CES 2018 marked a turning point in the consumer electronics business. For the first time, the big companies talked more about services than products. This shift has been long in the making – it’s why the organisers no longer refer to it as the Consumer Electronics Show – and 2018 was the tipping point. It was all about connected home products, with long neglected categories like kitchen appliances and washers and dryers suddenly taking center stage. The products themselves are increasingly generic, with differentiation coming from the voice recognition and artificial intelligence services that manufacturers bundle in.
The thought of my refrigerator or garage door opener constantly analysing my actions and predicting what I’ll want next seems spooky, even unsettling, to me, but conventional wisdom is that what older consumers perceive as surveillance state products, younger ones embrace as high level service. Plenty of innovation was on display, but it came from cloud-delivered services, and not from a box.
Small and medium sized companies were not the place to look for breakout products this year. I checked out the evening showcases, which cater mostly to smaller and newer exhibitors. The first, CES Unveiled, didn’t have much under the veil. Most of the exhibitors were small companies with, at best, incrementally innovative products. The lineups at Showstoppers and Pepcom’s Digital Experience were better, but aside from a 300-mile marathon trek on a Onewheel electric board, there weren’t many wow moments. Same for Eureka Park, the now huge section of the CES show floor dedicated to start up companies. There were plenty of toys, and lots of me-too products and barely discernible upgrades to existing products.
Looking ahead, one path for startup success will be through the big AI platform operators, either the generic ones like Amazon or Google, or the in house systems developed by the big boys.
This year will also be remembered as the year when cars became a consumer electronics product. The north hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center looked like a car show. Automakers have exhibited in past years, but there were more of them, and more with marketing messages crafted around connected services. Even ones that you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the automotive market, such as health monitoring.
Carmakers also have extensive AI projects underway, as the rush towards self driving cars picks up speed. If cars are just another consumer electronics platform, then the big auto companies will also be players in the consumer AI game.
Far from collapsing, the consumer electronics industry on display at CES was expanding into new services and new sectors, all of them linked by live data streams.