At CES 2026, Everything Is AI. What Matters Is How You Use It
Integrated chatbots and built-in machine intelligence are no longer standout features in consumer tech. If companies want to win in the AI era, they’ve got to hone the user experience.
The New Year’s Eve champagne isn’t even warm yet, and CES week is already upon us.
The giant annual celebration of consumer tech kicks off the first full week of January as companies across the world convene in Las Vegas to hawk their latest innovations.
As always, WIRED will be keeping track of the deluge of tech announcements. Our intrepid team will be in Las Vegas, bounding around event spaces, trying on headsets and petting possibly several robot dogs, while sharing videos of the most important—and most bizarre—stuff we find. Follow along on our CES live blog or dive into all our event coverage.
Everything Is AI; Nothing Is AI
We are of course expecting artificial intelligence to feature prominently at CES for the third year in a row. Whether the AI race is an actual boom or just a bubble, the entire Earth is seemingly caught up in the trend of packing AI features into every new device.
The rush of companies stuffing chatbots, computer vision, and intelligent sensors into their products has led to a sort of evening out—when products all offer similar features and use cases, they become harder to differentiate.
“Everything is AI now, so nothing is AI,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who has said this kind of thing for a while now. “It has reached such a point of saturation that simply stating ‘AI’ doesn't really do anything.”
Competing products may use AI capabilities to do all the same things, but the differences that make one win out over the other may come down to which one can figure out how to best deploy the software.
“It's really a software maturity story,” Sag says. “But that's not very sexy.”
Take smart glasses as an example. A heap of smart glasses will be announced at CES this year. Based on the emails already flowing into my inbox, these glasses will have just about anything you’d want—voice-activated chatbot search, sharp displays, instant language translation. But any new specs will have to compete with Meta, which has carved out quite a lead with its best-selling smart glasses. Meta has been able to refine its user experience and design for years now and, so far, its execution is unmatched.
Extend this out to just about any product category and you’ll see the same thing.