At CES 2026, Everything Is AI. What Matters Is How You Use It

2 days ago7 min read

Walking the floor at CES 2026 feels less like a glimpse of the future and more like a stroll through a very smart, very chatty appliance store. The headline-grabbing shock of AI is gone.You won’t find a single booth screaming “NOW WITH AI!” because, well, *everything* is. Your fridge has it, your car’s cupholders probably have it, and your mirror is likely offering unsolicited skincare advice powered by a large language model.The raw computational power, the ability to generate text or images on command—that’s become the baseline, the new silicon. It’s the expected hardware.The real battle, the one that separates the forgettable gadgets from the future classics, has shifted entirely to the canvas of user experience. It’s no longer about what the AI *can* do; it’s about how it makes you *feel* while doing it.Think of it like the evolution of the smartphone touchscreen. The first capacitive screens were the miracle.But the companies that won were those who mastered the intuitive swipe, the satisfying bounce-back, the ecosystem where the technology itself faded into the background, leaving only the desired action. That’s the precise frontier we’re on with AI today.The winning products here aren’t the ones with the most parameters or the fastest tokens-per-second. They’re the ones where the AI feels less like a brittle, over-eager intern and more like a seamless extension of your own intent.I saw a smart sketchpad that didn’t just correct my wobbly lines but understood the *style* I was fumbling toward, adapting its assistance from technical drawing to watercolor with a contextual grace that felt collaborative, not corrective. Conversely, I suffered through a demo for a “revolutionary” AI-powered recipe planner that required three separate voice confirmations and a biometric login just to suggest adding more salt to my soup.The friction was palpable. This is where the art comes in.The user experience is the narrative layer wrapped around the AI’s cold logic. It’s the pacing, the personality, the visual feedback that tells you the machine is listening, not just hearing.It’s the difference between a tool that solves a problem and a companion that anticipates a need. We’re moving from a paradigm of command-and-control to one of conversation and co-creation.The most compelling applications I saw were those leveraging AI for subtle augmentation: a video editing suite that intuitively assembled B-roll based on the emotional tone of my voiceover, or a design tool that generated not just a logo, but a coherent visual language across mockups for business cards and websites, maintaining a stylistic thread I’d only vaguely implied. The magic wasn’t in the generation, but in the curation and cohesion it provided.

#featured

#CES 2026

#AI integration

#user experience

#consumer technology

#enterprise strategy

#product design