We spent the last day at the Venetian going through startups and other booths and gathering last day information on any exhibits we may have missed. It was a time to start summarizing what we did and didn’t find at CES this year. I will be writing about CES for a while because there was so much to digest this year. I would have to say in summary, after starting out doubting our progress, by the time I was done, I was convinced that this year’s CES was the largest single leap forward among a wide range of products rather than one key event, such as Amazon Alexa, or the iPhone. This was a big, very disruptive year and I can’t get enough of how this will impact us in the coming decade. As for a summary:

What we Loved

Hands down, the coolest thing at the show was Caterpillar’s D777 autonomous dumbstruck at the show. Just seeing it inside a building was impressive let alone the extremely nice people who were there from the company. Not only was their exhibit interesting, it was well staffed by the best employees. Bravo Cat!

We love the new EVs. While we don’t think the infrastructure can support them yet, we know it’s where automotive is heading, like it or not.

We loved the AI software that seemed to be in just about everything. Smart is to a point where there is less human involvement. We loved the pace that technology seems to be moving and there were a lot more smaller surprises than I was expecting.

Robots are catching on quickly! There were more practical applications than ever before and the robot garbage can gathering trays was an actual useful robot.

ChatGPT remained the hot topic of discussion just about everywhere. People were thinking hard about how this was going to influence all products, and it will. It won’t be just ChatGBT, it will be a field of others, all doing the same thing. This will have a profound impact on how we build products and manage companies. While it’s still not useful for my type of questions, I have no doubt it will be soon.

This is my entire point of CES this year. All of this AI interaction is happening everywhere inside of products and software. CES talks about the “immersive” experience, however it’s more than that. We’re creating products that seem to think for themselves and while that’s somewhat frightening, think of what it frees up us humans to create! Think of where it can take us!

What was Scarce

Here is what I didn’t see this year at CES. Drones were in short supply. While there were some, it was way down from prior years. A few players now dominate the category and the others are all “me too” products.

I don’t recall seeing any new or innovative laptops of any kind from any manufacturer. While they could have been there, we missed them. I didn’t read about anyone else ranting about them either.

We didn’t see phones outside of LG and Samsung and there were very few. The foldable OLED screen seems old news now. We didn’t see any tablet solutions, at least anything we remember. TVs were scarce compared to prior years.

We did see a lot of computer monitors. All were big and dramatic with flexible screens to either be flat or curved, or ultra-wide. I don’t think we noticed a single desktop computer anywhere. They may have been at the show, but nothing stood out.

We saw only one human carrying drone at the show. There may have been others but not like prior years. Business and Commercial Aviation wrote some time ago that there were no business cases for a human carrying drone of any kind. I think they were right.

I hated to see the show end this year. I felt like I didn’t get enough yet I was tired. I was physically feeling it by the last day. We walked between seven and nine miles a day, every day and it was wearing me out.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn and a lot of reading to do, just to feel like I’m current again. It was wonderful to see such innovation in spite of COVID. I still feel the giant leap forward was in the hands of the smaller players, however they too will catch up. They always do.