CES 2026 Was a Tech Show. It Was Also a Cry for Help.
Every January, the tech industry descends on Las Vegas to answer the question nobody actually asked: what if we put AI in that? This year's Consumer Electronics Show was no exception, serving up the usual buffet of enormous televisions, rollable laptops, and humanoid robots alongside a side dish of gadgets so aggressively weird that they require a moment of quiet personal reflection before you can fully process them. As someone who spends her days implementing technology that is supposed to solve actual problems for actual humans, watching CES each year is equal parts professional development and spiritual experience.
Let us start with the gadgets that have ambitions. Dreame's Cyber X robot vacuum sprouts chunky treaded legs and hauls itself up a full staircase like a tiny cleaning tank, Engadget which is either the most practical thing at the show or the origin story of a robot uprising, depending on your afternoon reading. iPolish unveiled acrylic nails that change color on demand via electrophoretic film and a companion app, cycling through 400 different shades almost instantly. Gizmodo Genuinely impressive engineering applied to the question of whether your manicure should coordinate with your outfit in real time. And then there was the ultrasonic chef's knife from Seattle Ultrasonics: a $399 blade that vibrates over 30,000 times per second, moving through food with a sharpness that exceeds its physical edge, TechCrunch and which makes your tomatoes feel like they are being sliced by a benevolent ghost. Practical? Debatable. Deeply cool? Unquestionably.
Then there is the category of gadgets that require a different kind of conversation. Lepro displayed a desktop OLED screen housing an AI "soulmate" that the company describes as empathetic and capable of connecting with users on a deep level. Quartz Razer's Project AVA evolved into a 5.5-inch animated holographic desk companion with selectable characters, eye-tracking, expressive faces, and lip-syncing for realistic interactions. TechCrunch Vivoo, not content with their clip-on smart toilet that analyzes hydration by monitoring your pee, also unveiled a menstrual pad infused with microfluidics that tracks fertility and hormone markers once you scan it with your phone. Engadget There is a version of all of this that represents genuinely meaningful health innovation. There is also a version in which CES 2026 was the year technology decided to be present for every single moment of your biological existence whether you wanted company or not.
Here is what CES always surfaces for me as an IT professional: the gap between what technology can do and what it should do is not a technical problem. It is a design problem, a values problem, and sometimes a please-read-the-room problem. The same engineering discipline that produces a stair-climbing vacuum produces an AI companion screen, and the difference between those two products is entirely a question of what problem the engineers decided was worth solving. In enterprise IT, we make these calls constantly. Every automation workflow, every tool selection, every process improvement starts with a version of the same question: does this actually make someone's experience better, or does it just make a capability available because we had the capability to make it available?
But the weird stuff is not the distraction from the serious stuff. It is the honest version of the same impulse: someone looked at a problem, or a gap, or an opportunity, and decided to build something. Some of those somethings are going to change how we live. Some are going to be a $10 music-playing lollipop you can crunch on while hearing Ice Spice through your jawbone. Both of those outcomes are, in their own way, a form of ambition worth respecting, even if one of them is considerably more respectable than the other.
