficiency NPUs in PCs, better image processors in TVs, and dedicated inference chips in appliances are the enabling layer. If the last decade was about connecting everything to the internet, the next one may be about giving everyday devices enough local intelligence to be useful even when the internet is spotty or when users simply prefer that their data stays at home.
The most interesting takeaway from the CES previews is that “AI” is becoming a design constraint, not a feature sticker. Products have to decide: what runs locally, what runs in the cloud, and what is worth the cost and power budget? The companies that answer those questions credibly will define the show’s real winners. The rest will still have flashy booths but fewer people will believe the hype.
What to watch next: keynote announcements tend to land first as marketing, then harden into product roadmaps. Pay attention to the boring details shipping dates, power envelopes, developer tools, and pricing because that’s where a “trend” becomes something you can actually buy and use. Also look for partnerships: if a chipmaker name-checks an automaker, a hospital network, or a logistics giant, it usually means pilots are already underway and the ecosystem is forming.
For consumers, the practical question is less “is this cool?” and more “will it reduce friction?” The next wave of tech wins by making routine tasks searching, composing, scheduling, troubleshooting—feel like a conversation. Expect more on-device inference, tighter privacy controls, and features that work offline or with limited connectivity. Those constraints force better engineering and typically separate lasting products from flashy demos.
For businesses, the next 12 months will be about integration and governance. The winners will be the teams that can connect new capabilities to existing workflows (ERP, CRM, ticketing, security monitoring) while also documenting how decisions are made and audited. If a vendor can’t explain data lineage, access controls, and incident response, the technology may be impressive but it won’t survive procurement.