CES 2026 delivered its usual mix of the practical and the peculiar.
But this year, even the quirky gadgets pointed toward a consistent theme: AI is leaving the screen and entering the physical world—our cars, our homes, and apparently, our arms.
Self-Driving Shifts from "Someday" to "Shipping"
The autonomous vehicle conversation at CES felt different this year. Less "robotaxis are coming someday" and more "AI-assisted driving is shipping now."
Nvidia announced Alpamayo, a family of AI models for autonomous driving that President and CEO Jensen Huang called "the world's first thinking, reasoning autonomous vehicle AI."
The key differentiator: these cars don't just perceive the road—they reason about it using chain-of-thought processing similar to what powers advanced AI chatbots.
One standout feature is that the Alpamayo model explains its reasoning for each decision. This transparency matters enormously for an industry where regulators need to understand what happens when things go wrong.
Black-box AI making life-or-death decisions on public roads is a hard sell. AI that can articulate why it chose to brake or swerve is far easier to validate and trust.
Mercedes Makes It Real
The Mercedes-Benz partnership made this concrete.
The 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA will be the first production car shipping with Nvidia's full autonomous driving stack, including Alpamayo. It's arriving in the U.S. this year, classified as Level 2+ (still requiring driver attention) but with capabilities similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving.
Mercedes also made news with its electric GLC, which features the first in-car infotainment system integrating AI from both Microsoft and Google—an interesting choice to go multi-vendor rather than exclusive. That decision signals how automakers are thinking about AI partnerships: hedging bets rather than going all-in with a single provider.
Why Autonomous Driving Matters Beyond Cars
Why should association leaders care about self-driving technology?
Beyond the automotive industry implications, autonomous vehicles serve as a proof point for AI capability. If you can make self-driving work—navigating complex, unpredictable physical environments in real-time while making split-second decisions—you've demonstrated something profound about what AI can handle.
There's another angle worth considering: unlike human drivers, AI systems can collaborate.
We're generally terrible drivers—dangerous, inefficient, prone to road rage. But autonomous vehicles can communicate with each other, moving as coordinated swarms, joining and leaving groups safely.
Think about what happens on highways. Someone accelerates too fast getting on, forces their way into a space that wasn't there, and triggers a chain reaction of braking that ripples backward for miles. AI vehicles interacting in real-time could smooth all of that out.
The efficiency gains—in both time and fuel—could be substantial. The safety gains could save thousands of lives annually.
None of this means the human experience of driving goes away. Plenty of people genuinely enjoy driving as a recreational activity. But when the function is purely transportation—getting safely from point A to point B—autonomous systems will likely prove safer, more efficient, and less stressful than human drivers.
The Companion Robot Trend
CES wouldn't be CES without gadgets that make you smile (or raise an eyebrow). But this year, a clear category emerged: companion robots designed for emotional connection rather than productivity.
Cocomo from Japanese startup Ludens AI is a fuzzy, egg-shaped companion robot that follows you around the house on a wheeled base.
Its exterior maintains a temperature close to human body warmth—about 98.6°F normally, rising to 102°F during extended contact like hugging. It communicates through soft humming sounds rather than speech, giving it a more pet-like than assistant-like personality.
It's easy to dismiss a warm fuzzy robot as silly until you realize how many companies are now building products specifically designed to combat loneliness. That's a real problem—and these companies are betting it's a problem people will pay to solve.
Razer's Project Ava takes a different approach: a 5.5-inch holographic desk companion. You choose your character—options include an anime girl named Kira or an edgy masculine alternative named Zane—and it acts as a gaming coach and life assistant.
Razer markets it as a "Friend for Life" that "bridges the gap between virtual assistance and physical companionship." Whether that vision appeals or unsettles you probably says something about where you stand on AI's role in human relationships.
The Practical Stuff
Not everything at CES was designed to be your friend.
LG's CLOiD is an AI-powered home robot that can fold laundry, unload the dishwasher, serve food, and start laundry cycles. It demonstrated these capabilities live at CES, folding clothes and loading laundry into a washing machine on stage.
The robot has articulated arms with seven degrees of freedom and hands with independently moving fingers. It's more concept than product right now—LG hasn't announced pricing or availability—but it represents LG's "Zero Labor Home" vision.
The Roborock Saros Rover might be the most impressive practical innovation: a robot vacuum that can actually climb stairs using two wheel-legs.
Each leg moves independently, allowing the vacuum to keep its body level while navigating uneven surfaces. More impressively, it can clean stairs as it climbs them—something competing stair-climbing robots simply cannot do.
The Saros Rover can also hop, balance on one leg, and make sudden directional changes without falling over. It's currently in development with no confirmed release date, but it represents a meaningful leap in what robot vacuums can handle.
The Through-Line
It's easy to dismiss some of these announcements as hype or novelty. But CES has a track record worth respecting.
VCRs, CDs, HDTV, the original Xbox, voice assistants like Alexa—what shows up at CES often ends up in our lives a few years later. The show has been previewing mainstream technology for decades.
The through-line this year is clear: AI is moving from digital to physical.
The gap between demo and deployment is closing. We're seeing real shipping numbers, real production timelines, and live demonstrations instead of edited highlight reels.
Whether it's a self-driving Mercedes, a laundry-folding robot, or a warm fuzzy companion designed to make you feel less alone, we're watching technology try to meet genuinely human needs.
Some of it will stick. Some won't. But the direction is unmistakable.
The question isn't whether physical AI is coming. It's already here. The question is how quickly it scales—and how prepared we are when it does.
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