5 EMERGING THEMES FROM THIS YEAR’SCONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,HUMAN DESIGN CES has always been a spectacle - asensory overload of bright lights, ambitiousprototypes, futuristic promises, and theoccasional uncanny glimpse of what thefuture might hold. Robots roam the show floor. feel something. They were turning abstractenterprise capability into lived experience As remarked in a dentsu Breakfast Briefingsession, ‘CMO Futures: Where IntelligenceMeets Intention’, when as marketers we lookback at CES, a conference inundated by That’s what makes CES so valuable formarketers - not as a predictor of winners andlosers, but as a signal of how innovation is being Here are some of the innovations that wefelt combined Artificial Intelligence andhuman-centered design to create value (for At CES 2026, something subtlebut significant shifted. Amid the noise and bright lights of sharperscreens, faster processors, proliferatingplatforms, and ever-more sophisticated AI,the brands that truly stood out weren’t simply 01MAKING IT REAL:AGENTIC AI’SSOPHOMOREPHASE 02LET’S GETPHYSICAL:ENHANCING IRLEXPERIENCES CREATORSWITHOUT BORDERS:WHERE CULTUREGETS MADE03 LESS IS MORE:THE RESILIENCEOF ‘MINIMALIST’SOLUTIONS04 05 FROM BUYERSTO BELIEVERS:THE RISE OF THETOTAL PERSONEXPERIENCE IN B2B MAKINGIT REAL:AGENTIC AI’SSOPHOMORE As remarked in a dentsu Breakfast Briefingsession, ‘CES for Marketers: Trends WeExpect for 2026’, hosted by dentsu’s WhitneyFishman, EVP Futures & Insights and SarahStringer, Global Chief of Innovation, Media,this means we are entering the critical Last year, at CES 2025, ‘agentic’ was thebuzzword permeating the conference,as a result of NVIDIA’s AI Blueprintsannouncement and of a considerable uptakein funding investment for AI agent start- Here are some notable examples of innovationsshowcased at CES where agentic AI was putin service of solving for some form of long- TIMEKETTLE - ROSETTA’SEARPHONES Imagine language barriers are no more andthe implications this new reality can havefor sectors like travel, hospitality, retail,and healthcare, to name a few. A CES 2026Honoree in Artificial Intelligence, Headphones The earbuds are reportedly 98% accurate intheir translations, which are essentially real-time (delivered with a 0.2 second lag). ‘Agentic’comes in play in this application as the AI LG - HOME ENTERTAINMENT‘SOMMELIER’ As new entertainment offerings, new smartdevices, new ‘must have’ applications andgadgets continue to emerge, consumers aredefinitely not struggling with a lack optionswhen it comes to investing their downtime.As a matter of fact, they are more likely At CES 2026 LG showcased how theirSmart TVs leverage its multi-AI architecture(webOS2026) to deliver smarter, moreresponsive viewing experiences to the enduser. This underlying architecture leverages UNO - WHOLISTIC TRIAGING “Mens sana in corpore sano” (“a healthymind and a healthy body go hand inhand”), the Latin adage says. But assessing A CES 2026 Honoree in EmbeddedTechnologies, UNO Brain Body is anext-generation mental AND healthscreening kiosk that delivers hospital CERENCE – AGENT-2-AGENT ECOSYSTEM The ‘at home’ version, UNOCARE, takes a similarapproach as it analyzes facial blood flowsignals through face recognition technologyto identify key wellness states such as stress, As evidenced in a recent dentsu researchreport, with 55% of Americans either using orplanning to use it to shop, AI is emerging asa recurrent shopping partner for shoppers.2But what if AI agents on both sides of the In the lead up to CES 2026, Cerence,an industry leader in AI solutions for theautomotive and transportation sectors,announced it’s moving beyond in-vehicle Automating lead capture, test drive bookings,and service scheduling while integratingdirectly with CRM and Dealer ManagementSystems, the former is designed to bridgethe gap between customer expectations However, what is most interesting is perhapsthe notion of the two agents collaboratingto create an AI-powered service loop that WHATBRANDSSHOULD MAKE YOUR DATA AGENT-READY Clean, structured, consented data becomes theraw material agents need to act intelligently.Invest in tagging, taxonomies, and consistent REWRITE ROLES AND KPIS Expect less time on manual build/traffic work,and more on strategy, testing hypotheses, andinterpreting outputs. An upcoming dentsu CMOreport shows that 50% of global marketingthink redesigning marketing processes, DESIGN FOR ‘SUPERVISINGAI,’ NOT JUST USING IT Build playbooks where humans setgoals, guardrails, and brand voice—andagents execute. Train teams on promptframeworks, QA, and escalation rather GUARDRAILS FOR BRAND AND RISK Set rules governing where agents canpublish without approval, what data they can T H E M E 0 2 LET’S GETPHYSICAL:ENHANCING IRL While CES has grown into aninnovation showcase that oftenfeatures technology far beyond thereach of average consumers, thereis still a consistent presence on the AI