CES 2024 Event Highlights & Insights

Date: January 8 to 12, 2024 Location: Las Vegas, NV

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• CES 2024 is back to pre-pandemic form drawing over 135K attendees and 4,500 exhibitors with a notable return of Chinese firms.

• Generative AI made a surprisingly subdued appearance at CES 2024 considering the outsized hype with many exhibitors touting Gen AI features cautious about claims of grandeur.

• Automotive at CES is transitioning from autonomous vehicles to the SDV (Software-Defined Vehicle). The autonomous vehicle can has been kicked way down the road along with its aspirational promises.

• Industrial tech makes its presence known on the coattails of sustainability and industrial players from agriculture to shipbuilding flaunting their “tech” DNA.

• The AI PC landed at CES 2024 into a field of open questions and a crisis of identity and purpose. What really is an AI PC?

• Consumer and industrial IoT go ambient and unnoticeably pervasive.

• CES 2024’s elephant in the room, Apple’s Vision Pro as Metaverse faces a reckoning with an imminent immersive reality pivot in 2024.

NOTE: To view the neXt Curve's Analysis section of this CES 2024 event summary, please view the full version of this report on the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com.

EVENT SUMMARY:

CES is back to pre-pandemic form with over 135,000 attendees and 4,500 exhibitors converging in Las Vegas for the 100th anniversary of the Consumer Technology Association and to create the next buzz in consumer (and industrial) tech. This year’s event was a welcome return to form that brought back the energy and the overwhelmingness that has characterized the Consumer Electronics Show in the past prior to the Pandemic.

This year, neXt Curve pursued a joint research agenda with Transforma Insights with the goal of surfacing the undercurrent tech and industry trends that we believe will shape the discourse for consumer tech, automotive tech, enterprise tech, and what was a visible expansion of the industrial tech invasion kicked off by John Deere last year. 

This year, Leonard Lee of neXt Curve was joined by Jim Morrish, Co-founder, and Dr. Bradley K. Canham, VP of Research of Transforma Insights onsite in Las Vegas to cover the event and pursue a research agenda targeting the following topics: 

• Generative AI & AI in general

• Automotive tech

• XR and immersive reality tech (what happened to Metaverse?)

• Non-terrestrial Networks (NTN)

• Smart home & smart living

• Consumer IoT

• Enterprise IoT

• The future of PC computing & AI PC

• EV charging infrastructure 

• Sensors & haptics

• Wearables & smart fitness/health

Pre-event Briefings

Even before landing in Vegas, we participated in briefings with the big chip companies and electronics OEMs who we typically talk to before the big show. This year we heard from Samsung, Lenovo, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD to get a head start on things. A great deal of the focus across the board from this company of tech giants was the AI PC and automotive.

The announcements were also overwhelming. Lenovo had over 40 new product announcements alone. Of course, Intel was on its Core Ultra high horse with an armada of laptops loaded with the company’s first “AI PC” processor from OEMs including Lenovo, Razer, Acer to Asus. Not to be left out of the AI PC spotlight, AMD showcased their new lined of Ryzen 8000G and 5000 Series NPU-armed desktop processors with a focus on content creation.

Both Qualcomm and Nvidia jockeyed to get the pole position on their automotive solutions. Qualcomm emphasized generative AI enhancements to their digital cockpit while Nvidia emphasized their new logos (mostly Chinese EV OEMs) pushing the edge of advanced driving systems with Nvidia silicon. 

Of course, Qualcomm teased a group of XR analysts with their new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 introduced a mere three months after the XR2 Gen 2 was unveiled at Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui. XR looked like it just might be a hotbed of action and excitement this year. 

CTA Tech Research Briefing & CES Unveiled Press Event

neXt Curve started off on Sunday attending CTA’s Tech Research Briefing which took place on the 2nd Media Day that precedes the official CES event. The CTA research team provided an overview of the key tech and demographic trends that they feel will shape the broad consumer electronics industry in 2024 and beyond. 

This year, the CTA research team emphasized connectivity and the potential of emerging NTN service providers such as StarLink bringing about ubiquitous connectivity connecting the unconnected. The CTA research team’s hypothesis is that this will expand the TAM for a wide range of electronic/digital device categories that increasingly depend on connectivity and access to cloud-based services.

We missed CES Unveiled last year but managed to check out what seemed like a larger exhibit this year. We encountered a few notable showings such as Chinese chipmaker, Black Sesame Technologies based in Shanghai focused on automotive, Neuchips out of Taiwan which specializes in AI inference ASIC designs, and an interesting “Generative AI” startup out of South Korea called Nation AI that provides a SaaS for 3D/4D content and data creation. 

Several of the companies featured at CES Unveiled were CES Innovation Award winners or nominees which is typical fare. Maybe we have been coming to this show too often but the innovation seemed light and surprisingly absent of generative AI plays with the exception of Nation AI. We expected more given the intensity of the hype in 2023 that has yet to abate. 

CES 2024 Press Day

Monday was press day and our schedule was packed stranding us at the Mandalay Bay for the better part of the morning and early afternoon absorbing the key messages from leading sponsors of this year’s CES.

