CES 2026 was full of weird, fun tech that you didn't know you needed. Not everything is practical, but a lot of it is surprisingly clever. AI is popping up in places you'd never expect. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is known for featuring some of the weirdest and wildest new tech products and concepts of the year.
Jenny Xiao, partner at Leonsis Capital and former researcher at OpenAI, came in with a nuanced take. There's something of a bubble, but it's "relatively contained" in the infrastructure layer with overinvestment primarily in data centers, GPUs and in large language model companies. But right now, there's actually underinvestment in the application layer because there are so many ways AI can make an impact in various enterprises, Xiao said.
On the consumer side, one of the things we talk about from a Gemini perspective is the fact that it is easily integrated into our Google Suite, which we think is our biggest differentiator. We always lean into the ability to supercharge productivity as well as creativity, and being able to do that 10-fold if you compare it to the competitors in the marketplace, because we have an integrated stack.
Microsoft Corp., eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI's ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google's Gemini boasts 650 million a month.