The mood at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is pretty upbeat. This is a hardware show and after years of taking a backseat to software, the massive computing power from GPUs for AI applications has propelled hardware to the forefront. And it’s not just servers, racks, data center peripherals, or networking, the range of hardware was impressive. From auto, robots, home appliances, entertainment, healthcare devices, industrial equipment, and smart glasses, to security.
Vendors, engineers, consulting firms, and VCs are noticeably excited for the future.
Heavily focused on AI, the number of exhibitors with AI proof of concept and use cases was also quite large. Sure, there’s always hype, but a lot of them were genuine, with orders, use cases, and deployment.
Trends
Smarter hardware
Robotics – big push from computing power for robotic uses in supply chain, warehousing, and retail. Strong use of AI in industrial design, and industrial production.
Examples:
- Siemens’ collaboration with Nvidia and several others using Nvidia’s Cosmos (a big improvement on Omniverse) for pre-production simulation and assembly lines for quality control, and error reduction)
- Eaton with Intel for power systems. (Time reduction on compliance, process streamlining)
- Accenture’s several clients, in fields like oil drilling, and IoT applications.
Vendors can do a lot more now and are seeing demand for better AI products.
Inference
Both edge AI in PCs and IoT endpoints are going to be huge. A SaaS cyber security firm (among others) complained about the crazy fees she pays AWS (somebody’s got to pay for that $100Bn of Capex for Nvidia’s GPUs!). The need to increase inference and solutions at the endpoint will be a major trend, and the increase in the number of AI PCs coming to market confirms the shift to the edge.
Agentic AI or Agents
I had lengthy discussions with Nvidia and AMD engineers on Agentic AI, which has become a bit of a buzzword with some hype about it really being a chatbot with a fancier name, but in several cases that I saw, was a major improvement over a chatbot.
Agentic has to mean enhanced or better solutions than a chatbot – a chatbot or a ChatGPT query gives you a simple answer to a query from a data set. An Agent must be able to give you significantly more feedback from analyzing a wider set of data, or more than one data set. It is more interactive and provides feedback and looks for feedback – a loop that ends up with a better solution.
A comment from the VP of Accenture was very interesting. She said, that if agents have to be better than chatbots or the latest version of Alexa/Siri – if I ask for the next charging station for my EV, it should be able to know my history, deduce, which direction I’m going in, and also tell if there is a vegetarian eatery on the way (in the same direction) – not just throw up 5 charging stations 2 in the wrong direction, as it currently does.
In my opinion, this is just the beginning, there will be secular growth for a while. I would strongly focus on AI with the usual caveat of being careful of stock valuations running ahead of growth and getting overpriced – we’ll need to be patient with getting the right price.
For AI to continue growing the industry has to get more democratized – more developers, a wider ecosystem, more use cases and I saw that in spades, which gives me a lot of confidence in its future – Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Amazon, Google, and Intel had multiple partners all over the conference.
The Agent could be your interface on your iPhone – this is an interesting idea brought up by a VP from Qualcomm.