I’m still recovering from CES 2025, the massive technology conference held earlier this month in Las Vegas. It ran from Jan. 7 to 10 after two days of preshow events for journalists.
This year’s show featured more than 4,500 exhibitors, including 1,400 startups. CES 2025 attracted over 141,000 attendees, including more than 6,000 media.
This was my 26th CES, including two I covered virtually during the Covid pandemic. So I’ve schlepped to Las Vegas 24 times for the show, which used to be called the Consumer Electronics Show.
It’s getting harder to cover the show and not just because of my advancing age.
CES is spread out across multiple venues not just the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center, which has north, south and west halls. It also spans the Venetian Expo, Aria and Mandalay Bay. This year, the Sphere joined the lineup of venues. Plus, there were private events at the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace and many more locations.
Getting around town is a major pain involving shuttle buses, the Monorail, the Vegas Loop, taxis, Ubers and just hoofing it.
I felt like Danny Glover from “Lethal Weapon,” who kept muttering, “I’m too old for this shit.” I threw out my back from carrying my laptop bag over one shoulder and I picked up a cold while there. Catching a bug among that many people is not unusual. In fact, it’s known as “the CES flu.”
When you’re at the show, you have to focus on select things or you’ll get overwhelmed.
My primary focus was the key theme of this year’s show: artificial intelligence. AI chipmaker Nvidia kicked off CES 2025 with a keynote speech from CEO Jensen Huang at the Michelob Ultra Arena.
I interviewed executives from companies in software, semiconductors, robotics, and consumer electronics. The AI theme kept popping up. You couldn’t avoid it. It was the buzzword of the show for the second year in a row, by my assessment. (Though new twists included agentic AI and physical AI. Last year was more about generative AI.)
“It seems like every year, there is a new theme to CES,” Daniel J. O’Regan, managing director of equity trading at Mizuho Securities USA, said in a client note. “One year it was 3D TVs, one year it was drones. This time around it was all about AI on EVERYTHING. Literally, every consumer electronics segment we talked to was trying to utilize some sort of ‘AI’ that it felt overplayed.”
O’Regan’s colleague, Jordan Klein, a trading-desk analyst with Mizuho Securities, compared the CES experience to “competing in your own version of Squid Games, without the blood and machine guns.”
“It’s pure survival of the fittest in terms of crowds, casinos, getting around, and all the meetings,” Klein said. “And that’s before handling whatever you do at night. After two full days and three nights, I voted with the ‘X’ group to leave the game and come home. Rather than stay longer and try and win more money, I had had more than enough.”
Some companies skip CES rather than get lost in all the noise. Prominent companies that didn’t exhibit at this year’s show included Apple (a longtime holdout), Dell, GoPro, iRobot, SharkNinja and Sonos.
Delta Air Lines used CES as a venue to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The company, which started in the crop-dusting business, rented out the Sphere for a blowout presentation and party, featuring a concert by rocker Lenny Kravitz.
Afterward, I heard one attendee say, “That was the longest commercial I’ve ever sat through.”
Delta wasn’t the only major U.S. corporation celebrating a 100-year anniversary this year at CES. Caterpillar also celebrated the century milestone at the show.
And the Consumer Technology Association, producer of CES, is celebrating the 100th year of its founding as well. The association started as the Radio Manufacturers Association in April 1924.
People always ask me what I saw at CES that I’d like to own. This year, it would be Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses from Meta Platforms and EssilorLuxottica. I also liked the newest smart birdfeeders and backyard wildlife cams from Bird Buddy and Birdfy.
My favorite booth was the Nikon booth, which had a professional photographer taking portrait photos for CES attendees.
Related articles:
CES 2025: The Global Stage for Innovation, Connecting the World, Creating the Future (CTA; Jan. 10, 2025)
CES 2025 Wrap-Up: The Future Of Tech Is Brighter, Smarter And Picks Up After Itself (Forbes; Jan. 10, 2025)
These Are the Official 2025 Best of CES Winners, Awarded by CNET Group (CNet; Jan. 9, 2025)
Photos: Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall (CTA) and Delta event at the Sphere (Delta).
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