CES is coming, get ready for an AI "tsunami."

Beginning on January 9 in Las Vegas, CES promises to offer the customary array of new consumer technology devices. This year, machine intelligence will enable even more of such stuff.

IF YOU THINK the chatter about generative AI is fading away, brace yourself. The excitement surrounding artificial intelligence continues unabated, and this phenomenon is set to take center stage at this year's CES.

Scheduled for January 9 in Las Vegas, CES, the largest annual gathering of the consumer electronics industry in the US, is a sprawling tech extravaganza spanning four days. Packed expo halls showcase a plethora of new gadgets, burgeoning startups, and prototypes pushing the boundaries of innovation. CES serves as a trade show where crucial sales and distribution agreements are sealed, concept cars navigate through bustling streets, and tech enthusiasts and journalists explore the floors in search of groundbreaking products. This year, a substantial number of these new products will be infused with substantial doses of AI.

Generative AI technology, which simmered beneath the surface for years, burst into the spotlight in November 2022 with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT. This event marked the beginning of an AI arms race. The ripples from this upheaval had yet to fully permeate the tech industry during last year's CES, rendering discussions on GenAI relatively sparse. Consequently, CES 2023 appears almost archaic in hindsight, trailing just six weeks behind the most significant technological revolution since the advent of the mobile phone.

However, the narrative is poised to change in 2024. Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, notes, "We didn't get the full CES fire hose of AI announcements last year like we're going to have." He predicts a tsunami of AI-related unveilings this year, permeating various sectors such as cars, scooters, headphones, cameras, speakers, and televisions. Some products may incorporate a ChatGPT-style question-and-response feature for spoken commands, while others might introduce more profound advancements.

Noteworthy players like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are anticipated to reveal chips supporting on-device AI services. These chips would process AI tasks locally, eliminating the need to send requests to cloud servers and enhancing the responsiveness of functions like computer vision, voice-to-text services, and generative computing.

As the stage for industry trends is set at CES, Sag predicts that AI will dominate the narrative this year. He states, "AI is just going to overwhelm everything. It will be so prevalent and so dominant that some people will just be sick of it." Get ready for CES 2024, where AI takes the spotlight and reshapes the conversation around technological innovation.