The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attracts thousands of exhibitors and attendees searching for the next big thing, with this year set to feature a cornucopia of technological innovation from connected fridges to drones, smartwatches and virtual reality headsets.
At CES this week, many manufacturers will add virtual assistants from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google to their products, while others will claim they have added “artificial intelligence” to everything from cars to toothbrushes.
“Artificial intelligence could well be the story of the show,” says John Curran, managing director at consultancy Accenture’s TMT division. AI can “help jump-start some of the other categories that have met resistance in consumer adoption because the devices have been seen as hard to connect and hard to understand”.
