LAS VEGAS, NV — Standing beneath a 90-foot LED panel that pulsed gently in the corporate blue of a company nobody in the audience could afford to short, the CEO of a major consumer electronics firm announced Wednesday that his company’s newest generative AI assistant is now capable of attending CES on the user’s behalf, freeing up valuable human time for activities like attending CES.
The product, demoed during a 94-minute keynote that opened with a four-minute drone-shot flyover of the Las Vegas Convention Center, will reportedly watch competing keynotes, summarize them into bullet points, generate plausible LinkedIn reactions, and tell the user which booths to pretend to have visited.
“We’re returning time to the human,” the CEO said, standing in front of a slide that contained the word HUMAN in a font roughly the size of a human. “Imagine never having to sit through a keynote again. Imagine your assistant sitting through it for you. Imagine, eventually, its assistant sitting through it for it.”
By midmorning, six other major tech CEOs had announced functionally identical products, each described as the first of its kind. One demo featured an AI agent watching a recorded version of the same keynote it had been announced in, generating a summary the presenter then read aloud to confirm accuracy.
Anders Pelle, a principal analyst at a research desk inside one of the Big Four firms, noted that this year’s CES has converged on what he called “a recursive labor model,” in which AI products are primarily designed to interact with other AI products on behalf of humans who have stopped showing up. “The encouraging news,” Pelle said, “is that engagement metrics are up across every platform. The complicating news is that we can no longer confirm which of the engagers are people.”
A reporter from a trade publication, who said he had been covering CES since 2009, watched the demo from the press riser and remarked that his own outlet had this year deployed an AI tool to draft preliminary coverage of keynotes, which would then be reviewed by an editor who, he confirmed after a brief pause, was also an AI tool. He said he was at the show mostly to confirm the building still existed.
The keynote also previewed a consumer-facing AI refrigerator that drafts grocery lists based on items its companion AI pantry app told it were running low, a smart mirror that compliments the user using sentiment analysis of texts the user’s phone AI sent earlier that morning, and a $1,299 wearable described as “a second wearable, for your first wearable.” All three products will ship in Q3, pending the resolution of what the company called “minor questions about what they are for.”
Asked during a brief press gaggle whether any of the announced products solved a problem that existed before the products themselves were announced, the CEO smiled, nodded, and said his assistant would get back to them. By Wednesday evening, it had — with a 600-word reply praising the question, restating it in three different ways, and recommending the reporter consider upgrading to the Pro tier.