The CES Consumer Electronics Show held earlier this month highlighted technological breakthroughs with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and sustainability, and there was a lot of enterprise technology marketing on the agenda.
This analysis explores these themes and illustrates their impact through examples from leading companies in the industry. This reflects how these trends are reshaping the consumer and business technology landscape.
CES 2024 Overview
CES 2024 has bounced back in a big way with 135,000 attendees, marking the return of the tech industry’s premier event. The conference featured innovations focused on AI, sustainability, and the evolution of enterprise technology marketing. These themes not only demonstrate technological advances, but also reflect the deeper integration of technology in various aspects of business and daily life.
AI eats the world
AI was a cornerstone of CES 2024, manifesting itself in a variety of applications that use AI in different ways. Here I’ll dig deeper into what AI means in some applications that I found very interesting.
True PetSmart for pet owners
Blovo Animal Health & Lovo Tales is committed to revolutionizing pet healthcare by integrating AI. This allows for easy access to veterinary services and efficient management of your pet’s health data using ChatGPT. This allows pet owners to easily access veterinary care services and maintain their pet’s health data, reducing the cost of pet care and giving them better control over their animal data. Use ChatGPT to summarize your pet’s health information and add context to make it easier to understand. This takes advantage of the API-based exploitation of the underlying model. This makes it sustainable even for small businesses.
AI in the bedroom
DeRUCCI’s T11 Pro smart mattress uses a proprietary general AI model, rather than a large language model, to look for health anomalies based on data from sensors and what it knows about you. It not only solves problems such as snoring, but also checks other health indicators such as body temperature and movement to help you reach deeper sleep. Reasoning at the edge of the bedroom to get results. This is a common model that tweaks and unfolds at the ends to perform actions such as inflating or deflating parts of the air mattress.
Software-defined automotive and AI applications
We spoke with Sandip Ranjhan, CEO of Cerebrumx, at the Blackberry booth about the need for AI at the automotive level and how to bring AI to data. We agreed that training and conditioning would take place in the cloud. Many use cases, such as risk determination in the insurance industry, will be able to leverage this inference and data summarization at the edge. Again, this is not edge generative AI, but generative AI could be used to adjust to answer questions based on the edge AI in the car.
Different types of AI in manufacturing
In conversation with IBM Crop., we discussed the applications of AI in manufacturing, supply chain management, and sustainability. Jose Favila shared his insights on where and how AI models should exist and emphasized the importance of governance and security.
We also talked about the importance of applying AI to the data, rather than applying AI to the data, to optimize industrial processes and preventive maintenance. We noted that the underlying model across industries does not necessarily have to be different, but that data changes all the time. Again, these are not LLMs themselves, but models that may be used in conjunction with LLMs. Multimodal AI was a major theme.
At a briefing with Amazon Web Services Inc., we discussed how AWS and cloud operating models make manufacturing an ideal place to partner with third-party hardware. Users can download and install this hardware on industrial computers or gateways with Linux or Windows operating systems.
Alternatively, users can use AWS-specific hardware such as Outposts or Snow Family. The briefing also provided details about AWS IoT SiteWise Edge and how the configuration process is streamlined through the AWS IoT SiteWise console. This allows users to select data sources, such as industrial sensors, and apply predefined or custom functions for data sampling and metric calculations. Finally, we also discussed the announcement at re:Invent and how AWS is leveraging machine learning at the edge and his LLM from Amazon Bedrock for manufacturing.
AI that realizes sensing beyond perception
We met with Natalya Lopareva, CEO of Algorized, in the SwissTech section of Eureka Park to see a demonstration of their AI-powered remote sensing software. This software goes beyond the limits of traditional perception and provides a complete understanding of objects and individuals in any environment. The demonstration showed how to detect breathing inside a vehicle and distinguish between adults and children.
We also demonstrated an example of its application in a room in a building. This is useful in high-security environments such as small boats. He said the software runs on an ultra-wideband chip and seamlessly integrates with Qorvo’s ultra-wideband radar chip to improve accuracy and reliability. This was very interesting in that the chips and ready availability weren’t the story, the software was the story.
Accessible and accurate data is at the core of AI
While visiting SwissTech in Eureka Park, the team came across StackThink, a startup led by CEO Ruben Berdin and CTO Alexis Fabre. The company’s main focus is establishing two-way synchronization between customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot and databases such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and MongoDB.
This two-way synchronization allows DBAs to make any necessary changes to the database using SQL, and the updated information appears in the CRM system, providing a single source of truth. They weren’t pushing an AI agenda, but if you’re going to build a Customer360 view and build AI-based data products on top of it, it’s important to clean and connect this data.
AI-powered accessibility
Another startup in the Eureka Park European Innovation Council area that I personally found interesting was Dot Lumen. Dot Lumen has developed a lightweight headset with AI for self-driving cars and haptic responses to guide blind and visually impaired people as they walk on streets and indoors. The incident took place around his crowded CES floor. For me, this was one of the best uses of AI to provide sensing mobility and accessibility to everyone, which was only available to blind or partially sighted people using guide dogs. Again, this goes beyond using Gen AI to apply AI to important problems.
Sustainability: a core marketing philosophy
Sustainability has emerged as an important theme, especially for companies marketing outside the United States. It was clear that we couldn’t sell it in other regions without a sustainability message.
There were some interesting advances in sustainability technology at the show. Mobile off-grid power from solar and wind power has become popular, as has battery-based backup power rather than home generators.
Home appliances have also seen many improvements, especially in terms of efficiency. One standout product was the GE Profile Combo Washer Dryer, which uses breakthrough heat pump technology and is ventless. The biggest improvement is that he can wash and dry a king-sized comforter in less than three hours.
These examples highlight the growing importance of sustainability in product development and corporate strategy.
Enterprise Technology Marketing: Bridging B2B and B2C
We’ve noticed a major shift in enterprise technology marketing. Today, B2B strategies are effectively used to market B2C product features. One of the biggest examples of this change was the “software-defined car” that was prominently displayed at Blackberry’s booth and many others. While the concept of AI was being promoted by many companies, the concept of software-defined was being integrated into every part of the technology industry.
However, some of these companies appeared to be adopting buzzwords without fully understanding them, reducing the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Many of these industrial and consumer technology companies are still learning the lessons they’ve already learned from bringing marketing strategies from one part of the industry to another.
our angle
CES 2024 witnessed a wide range of innovative applications in AI, sustainability, and enterprise technology marketing. What was considered a new innovation just four years ago at his CES 2020 is now more advanced and mainstream. The push for AI is increasing in many forms.
Although AI was present at CES before 2024, its rapid evolution is clear. It was nice to be able to explain how exhibitors are using AI, the security associated with how they use it, and mostly avoid over-hyping the use of AI.
Sustainability is the second most important topic, and one that U.S. technology companies looking to sell overseas should take note of. This is true sustainability, with circular economy, water use and renewable electricity being top of mind for many exhibitors.
We’ll have to wait and see if enterprise technology marketing simplification and use in some B2C applications continues to be successful.
Rob Strechay is an analyst with a unique combination of product, engineering, marketing, sales, and operations experience. He has held senior management positions in startups and Fortune 500 companies. Cloud, Software-as-a-Service, and Managed Services Providers have a world-class team that delivers, markets, and sells products in the areas of storage, application management, disaster recovery, networking, analytics, and infrastructure operations and management.
Disclosure: theCUBE Research is a research and advisory services company that engages in or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not control any stock positions in the companies mentioned in this article. Analysis and opinions expressing herein is specific to the individual analyst, data and other information that may have been provided for verification, and not of theCUBE Research or SiliconANGLE Media as a whole.