Between ChatGPT-integrated cars and at-home health tests, CES tends to have something for everyone.
While AI dominated this year’s iteration of the tech industry’s biggest showcase, there were also plenty of announcements around car tech, extended reality (XR), and all manner of other gadgets. To help take a sampling of everything there was to see, we asked a slew of tech execs what they saw or were looking to see at CES 2024.
AI responsibility
Fresh off a panel on AI and jobs with acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Kathy Baxter, principal architect of responsible AI at Salesforce, told Tech Brew she is always looking to learn about how companies are handling responsible AI.
“We hear over and over again how important it is for the public to trust AI. And so what are companies doing as a result of that?” Baxter said. “So I’m always looking for that tangible kind of example that companies are showing.”
The strong presence of public-sector officials like Su at CES speaks to how policymakers are increasingly looking to better understand AI, she said. “We’re really seeing an explosion of interest among governments,” Baxter said.
Responsible AI was also a big theme for Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, who was on his way to his own panel to discuss the topic, including the company’s Content Authenticity Initiative to label AI-generated media.
Adobe’s presence at CES was about engaging with customers amid its big Firefly push.
Headsets ahead?
Costin said he was also hoping to see some advancements in mixed-reality headsets, particularly to make the hardware less bulky and smoother to use. Between Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta’s lineup, and Samsung’s forthcoming device, it could be a big year for that.
“I do hope that generative AI—and AI in general—combined with progress in hardware will lead to potentially new mediums and new content types that will need to be created,” Costin said.
Speaking of Samsung’s headset, Qualcomm announced a new chip intended for more advanced AR and VR experiences, which Samsung and Google are signed on to use in some capacity. Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire said he predicts headsets will probably become more mainstream in 2025.
Among the trends he hoped to see at CES, McGuire pointed to the impact of generative AI and copilots on hardware needs for PCs. “The PC is about to go through an inflection point of transformation with AI,” McGuire said.
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Siemens also announced an XR headset with Sony for industrial use at CES in addition to an AI partnership with Amazon Web Services. Siemens CTO and Chief Strategy Officer Peter Koerte told us XR is currently mostly used in the industrial world for training workers in places like chemical and power plants, fire departments, and healthcare settings, especially since the start of the pandemic. The company wants to move beyond that into functions like collaboration among engineers.
New interfaces
At CES, Koerte said he was hoping to explore how software is defining the functionality of devices rather than the hardware itself.
“That’s a major, major topic because it’s changed the business model; it’s changed the architecture, the technology. And it’s very interesting to see how everything here is going to be more and more software-defined,” Koerte said.
How generative AI might create new interfaces and assistants for navigating devices and software was a big topic of conversation at this year’s show, between in-car chatbots and a pocket AI companion that immediately flew off of virtual shelves.
Globant North America CTO Nicolas Avila said he’s watching for the emergence of specialized AIs called “agents” that can handle individual tasks for consumers.
“We have all this information. And we want to filter in a conversational way. It’s completely different,” Avila said. “I want to see this UI, and this will happen to you, you’re going to tell a large language model [LLM], and the LLM is going to decide what answer to show.”
AI vs. Hollywood?
Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg was at the show to promote Aura, an AI cybersecurity startup his investment firm WndrCo is backing. Katzenberg told Tech Brew that AI is going to bring “extreme disruption and extreme opportunity” to the film and animation industries.
“I’m bullish on the disruption,” Katzenberg said. “We look at everything, we’ve seen all the up-and-coming companies, and we’ve been impressed with some of them, but not ready to really dive in deep yet—and I emphasize the word yet.”