I’m confident that CES 2026 will be even more crowded than everyone anticipated. Six years after the pandemic, I feel like — based on early announcements — that the show is finally coming back to life. Energized by the promise of AI – whether automation, generative, agentic, or any other kind – companies are daring to go for the moon again. So what key trends are we expecting from the year’s biggest show for technology innovation? I may ultimately be wrong, but let me peek into my crystal ball and see if I can connect some dots.
AI will be inevitable
More than at any CES show in years past, we’ll see AI incorporated into every gadget imaginable. Samsung, LG, Lenovo, Razer – all the biggest attendees and even smaller unknown startups will be boasting about why some form of AI will make their products better. Some AI applications may legitimately move the needle; The vast majority will be AI features, over-promising and under-delivering.
As journalists, we’ll be spending our days at CES 2026 sifting through the AI minefield of intelligence sprinkled across laptops, mobile devices, home appliances, transportation, and more. Just as Wi-Fi was added to almost every gadget, AI will change its path even when you don’t want it to.
Do you really need AI in your washing machine or refrigerator? How many times will a major electronics company try to convince us in a packed press conference that we need a new home appliance to learn how to make a meal out of leftover ingredients? The most useful AI functions will be those that do not seem to be AI, LLMs or even chatbots working invisibly in the background to make our lives more convenient.
sea of smart glasses
If last year’s review of a bunch of smart glasses, including Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, is any indication of what to expect in 2026, it’s that there’s a ton of smart glasses on the way.
As the potential next big thing after smartphones, every company is trying to figure out how to commercialize smart glasses. How do you balance style and utility, while also making it worth the price for early adopters and incorporating AI into them to keep up with the latest trend? Meta You might be thinking that it has found some magical recipe, but in reality it is not so. A pair of smart glasses with a solid screen, camera, battery life, speakers, AI, and apps is still a sacred device that everyone is chasing.
At present, smart glasses still have a lot of tradeoffs. It’s also not clear that consumers will even want smart glasses that can do all this. That’s why we’ve seen a variety of smart glasses — ones with mono- and dual-lens waveguide screens, ones without cameras (for privacy, naturally), or simple “AI glasses” that are best at taking photos and videos and playing music like a pair of open-ear headphones. Then, there are video glasses like Xreal that are bolting on XR functions to allow them to offer more computing-like features that you’ll find in heavier XR or VR headsets.
I don’t expect any smart glasses blueprints to emerge until the end of CES 2026, only that the variety of designs and offerings will grow far beyond what we’ve already seen. XR and VR will be far more smart glasses than headsets. The Metaverse is dead; AI is the new hotness now.
TV technology matters again
OK, maybe consumers won’t care at all what Micro RGB or WOLED means, but TV makers will be working hard to make their latest display technologies mandatory when they finally ship in actual flat screens.
Never mind that you can’t understand how backlighting technologies work or that your deteriorating vision can’t see wider dynamic range, extended HDR, higher contrast, or increased brightness. CES 2026 will promote TV technology as it has for more than 50 years. The show wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t go to Ogle Pixels.
I’ll be paying close attention to how forced AI is into new TVs and how companies choose to integrate AI there. There’s no doubt that Google’s Gemini will replace the old Google Assistant, but I’d really like to see how much AI it will lack. My guess is that there will be an uncomfortable amount of AI negligence disguised as usefulness. More AI screensavers—sorry, canvas art. More AI to create fake frames to make watching sports and gaming easier, but obviously ugly when watching movies and TV shows due to motion smoothing.
Speaking of higher frame rates, I wonder how high the refresh rates will TV manufacturers go? 120Hz, 165Hz, and 240Hz already push the envelope for gaming, but don’t be surprised if there’s a bunch of TVs with even higher native (and artificially enhanced) refresh rates out to beat the competition in the spec sheet war.
EVs and mobility have taken over
Everyone knows CES isn’t a car show, but it’s also impossible to ignore the entire hall of EV, automotive, and mobility tech at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Like a slow burn, there will be more to it. More EVs with ridiculous top speeds, long ranges and displays inside their interiors; more e-bikes and e-scooters that resemble motorcycles; And more bizarre prototype flying cars and personal quadcopters that promise to take to the skies (but probably never will).
Zooming in more specifically, my observation is that there will be a tendency to revert to physical and tactile controls in the car. A decade ago, Tesla made touchscreen dashboards and controls ubiquitous, but carmakers and consumers are now realizing that the good old buttons were never needed and probably should never have been removed.
Personally, I welcome this return to sensitivity. Apart from giving cars more uniqueness and character, physical buttons, dials and knobs are actually more user-friendly while driving. Who could have imagined that turning a dial to adjust the volume or air conditioner is faster than tapping multiple layers into one touchscreen layer?
And of course, like every other connected device at CES 2026, I’m sure we’ll see more promises for AI in the dashboard as well as self-driving technology.
here come the homing droids
Not that the smart home won’t have a big presence at the show – it will – but it’s currently being reimagined with AI, so it won’t feel unprecedented. Google Assistant is being replaced by Gemini and Alexa is being replaced by Alexa+. These “upgrades” are mostly on the backend, but as we’ve seen testing the early batch of products powered by these more intelligent voice assistants, the intelligence part isn’t there yet. When you require consumers to use two different modes – one for smart home control and another for more conversational AI – as you do with Gemini, it’s a sobering reminder that retrofitting is still a work in progress.
What should be more interesting on the smart home front is to see the merging of intelligence with robotics within the home. Of course, I’m talking about humanoid robots that can pick up things and do chores, and even advanced robot vacuum cleaners that can climb stairs. At CES 2026, we should be able to take a closer look at some of these personal robots. They won’t be commercially available at any affordable price any time soon, but at least they should give us an idea of whether we’re really any closer to the sci-fi dream of having a real-life C-3PO to do our bidding.
More about general consumer technology
Those are the big trends I expect to see at CES 2026. On a pure hardware level, the show will be packed with the usual new laptops and PCs, home entertainment systems (TVs and speakers), wearables, audio (wireless headphones and wireless earbuds), cameras, transportation (EVs, e-bikes, e-scooters), and mobile accessories and computer peripherals. A paradise of gadgets if you like.
By the end of the show, the Gizmodo consumer tech team will be tired and hungry, but we’ll have seen it all. CES is the best place to preview the future. Or rather, ideas about what the future looks like.
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