Kantar’s Futures Practice reads the future from the show floor

Like few other conferences, the annual CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas offers a mixture of breathless hype and tangible proof that the future is already here, with products available for sale, as well as aspirational visions. Both the devices and the way companies talk about them offer clues for how the world’s biggest tech companies think about the future – what consumers will want, and what brands can deliver.

This year’s CES was the first to happen a full year after the explosion of interest in generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), occasioned by the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. With that in mind, brands have had plenty of time to roll out innovative AI products and layer an AI gloss over others. But the learnings didn’t stop at AI. Here are some of our top observations, and what they tell us about the future.