CES 2026 will showcase billions of dollars in AI investment. My suspicion is that much of it still won’t reach consumers.
I’ll be at CES this week with three hypotheses about where breakthrough technology is heading — and where it’s stuck. Not predictions. Frameworks for observation. Questions to structure what we see on the show floor and hear in conversations with product leaders.
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Despite years of investment, the distance between AI capability and human adoption is getting worse, not better. Companies are adding sophistication while consumer behaviour stays stubbornly static.
What I'll be watching for: does the technology know when to be invisible? Have companies moved beyond demonstrating what their algorithms can do towards showing what people actually want them to do? Smart speakers still functioning as expensive timers. Wearables abandoned in drawers. Kitchen appliances bypassed for manual controls. Has anything fundamentally shifted?
The ecosystem question interests me particularly. Every major player will announce integration numbers: 200 device partnerships, seamless connectivity, unified experiences. But I'm looking for quality of integration, not quantity. Do these ecosystems create genuine coherence, or just reduced friction? Will devices feel like parts of a thoughtful whole, or technically compatible but experientially stitched together?
We learnt this when we helped a smart home platform shift from positioning individual devices to creating a cohesive smart living ecosystem. The technical connectivity existed. What didn't exist was a way for consumers to understand the value. When we transformed fragmented capabilities into a unified experience proposition, they achieved 10x capitalisation growth in two years, became the number one platform in their market with 200 integrations, and connected 5 million homes. Fifty percent of their business now comes from ongoing services beyond hardware. Ecosystem thinking unlocked revenue models that device thinking couldn't.
The embodiment challenge is where real differentiation is happening. As AI moves from explicit interaction to ambient intelligence, physical product design becomes critical. Ambient requires products that communicate capability without screens, build trust through consistent behaviour, and feel natural in domestic environments. I'm curious whether anyone at CES has solved this. Can they make intangible AI feel tangible and trustworthy? Or are we still seeing brilliant computational sophistication wrapped in products that reveal no understanding of how humans actually live?
My test: if I remove the technical explanation, does the product itself communicate its value?
CES 2026 will feature the most impressive humanoid robotics showcase yet. Hyundai's presentation, the K-Humanoid Alliance's Robot Pavilion, multiple debuts from global manufacturers. The technical capability will be extraordinary. The deployment strategy will be missing.
What I expect to see: demonstrations of mobility, dexterity, AI-powered autonomy. Engineering excellence that is genuinely breakthrough. What I don't expect to see: coherent answers to the human acceptance question.
The challenge with humanoid robotics isn't whether they work. It's whether people want them working alongside them. The distance between technical capability and social acceptance is enormous, and most companies are approaching it backwards, building perfect robots and hoping acceptance follows.
The signs I'm watching for: deployment scenarios that address trust before scale. Use cases that leverage competitive advantages while building public comfort. Principles that demonstrate respect for human agency, not just task efficiency.
We've seen this directly. One robotics company came to us with breakthrough humanoid technology but no deployment strategy that addressed the acceptance barrier. Technical capability alone couldn't secure investment. More engineering demonstrations weren't building confidence, they were creating uncertainty. We repositioned their humanoids not as human replacements but as intelligent connectors within existing ecosystems. We developed deployment scenarios with trust-building behaviours, clear value propositions, and stakeholder benefits that accounted for both capabilities and limitations. The result: £150M board investment secured, clear market differentiation, and a structured approach to addressing public acceptance before deployment.
My test: can companies articulate what problems their humanoids solve that justify their form? Can they explain deployment in terms that build confidence rather than create anxiety?
The deeper question: have they thought through the trust architecture? How do their humanoids signal intent, communicate status, respond when encountering situations beyond their programming? These aren't engineering questions. They're design questions that determine whether deployment succeeds or stalls. Most humanoid presentations at CES will be technically impressive and strategically incomplete. The winners will be those who've invested as much in trust architecture as they have in mechanical engineering.
The technical interoperability challenge, making devices actually communicate, is largely solved. The experience challenge, making that communication feel meaningful, remains unsolved.
What I'm testing: can anyone articulate their ecosystem value proposition beyond device count? When they demonstrate adding products to their platform, does the system's value increase, or just its feature list? I'm looking for evidence of ecosystems designed holistically versus platforms that simply aggregate existing products. That distinction matters. Aggregation creates lowest common denominator experiences, technically compatible but experientially fragmented. Holistic design creates unified languages across categories and connection patterns that feel orchestrated rather than accumulated.
When we worked with an AI assistant platform, this was the exact challenge. They had genuinely breakthrough capabilities, but users defaulted to simple commands. We developed comprehensive design frameworks that embodied their core values while making complex technology approachable.
Products that were beautiful, emotionally engaging, and revealed advanced capabilities naturally. They reached 50 million monthly active users engaging with advanced features, scaled from 10 to 100 SKUs while maintaining unified design DNA, and achieved twice the speed to market. That design framework survived three years of major technology disruption because it was built on principles, not trends.
My test: if I see three random products from an ecosystem together, can I tell they belong to the same system without logos? Do they share a design language that suggests intentional relationship, or just consistent branding?
