CES to Witness a "Tsunami" of AI

­CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, loves latching into themes. A consistent message is a more easily-digestible one. When I went to CES in the late 2000s/early 2010s, the message was 3D. In 2024, the topic du jour will be AI.

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve all seen the AI chatbots, and the AI-generated images are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

But AI’s also an indispensable component of the Internet of Things – artificial intelligence makes that global network of devices, vehicles, white goods, and everything else run much smoother. And it’s there that AI will slowly seep into the pores of our very existence, for better or worse.

And starting next week, AI will dominate CES.

“We didn’t get the full CES fire hose of AI announcements last year like we’re going to have,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “If you thought it was a wave last year, it's going to be a tsunami this year.”

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, claimed that “AI is almost like the internet; it’s a huge ingredient that’s not going away,” and for anyone even slightly alarmed about the privacy implications of a machine intelligence that gathers data and thinks much faster than any human, the CEA’s blasé attitude towards AI is frightening.

Amongst the avalanche of CES Conference Sessions, I saw a tiny handful sounding the alarm – “AI Controversy: Innovation & Transformation vs. Threat to the Future” and “Harnessing the Power of AI Ethically,” amongst others.

But there’s far more along the lines of “2024: The AI Inflection Point,” “AI is the 5th Industrial Revolution,” and “How AI-Powered Strategies can Transform the Mobility Experience”…no surprise since the CEA is a trade group (and cheerleader) for the consumer electronics industry…so you won’t a general condemnation from the group implicating its members in what could end up being the end of personal privacy as we know it and the start of a gazillion roboapocalypse clarion calls.

We’ll find out just how big of an AI shill the CEA is starting next week.