AI toothbrush. AI sleep mask. AI baby monitor. AI coffee maker. AI cat feeder. AI pen. AI pin. AI massage chair. An AI mirror that “reads your face.” An AI refrigerator that needs to know me better than I know myself. AI smart ring, AI smart necklace, AI headphones, AI OH MY GOD WHATEVER.
On day one of my first CES, I started keeping a list in my notes app. Not a list of companies to follow up with, but of products that had been given the AI treatment for no discernable reason.
Some of the products were fine. Some were silly. A few were genuinely impressive (looking at you, massage chair). But they all suffer from the same problem: Too often, AI isn’t solving a real problem. It’s simply a marketing strategy.
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It being my first time at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas, I expected to be overwhelmed. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world packed into two venues in one of the most extravagant cities ever? Yeah, I was prepared for the sensory overload. But what I didn’t expect was how quickly “AI” would start to become mind-numbingly meaningless. By the third day, every pitch blurred: AI-powered, AI-driven, AI-enabled.
Most of them? AI nonsense.
I found myself oscillating between fascination and fatigue. Fascination by the sheer ambition and grandeur of the displays promising the key to the future. Fatigue at how often that future looked like a nonsense solution in search of a nonexistent problem, all wrapped up in an LLM.
The problem at CES 2026 wasn’t the AI itself. But how liberally and casually it was being applied.
AI fatigue doesn’t mean we should reject the technology as a whole. It’s about watching something that could be genuinely powerful become flattened into a buzzword and bolted onto any and every product and device that doesn’t need it. When everything is AI, nothing feels innovative. It’s a checkbox. A mandate. An expectation. And that’s when the fatigue sets in.
As a CES first-timer, I kept waiting for the moment when the hype would finally resolve into clarity. Give me evolution! A catalyst! An epiphany! A paradigm shift! Something!
And then, unexpectedly, I found it. And it was shockingly grounded. Sorry to most of the exhibitors, but I didn’t find clarity in lifestyle gadgets or products promising to reinvent how I drink coffee or take notes or sit in a chair. It was in the space of health and medical research, and I think the major difference was that AI wasn’t the headline — it was the infrastructure.
In conversations about neurological research, diagnostics and treatments, AI is being used to surface patterns too complex for human cognition alone to solve in a timely manner. I felt genuine optimism about AI being used to analyze brain signals, assist in non-invasive therapies and surgeries, and push medicine forward both incrementally and responsibly. This is one place where AI seems to have a real-world positive impact. And the amazing part is that in a room full of products insisting they’ll change our lives, these are the breakthroughs that actually focus on helping us live better ones.
Humanity, human consequence and human lives are at the forefront of these innovations. Isn’t that something?
And once that clicked, it reframed my week at CES.
Because, for all the talk of AI, robots, and clones, the most remarkable aspect of CES is the deep, stubborn, glorious humanness at its center. I loved the buzz of the CNET workroom, the mob of bodies packed shoulder-to-shoulder in hotel ballrooms, casinos and hallways, and the excitement of thousands of journalists and industry professionals coming together in one moment in time to get a glimpse of the future of tech. There’s something so special about how frenetic yet impactful these moments of connection are.
It was meeting my coworkers in person for the first time and realizing how much chemistry doesn’t translate over Slack messages. It’s losing at pool (sorry, Lai and David), taking chaotic cab rides across Vegas (we made it, David and Jon), and laughing over great food, shared exhaustion and the sheer absurdity of seeing AI clones try to approximate humanity while the real thing stands right next to me. That feels like the future worth paying attention to.
CES didn’t make me more cynical about AI — I’ve pretty consistently thought a majority of it is nonsense — but I guess I am clearer-eyed about how impatient I am for it to lose its unnecessary ubiquity. The unnecessary AI now crowds out the purposes that matter. The most compelling technology I saw at CES was, as it turns out, the technology that would allow us to connect more easily, live a little better and concentrate on humanity. I’ll be waiting for more of that.