Mark Penn, CEO and chairman, Stagwell

CES has become more relevant to marketers. Back in the day, it was more limited to the technology companies themselves and their prospective consumers and partners. Marketers then kind of saw this as something they should go to to keep up with with what is going on. Now there are more marketers here than ever. I don’t know if it’s the Cannes of America yet, but it’s close.

Agentic AI, one of the major themes of CES this year, is a big building block of the brand of the future. If you think of a brand as having a word mark, a logo, or an audible element—all brands will now have an agent, too. A personality created through artificial intelligence that represents the brand will be routine, and that personality has to be created and imagined. It’s not born. You don’t want it to be the voice from The Forbin Project or something, you want it to represent the personality and values of your company. You don’t want to take things off the shelf and make your company look like every other company, particularly if you’re a large enterprise with a with a brand personality. It is now going to be represented through technology.

Sir Martin Sorrell, chairman, S4 Capital

It’s the usual things. It’s the screens. I was reading, John Deere has autonomous tractors. A guy last night from AutoX told me [they are] going to have an autonomous car. They’ve got an experiment going in San Jose financed by SoftBank. They raised a billion dollars, and they’ll have an autonomous car by 2026. They’re already running cars in San Jose. So that’s going to be big. And the advances in medicine are also huge—for curing disease, cancer, etc.