Josh Campo, CEO, Razorfish
We knew AI was going to be a big topic, but we saw AI with a lot more substance. There was a lot of conversation around agentic AI, which is about how we’re going to use AI in the future.
With AR and XR, I don’t know that we’re fully there yet, but I feel like we are really close to a consumer viable product. The experience could get a bit stronger, but we are well ahead of where we were last year.
The screens inside cars are getting much bigger, which means you have new entertainment and media space. You also see AI continuing in self driving, which also means that drivers will have more attention in that space.
Last year, we started to see the connected home evolve a lot. This year, you have standards like Matter, which allows providers to connect seamlessly regardless of your hub provider. That unlocks a big market for clients. It used to be that you had to have a homogenous smart home system. Now it’s more, we bought this one, we bought that one, and they can talk to each other.
Matt Graham, CMO of global food and nutrition, Mars
AI into the home around appliances in our business for food and nutrition is enormous. If you think about the integration of tech in TVs, tech in fridges, microwaves, and how you can actually start using AI to inform our people to eat better and create recipes and everything else with what is in their fridge is enormous, and how you can drive that back through conversion, I think that’s exciting.
Equally, I think the evolution of wearables, the data we can get, and how we connect that to human health and the role food can play within that is pretty exciting as well.
Dani Mariano, president, Razorfish
CES this year was a super well-attended event. It will be interesting to see the numbers. The C-Space was jam packed and very difficult to move. That speaks to how much this event matters to marketers, and to partners, and to things that are happening off the show floor.
It’s becoming a place for people to kick off the year, from a client, agency, and media perspective, adjacent to the show. Everything marketing is digital now, and so it becomes a massive place to kick off the marketing year at a technology show.
A lot of the things that we have been tracking over the last eight years are here. Like IoT—we have been fighting our way to try and do it on our own, but now it’s real. Operating systems in cars, we won’t see it for a few more years, but it’s very tangible. Same with XR and health tech.
With AI, there were pockets of it being more legitimate, useful, and ethical. There are brands that are doing deep integration with AI, versus just kind of masking that they’re using AI in the background.