I go through this every time I come home after CES. It’s a bit of a letdown. It’s quiet here as I write this after what seemed like days of endless show noise. The restaurants were especially loud at night. But, now here I am, at Moose Lodge, it’s quiet and I’m left trying to make sense of this year's show. I’m always surprised by something. I just wasn’t expecting it to be the steep decline of US innovation while other countries fly far ahead.

I wrote my five-part series about CES on Substack, where I get into what’s new and different and what seems to be trending. That’s the tactical stuff. As is every year, we advance, even when it only seems incremental. We advance. That sums it up. We’re still advancing, but the kid in me wishes for that new toy, that one thing that will wow me and it’s been a long time. I think the last time was the discovery that ChatGPT could do a better job of proofing my work than me. Before that, it was probably Alexa, and before that, it was the iPad and before that, the phone.

I had to think if innovation is slowing down or not. I don’t think it is, but innovation is like building blocks. Someone invents a major category, and everyone else invents something on top of that category. Alexa created a whole ecosystem and so did the iPhone and iPad and now we’re in the early stages with Large Language Models.

I was talking to friends last night and they were disappointed with this year’s show because of a lack of clear disruption in any direction. They felt it was one big show of baby steps. It was. We’re already tired of hearing that AI is in everything. I think the reason for the disappointment is that we saw improved technologies rather than products to buy. Nobody had a TV we all lusted after but rather a micro LED technology. I liked this show this year, but it did feel like CES was laying down the backstory of things to come. I can’t point to that one thing that wowed me and captured my imagination except for Amazon’s AWS DataZone. But few will find that as valuable as I did. Sure, I could write about all the EVs I saw but that gets tiresome too.

I loved the show and wish it didn’t end. There was still too much to see and learn but it will have to wait until next year. I still have more thinking to do about the show and my one regret is that I didn’t come back with that one thing I could tell you that will change your life. It just wasn’t the year.