Ultimate Guide: Seems Like Everyone Forgot The 'consumer' Part Of The Consumer...

Seeing all things AI at a tech tradeshow is hardly unusual these days. However, there was something about the tenor of CES 2026's tidal wave of AI announcements that really got under my skin—namely, many of the exhibitors seem to have forgotten the 'consumer' part of this electronics tradeshow.

Catch up with CES 2026: We're on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.

Now, I know it wasn't AI all the way down. There was still plenty of delightful CES weirdness in the form InWin's fresh signature chassis that looks not unlike a futuristic glass egg, as well as yet another rollable laptop concept machine from Lenovo. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention at least one questionable consumer doo-dad too, such as Lollipopstar, a lollipop that attempts to turn "candy into a concert in your mouth." No, I will not be elaborating further.

But, even setting aside the hours our poor Andy spent locked inside Lenovo's AI sphere of despair, a number of exhibitors at this year's CES focussed on AI. Gigabyte is among the most obvious examples; united under the banner of 'AI Forward', Gigabyte dedicated exhibition floor space to both local AI development offerings in the form of its AI Top series, alongside server hardware like its modular "one-stop AI data center solution" the Gigapod. That's already a lot of enterprise-geared hardware at a consumer tradeshow, but that's not all that ground my gears at CES this year.

Surprising perhaps no one, both AMD and Nvidia were also talking up local AI solutions geared towards consumers. Cloud-based AI is still swimming in money thanks to various partnerships, but it makes sense that both companies would also be looking to put tidy nest eggs into AI running locally from a device that, say, runs off their consumer grade hardware. That said, there is something about all of the local AI talk at CES 2026 that sounded ever so slightly desperate to me.

AMD's Lisa Su and IBM's Arvind Krishna say that there is no AI bubble, but there's a reason Bloomberg made its graphic charting recent AI investments look ever so circular. Long story short, the AI industry is currently staring down the challenge of creating a 'killer app' or feature that consumers will want to spend money on. Without that special something funnelling revenue back into the industry, it may go out with a bang potentially four times louder than the

Source: PC Gamer