The question is What does CES look like when AI everywhere is no longer a slogan, but plastic bricks, laptops, TVs, even a flashlight?
The most convenient signal of CES 2026 is not a specific type of product that occupies the floor. It is how common objects are being reassembling as systems: sensors and models, hardware and subscriptions, interoperability and privacy tradeoffs. The concentration points of the show, Lego, Samsung, NVIDIA, Dell, and a long tail of lesser-known brands, are all pursuing the same idea, the tech that becomes background and responds to the action in real time.
The following are the product bets and engineering decisions that best reflect that change.
1. Lego Smart Bricks that sense, light up, and make sound
The latest play platform of Lego uses the traditional 2×4 brick as a node of computation. The Smart Brick has motion, position, and distance sensors, lights, a miniature sound synthesizer, an accelerator, and a custom silicon chip – components selected to ensure models react to the behavior of hands instead of what an application wants them to do. Practically, the system is intended to be used with Smart Minifigures and Smart Tag tiles, which implement the effects of digital identifiers to activate when components interact. The most indicative one, however, is the ambition: Lego has referred to the Smart line as its most radical innovation in almost 50 years, and the first product will be released in March, in a Star Wars set. The reason why that timing of launch is important is that it positions Smart Bricks as a long-standing platform, rather than novice. In an interview with the BBC, Julia Goldin summed up the attitude of the company about the physical-digital boundary: “We do not see the digital world as a threat.
2. NVIDIA’s Alpamayo push for “reasoning” autonomous driving
The problem with autonomous driving is that the long tail has existed for years: uncommon edge cases, which do not commonly occur enough to be learned in a clean way, but common enough to instigate actual real-world failures. The new Alpamayo portfolio by NVIDIA targets that gap by open models, simulation tooling, and datasets that are designed to assist cars in perceiving, reasoning, and acting in a closer loop than classical perception-plus-planning stacks. The essence is a chain-of-thought, vision-language-action model that is capable of revealing the logic of the decision making- this is helpful in development workflows that even when the final in-car model has to be reduced and simplified. To NVIDIA, Alpamayo is not a mere release of a model, but a full-fledged ecosystem comprising a simulation framework and extensive driving data. The company indicates that the dataset covers 1,700+ hours of driving data in a wide range of conditions, which are meant to ensure that the edge condition that makes autonomy not look repetitive and reliable. NVIDIA CEO connected that with a more general physical AI story and said, The ChatGPT moment of physical AI is here when machines start to think, reason and act in the real world.
3. NVIDIA Vera Rubin as a six-chip “AI supercomputer” platform
CES loves superlatives, although the pitch of Rubin architecture is more of a tangible structure; a platform that is tightly integrated, with the CPU, GPU, networking and data movement blocks. During a single CES briefing, NVIDIA Dion Harris said that Rubin was a single chip that created one AI supercomputer, a statement that indicates the true intent extreme co-design in which the rack is the product and the chip a component. This is another indication by Rubin of the direction of the cost conversation. The theatrical story revolved around a more economical method of large-scale AI, by driving efficiency, rather than performance. What emerges is a platform story which ties into all the other stuff at the show: when inference can be made cheaper and more local, then smart features would not be the preserve of higher-end consumer products but would instead be found in the most ordinary of products that were previously defined by their dumb nature.
4. Dell’s XPS branding return with a spec-heavy, premium reset
At a time when most of the laptops are being marketed as AI PCs, then computers, Dell XPS return is like placing a wager on the fundamentals: industrial design, display, and a configuration envelope capable of supporting actual workloads. The 2026 version of Dell XPS 14 combines Intel core Ultra chip with up to 64GB of memory and up to 4GB of SSD storage in the gadget whose costs begin at 2,049.99.The interesting aspect of the engineering is not these numbers being there, that flagship laptops always do this, but that the XPS narrative is being sold as a reshape and a platform identity recreation concurrently. Within a CES hall of flashy ideas, the silent flex is delivering a smooth chassis with the ability to support high-performance thermals and continued battery requirements without making AI features the sole purchase driver.
5. Samsung’s “companion” framing for TVs, appliances, and care
CES messaging by Samsung is biased towards an ecosystem concept which is less smart home and more home operating system. It placed AI as a hand-free interface on entertainment and appliances on the show floor, with a demonstration of a Vision AI experience on the Micro RGB 130-inch TV and interconnected appliances that communicate with each other by voice, cameras, and screens. The through-line here is that machines must act like helpers but not look like robots. This ecosystem pitch is also present in the interoperability discussion by Samsung. Samsung, in its Tech Forum panel, highlighted open ecosystems and scale, saying that there were over 500 million users in the SmartThings community. Yoonho Choi concluded about the design constraint that it derived thereof: Home is the most personal location of our lives, so home AI should be trusted, in silence and with respect and value, which users may feel.
6. Timeli’s flashlight that doubles as a connected safety device
Personal safety gear usually hides in jewelry or keychains, but Timeli goes in the opposite direction: a flashlight with a camera at its center, GPS, and a dedicated emergency button. Pressing it triggers an alarm and connects to a dispatcher via RapidSOS, with live GPS coordinates and real-time video intended to help assess what response is needed. The device supports cellular, Wi‑Fi, and Bluetooth, and it can act as a power bank though the design even throttles phone charging to preserve its own battery for emergencies.
The product is also a clean example of the show’s “hardware plus service” reality. The device costs $300 and includes a year of service; after that, the cellular and GPS features cost $10/month. CES is full of smart devices, but fewer are this explicit about how ongoing connectivity becomes the business model.
7. Razer’s Project Ava: putting a chatbot in a tube
CES concept devices are often about form factor shock, and Razer’s Project Ava leans into it: a holographic-style avatar in a glass tube, intended to make an AI assistant feel present at a desk rather than trapped behind a window on a monitor. The unit includes speakers and a camera so it can respond to prompts and context; Razer also said the final version will include a privacy shutter and a mic-mute button small but important concessions to the reality of always-on hardware.Whether the “AI with a face” idea sticks is less important than what it reveals: companies are treating AI as something that needs its own industrial design language.
That language is still unsettled between calm utility and character-driven gadget theater but the attempt is now a repeatable CES pattern, not a one-off gimmick.Across these products, the pattern is consistent: compute is migrating into objects that already have rituals building, driving, watching, cleaning, walking to a car at night. CES 2026’s most durable ideas are the ones that treat those rituals as the interface, and treat AI as the hidden mechanism.The engineering challenge that remains is not adding intelligence. It is deciding how much agency a product should take, what data it must touch to do so, and how gracefully it behaves when the “smart” part is wrong.
