Excerpt: “With products and pipedreams being showcased to over 180,000 attendees here are some major themes from the floor that stood out to me.
Talk to Me. Voice based assistants exploded onto the market last year. This year and for years to come they will be the essential interface to everything that you interact with. Partly as a way to decrease time with any screen, Google and Amazon have been partnering with every conceivable device manufacturer to integrate Google Home and Alexa respectively. In your car, at the stove and even on the toilet, you can now change the volume, turn on the stove and flush with a voice commands. As consumer adoption continues and products become voice first, it is going to be even more critical for marketers to understand how their brands relate to voice-enabled systems.
Autonomous Everything. Brands in the business of getting people and things from A to B have been looking into autonomous vehicles for a number of years. Advancements in artificial intelligence and collective learning are finally able to make it a reality. Most of the Automotive OEMs had an Autonomous Vehicle present. With CES now being the launch platform for automotive innovation (much to the chagrin of Auto Shows I am sure) they use the scale and spectacle to showcase what they’ve created in the past year. Delivery companies are also in on this, including some of the hotels having room service delivered by Autonomous Robots. The most impressive however was from Bell Nexxus, with their Autonomous Helicopter. Moving people and goods with an alternative to “Ground-Based Solutions” with what is essentially a massive drone, they provided a glimpse into a potential future for making deliveries and trips avoid any roads.”
To read the full piece from Devon MacDonald, CEO of Mindshare Canada, check it out on Media in Canada.
