CES 2026 Recap: AI Everywhere and Display Tech Still Stealing the Show

CES 2026 made one thing painfully clear: we’ve entered the phase where AI is no longer a feature. It’s a label. It’s a checkbox. It’s a slide deck requirement. Giving a CES 2026 recap with an AI hangover isn’t fun.

And honestly? CES felt AI Drunk.

Not AI-forward. Not AI-enabled.

AI drunk. Too much of a good thing can make you drunk.

The show floor and keynotes were flooded with AI claims, AI companions, AI assistants, AI insights, AI experiences, AI robots, and AI-driven everything. Some of it was impressive. Some of it was clever. A lot of it was… just noise. But underneath the hype, CES 2026 did reveal a few signals that matter for IT and AV leaders, especially around edge AI, display innovation, and the next phase of collaboration and content workflows.

AI Everywhere (and Most of It Wasn’t Useful)

AI dominated CES 2026 messaging across product categories, from PCs to displays to robotics to smart home devices. CES itself leaned into AI as a key headline theme, with programming and showcases built around AI’s impact on work and connectivity.

But for enterprise IT and AV managers, the important question isn’t “Does it have AI?”

What does it actually do, and what does it replace?

A lot of CES AI felt like a solution looking for a problem:

• AI features that duplicate what users already do faster manually
• AI integrations that require major trust in cloud pipelines
• AI add-ons that create more complexity than value
• AI “assistants” without real workflow integration

The practical takeaway: AI is becoming marketing default. Your job is going to be filtering what’s real from what’s just renamed automation.

Shift to the Edge

While the “AI everywhere” theme got the attention, the most important structural change was quieter:

More intelligence is moving to the edge.

CES highlighted edge AI as a defining direction, with emphasis on workloads running closer to the user, improving responsiveness, privacy, and personalization.

For IT and AV leaders, this matters because it changes the technical conversation from cloud features to infrastructure decisions:

• Compute moves into endpoints (cameras, displays, meeting room appliances, laptops)
• Latency becomes controllable (critical for real-time collaboration and capture)
• Privacy posture improves (less data leaving the room by default)

In other words, edge AI isn’t about futuristic demos. It’s about a more realistic path to AI adoption where the network doesn’t become a bottleneck and security teams don’t shut everything down.

If CES 2025 was “AI is coming,” CES 2026 felt like: “AI is here, and it needs a deployment model that won’t break operations.”

AI Hardware

The strongest AI story at CES 2026 wasn’t a chatbot. It was compute.

AI is getting pushed into endpoints, and that requires the hardware ecosystem to catch up. Industry trend coverage tied CES 2026’s direction to efficiency and scaling on-device compute across categories. That move gets complicated with the recent uptick in prices for storage and chips.

Expect new “AI requirements” in device evaluations

When you’re reviewing conferencing devices, cameras, signage players, or content capture tools, you’ll start hearing language like:

• onboard inference
• local model support
• embedded NPUs
• AI acceleration
• private/secure processing

Some of those are meaningful. Some will be fluff. But either way, your lifecycle planning now includes AI compute capability.

Power, thermals, and lifecycle planning will matter more

Edge compute is real compute. That means:

• more power draw
• more heat
• more hardware refresh pressure
• more firmware and security patching responsibility

AI doesn’t just “add features.” It adds operational workload.

Display Technology Was Still the Real Innovation at CES

CES 2026 display trends leaned toward bigger, brighter, more power-efficient, and more immersive experiences, including movement in OLED and RGB/MicroLED directions.

CES display improvements matter because display technology impacts:

• meeting equity (visibility, color accuracy, brightness)
• control room readability
• digital signage ROI and longevity
• creative workflow confidence (proofing and review)

Key display signals IT leaders should watch:

RGB-based LED evolution

RGB and MicroLED concepts continue to push higher brightness and improved color performance, which has downstream impacts in signage, large-format displays, and high ambient light spaces.

Premium display tech is still trickling down

CES routinely shows bleeding-edge display capabilities first, but what matters is what shows up in commercial procurement cycles within 12–24 months.

If you’re responsible for campus-wide displays or large enterprise rollouts, the question becomes, “When is it worth waiting, and when do you deploy now?”

Collaboration & Conferencing

CES 2026 wasn’t a pure enterprise UC show, but collaboration themes are bleeding into everything. The show’s own messaging emphasized how AI is reshaping how people work and connect, which directly maps to conferencing and collaboration experiences.

The collaboration trajectory is heading toward:

• more automation in-room
• more intelligence in the camera + mic chain
• more local processing
• more workflow integration for hybrid teams

But there’s a caveat: Automation without trust is useless

If an AI camera mode makes people look worse, cuts to the wrong speaker, or “helpfully” reframes a shot incorrectly, users turn it off.

If meeting summaries hallucinate action items or misquote decisions, the system loses credibility fast. The winners here won’t be the vendors with the flashiest features. They’ll be the ones that build boringly reliable meeting outcomes, at enterprise scale, with manageable admin overhead.

What You Should Watch Next

CES 2026 was exciting, but it also set traps.

Here are the real “watch items” if you’re managing AV and IT together:

1) Edge AI will force endpoint standardization

If AI is running locally, not in the cloud, endpoints matter more. You’ll need fewer “random one-off devices” and more standardized platforms.

2) AI features will inflate RFP language

Expect more vendors to sell capabilities that are difficult to validate at procurement time. You’ll need test plans, not demos.

3) Displays will continue improving faster than meeting room design

Organizations will buy incredible displays…and still install them poorly. The gap between “hardware capability” and “actual deployment quality” is widening.

4) Content creation is moving into IT’s territory

As video creation becomes default, IT policies and platforms will get pulled into the workflow.

5) “AI Drunk” will wear off (I hope) and budgets will get more ruthless

When the hype fades, leadership will ask the best question in technology:

“What did we get for the money?”

CES Was Loud. The Smart Moves Will Be Quiet.

CES 2026 was loud, flashy, and full of AI promises. But for enterprise IT and AV managers, the real signal wasn’t the number of AI logos on booths.

It was the underlying shift toward:

• edge compute
• practical automation
• faster, better displays
• simplified content workflows

Your advantage in 2026 won’t come from chasing every new feature. It’ll come from knowing what to ignore. Because the organizations that win aren’t the ones that adopt the most “AI.” They’re the ones who adopt what works securely, reliably, and at scale.

We now set our sights on the next big gathering: ISE 2026. You can check out all our coverage on our dedicated ISE 2026 page.