CES: All AI, the Power of Prototypes, and Getting Human

A newbie's take on the world's largest tech conference

I attended my very first CES this year, to soak up the ideas, products and people who were bringing AI to the world. I had heard for years about the legendary trade show: Las Vegas’s biggest, and the biggest tech trade show in the world. And it did not disappoint. Here’s some top moments in tech from last week.

Lenny Kravitz’s human lyrics projected onto the epic screen of the Sphere, after Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s keynote at CES.

AI Inside

Remember the “Intel Inside” spots that helped personify complicated tech and what it did inside of products? Well AI showed up like that—no jingle included.

The convention floor only had a small space dedicated to AI, but you couldn’t sneeze desert air without bumping into something AI-enabled.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Jensen Huang, whose NVIDIA GPU chips have supercharged the AI revolution. For most of us, seeing a microchip in person says very little. They’re tiny squares of wires and silicon, and when a tech CEO holds one up, it’s the microscopic power that’s the most impressive and unfathomable.

Jensen Huang holding up a microprocessor at his keynote in his new snakeskin leather jacket. Image courtesy AFP.

Huang showed not just the physical chips, but also the massive ways that AI chips power what's next. Huge realtime animation, robots that can learn physics and thereby easily navigate complex spaces like factory floors, and AI agents that you can train to do the unfun bits of your job, all powered not just by NVIDIA’s GPUs but by their coding language and models.

The most talk-worthy parts of his demo were about creating more access to mind-blowing technology, like a $3000 personal supercomputer that puts more AI power into the hands of hobbyists, academics, and other AI experimenters without access to big tech-company labs, and a World Foundation Model — a sort of large language model for physical spaces that will help drive innovations in robots and autonomous vehicles.

Beyond that, every booth, every talk, every moment was infused with AI. It was inescapable. Here’s few highlights.

1. Digital twins.
   AI-powered digital models—also known as “digital twins”—were spotlighted as game-changers for everything from optimizing a factory floor to planning out traffic patterns for humans and robots. Dassault Systemes demonstrated how its 3DExperience Lab helps health-tech startups develop and use virtual twins for medical and surgical applications, while both Siemens and NVIDIA showcased digital twins of industrial spaces to streamline design and management in the physical world.

2. Agentic AI.
   Prepare to see AI agents specially trained for tasks like customer service or data analysis become huge in 2025. Delta showed off its new Delta Concierge, an AI travel app that can handle everything from booking your flight to recommending the best restaurants once you arrive. And NVIDIA (yep, them again) introduced “Blueprints,” which are general-purpose AI agents for common tasks that businesses can further customize.

3. Computer vision everywhere.
   Computer vision technology is driving the future of autonomous vehicles—and we’re not just talking cars. We saw everything from self-driving baggage carriers to AI-powered boats. LG also wowed with a digital billboard capable of reading facial features and serving targeted ads based on age and gender assumptions.

4. AI in your car.
   It’s not only about self-driving cars; AI can enhance the driving experience, too. Hyundai revealed a holographic display that offers different content depending on where a passenger is seated, and Sheeva.ai rolled out an in-car payment system covering everything from gas to fast-food.

5. Making AI feel friendlier.
   In a bid to ease concerns about AI, LG introduced “Affectionate Intelligence,” and Panasonic emphasized “Well to the Future,” integrating AI into its tech with a focus on better health and wellness features.

6. AI tackling chores.
   One common critique of AI is that it doesn’t always solve the drudgery of everyday tasks—like laundry or picking up clothes. Well, that’s changing: home electronics companies are now showing off AI-enabled robots (like Roborock) that pick up your socks, and machines that’ll do your laundry and fold it, too.

   When it comes to marketing, as Sir Martin Sorrel put it, the first year was wow, last year was how, and this year will be about now. There’s an urgency to crack the code as agencies and marketers face pricing pressures on their end products. In the world of marketing most of it was tell versus show, but a few things that stood out to me:

• PBS Kids talked about expanding on the relationship that kids have with TV characters by bringing them to life and making them conversation agents.

• LG had a DOOH board that could read your gender and age from your face and tee up targeted ads.

• Hologram company Hypervsn had a booth where you could create your own hologram; here’s me as a hologram:

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The Spirit of the Prototype

The thing that I love about environments like CES is the spirit of the prototype. Someone envisioned a foldable helicopter that can fit in the back of a van and offer personal flight, or a candy that can conduct music through bone technology. All these things are prototyped and displayed to bring them closer to reality.

Delta nailed the prototype with its keynote, bringing the customer journey to life through the story of a woman in the future, booking her trip on a Joby to get to the airport faster, booking restaurants from her in-flight entertainment system and being swooped up right on time since her Delta app connects to ride share. This in and of itself is impressive but it was writ large on the screen of the Sphere, one of the most epic screens on the planet.

Delta’s keynote at the Sphere featured a flyover video of Joby, an electric vertical take-off plane, or an Uber of the sky. Image courtesy of Delta.

Prototypes can be as tangible as a Honda’s EV prototype, or as vaporware as Delta’s beautiful walk-through of their future consumer journey. Whatever can make you feel like it’s so close to real you can taste it can drive the excitement to get it to be real and to scale.

Honda’s new EV prototype. Image courtesy Honda.

Get Real

The busiest booths, however, were not about AI. Stern’s pinball booth was a blast, and old-school manual pinballs had a CES-wide leaderboard, like old arcades. Kodak’s Barbie-themed photo area was packed, with printable photos off of their cameras and off of photo printers.

And of course the tangible connections of talking to people in coffee lines and lounges and parties trumped any smoothed-out AI talk. The messy joy of figuring out where to meet and when in the space-time vortex that is Las Vegas, the serendipity of who you sit next to at a keynote, and the feeling of togetherness was real. Shelley Zalis of The Female Quotient called it the Woosh during her legendary annual floor walk -- hundreds of women touring the massive convention center to understand tech, but just as importantly show up in full physical force in a STEM space that’s often overly male. It didn’t hurt that FQ equipped many of its participants with the Meta Rayban glasses.

What Is Social?
Not far from the convention floor, the Aria hotel buzzed with marketers, entertainment people, ad tech companies and agencies. In the wake of Meta’s announcement about its shift in content moderation and in the shadow of the potential TikTok ban, there was an undercurrent of conversation on where social might go.

will.i.am went far and wide with his messaging app FYI, although no one could quite figure out what it was or how to use it. OnlyFans showed up and held a spicy talk where an OnlyFans influencer praised her ability to make money as well as to only have to engage with true fans, willing to throw down $10 a month to hear from her instead of the trolls of instagram. And creators were out in force, continuing their TikTok and Instagram journeys.

The Real MVP

All of this buzzy tech was happening while Los Angeles, my home town, was under severe fire warnings. Images of buildings burning and news about evacuations dominated the air waves, and I spent more communication time checking in on people or responding to worried friends and family than coordinating at CES. So the tech that most impressed me during this time was Watch Duty, a non-profit app that kept people updated on the latest news on the fires, where to evacuate or get help, what the latest and greatest was straight from the source, 600,000 people downloaded the app in the last 24 hours, and it kept rocking.

If you want to help Los Angeles, please donate to Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, to continue to support firefighting needs.