Optimizing The Processes: CES 2026

“What are you doing to future-proof your business?”

I was just passing through on my way to my next meeting, but I already knew what the panelist’s response would be, having heard nearly identical questions on nearly identical panels all week.

“We’re investing in agentic AI solutions that will allow us to optimize our processes,” I mouthed. “Though we are still maintaining the human element as we believe that people remain at the core of our business.”

And that, my friends, is really all you need to know about what the industry writ large was talking about at CES.

I mean seriously, what did you expect?

Why It Matters

Allow me to frame that response in a broader context.

People were more optimistic this year at CES.

Or at least less freaked out.

Take your pick.

If 2025 was all about fear of the unknown: Trump, AI, inflation, tariffs, then 2026 was all about the realization that The World As We Know It was not about to end.

There was a general acceptance that AI was not going to take anyone’s job. At least not this year.  That if you put the word “agentic” before “AI”, you could sound cutting edge, regardless of whether or not you actually understood the concept or knew that there were various forms of AI.

If you knew the shorthand, it meant you were in on the joke.

“Agentic” was also largely shorthand for the fact that so much of the industry, the ad side in particular, is still solving for a world that no longer exists, sort of a 2026 version of “the internet is just a fad.”

You’ll note though that I said “so much of” and not “all” and that’s where the glass-half-full guy you know and love comes in.

Because there were people—not a lot, but enough—who understood that media had fragmented to a place where a visitor from the year 2005 would no longer recognize it. 

That the Vandals had indeed sacked Rome and no one was speaking Latin or GRP or even CPM and that whether you were making content or making ads you needed to make peace with the new world of Feudal Media, all those disconnected fiefdoms, each one isolated from the other, each with its own celebrities, memes, popular brands and, all too often, source of truth.

Which, to bring things back down to earth, means that context, that thing that most of the industry has been ignoring at its own peril for several years now, is going to be more important than ever in a world where You Are What You Watch is more than just an empty buzzword.

Then there’s AI which continues to feel like the thunderstorm that’s going on outside while everyone’s hunkered down around the fireplace with a nice glass of single malt, secretly hoping that the lights will stay on,

Because they have so far, right?

Not everyone is ignoring the storm though. There were predictions, like the one from our Cartographic Cassandra, that the whole bubble is about to collapse, the one you keep reading about but don’t actually see, with its energy sucking data centers out in the desert and the trillions of dollars swirling around San Francisco.

And the thing is, he’s not the only one.

The theory, or the TL;DR version thereof, is that the AI business is like a giant game of hot potato, where the players are all passing the money back and forth. And that as soon as someone drops the first ball it’s all going to come crashing in on itself. And then on us.

Sam Altman as Netscape. Or maybe Pets Dot Com. 

Depends on your capacity for trivia.

Or denial, which seemed to be most people’s reaction to the theory. Scarlett O’Hara being far from the only one to decide to “think about it tomorrow.”

And if you didn’t get enough AI from the media folks in the Cosmo and Aria, I’ll finish off with some notes from the consumer part of the Consumer Electronics Show. Which is, after all, what “CES” stands for.

The Convention Center was all about robots, humanoid robots that could soon put dogs and cats out of business.

All while chanting “Danger Will Robinson!”

There was a lot of “OMG” and an equal measure of “because we can.”

Meaning the robots aren’t taking over any time soon, but they’re not going away either.

Leaving us all plenty of time to, you know, optimize the processes.

What You Need To Do About It

In a time of massive and unpredictable change, most people’s tendency is to duck under the wave and wait for it to pass rather than jumping up to try and surf it.

Which is a good defensive strategy until it’s not and the undertow grabs you and pulls you away.

Which is why, no matter who you are or what piece of the media industry you are a part of—the team that’s making the shows or the team that’s selling the tickets to pay for them—you really only have one way forward: resist the urge to duck and jump really high just as the wave’s about to crash into you.

In other words, futureproof.