CES 2026 puts AI center stage with physical AI and RGB TV debuts

The CES 2026 agenda preview makes it clear that AI is no longer a side theme—it's the organizing principle of the world’s biggest consumer tech show. Nvidia anchoring the keynote program with a focus on “physical AI systems,” and AMD using the event to push enterprise AI chips that challenge Nvidia’s dominance, signal that the next competitive front is not just chatbots or copilots, but embodied and edge AI that lives in devices, vehicles, and infrastructure. When the main question at CES is how much AI a product can absorb, you know the compute and model layers are maturing into a platform.

For the AGI race, the interesting shift is from demo culture to deployment culture. The Technobezz piece describes robots (LG’s CLOiD, Samsung’s Ballie), RGB TVs, and smart home gear that treat AI as an embedded capability rather than a feature badge. That aligns with a broader pattern: hyperscalers and chip vendors are racing to make inference cheap and ubiquitous, while consumer brands quietly turn every screen or appliance into an AI endpoint. This doesn’t directly create AGI, but it massively expands the surface area where advanced models can be productively used, and where data for training more general systems can be harvested.

Strategically, the show underscores how tightly coupled AI model roadmaps are with semiconductor, device, and robotics roadmaps. Nvidia, AMD, and major OEMs are not just vendors—they are shaping the hardware assumptions future AGI-capable systems will have to live within, from power budgets to latency constraints.