On the way to the Mandalay Bay from The Mirage, we took the time to watch Nvidia’s special address at CES 2024. Unlike in previous years when the company had a notable presence, Nvidia was largely virtual and embedded. Needless to say, most of Nvidia’s messaging was tuned on generative AI. Many of the company’s showcased use cases in gaming, creation, and robotics highlighted generative AI augmentation and their benefits.

LG started off the day announcing their first line of transparent TVs, the Signature OLED T which made a huge splash for the event much like their rollable TVs announced two years ago. LG has been offering transparent OLED commercial displays since 2021 for use in retail signage, info kiosks and other applications that haven’t caught on outside of South Korea, hence the novelty.

Bosch and Hyundai had strong sustainability slants to their announcements underscoring the increasing presence that industrial companies have been and continue to make at CES on the back of the automotive invasion that started around 2016 and John Deere’s highly visible entry last year. Both Bosch and Hyundai focused on novel battery and energy technologies sources such as silicon carbide and hydrogen.

TCL was a big surprise this year. It wasn’t but a few years ago that TCL seemed like a second-tier player. This year, they showcased some compelling entries from massive MiniLED televisions to smartphones with novel display tech which they call NXTPAPER. Tech aside, their presentation was eye-popping with a Sports Center vibe that worked very well with the audience in attendance.

We managed to catch only half of Samsung’s press event but picked up on its theme for the conference, “AI for All”. While much of the attention that AI has gotten has been in the data center, the smartphone, and now the PC, Samsung’s CEO and Head of Device Experience, JH Han, made an effort to tell the company’s broader story of smart everything across its broad portfolio of devices. It also emphasized its software and shared IoT architectures that make up its portfolio of smart solutions for the home, work, and the automobile with its partnership with Tesla.

Toward the end of the evening, we had to make the long trek from the Mandalay Bay to the Intel analyst and press event being held at the Venetian. The session was kicked off by Michelle Johnston Holthaus, EVP of Intel’s Client Computing Group who ushered in the company’s foray into the era of “AI PC” with new lines of OEM laptops and gaming devices loaded with Intel’s new Core Ultra mobile processors. She also teased the upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors due toward the end of 2024. Yes, we got a preview.

After a long day, we made our way to The Mirage for a Qualcomm reception where journalists and analysts covering CES and the chip industry convened to have some cocktail-assisted conversations with some of Qualcomm’s executives in XR and automotive before round tables the following day. Thankfully, we were staying at the Mirage, so we didn’t have a long walk back to our rooms.

CES 2024 Day 1 – Mostly Automotive with Sprinkles of XR

The first official day of CES started off with Micron Technology regarding the important role high bandwidth memory (HBM) has in emerging classes of devices from the automobile to the smartphone that support on-device and client-heavy modes of hybrid Gen AI. Beyond, Gen AI, integrated and shared memory architectures are becoming a factor in chip design decisions as engineers look to bring novel heterogeneous computing models that transcend the CPU and GPU to markets that increasingly place importance on efficient performance.  

After a checkpoint meeting with our Transforma Insights colleagues at the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), it was off to the West Hall for some automotive. Since its opening in 2021, the West Hall has become the home of the automotive industry’s presence at CES. It only took a few moments wandering the exhibit hall to notice the growing presence of industrial companies such as Hyundai Heavy Industries, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Doosan. It’s difficult to not notice an autonomous excavator.

The absence of the Big 3 U.S. automakers on the exhibit floor was duly noted as well as the paucity of Japanese automakers with the exception of Honda who partnered with Sony last year in the Afeela brand of EVs which they jointly introduced at CES 2023. 

To fill the void were Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese automakers largely showcasing their concept and commercial applications of advanced ADAS, IVI, and SDV technologies.

Qualcomm was largely situated in the West Hall at the epicenter of the automotive fray sandwiched between Mobileye and Hyundai Motors, Goodyear, and Hyundai Mobis. We kicked off a series of analyst roundtables with Qualcomm starting with XR with VP of XR, Hugo Swart, who provided us with the details of their newly announced Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor. 

We had to leave mid point but Hugo made sure we remembered his assertion back in 2019 that AI would have a critical role in XR. Yes, XR2+ comes with expanded AI compute to support on-device Gen AI.

As expected, there was no shortage of some bold EV mobility solutions coming from China. Most eye-popping was Horwin with their futuristic eBikes, scooters, and motorcycles that conjure up memories of the classic Japanese anime film, “Akira”. 

The company was only one of several Chinese companies who were present at CES 2024 making a statement. The most sensational display was by XPeng Motors which unveiled its EV AeroHT flying concept car as well as a CyberTruck-like Land Aircraft Carrier. Flying cars have been a big area of interest in China at least since 2017 when we attended the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen where we first encountered XPeng as a start up. They have come a long way.  

We didn’t get a lot of telco action at CES 2024 but had the opportunity to meet with Tony Krueck, SVP of Cox Mobile to talk about the progress they have made with their mobile network one year after its national launch. Cox was a key partner with the LVCC providing mobile connectivity for the CES 2024 event and many others for the past 10 years. The company stated that it will invest $11 billion into their network over the next 10 years.

In the afternoon, we spent quite a while digesting the large AWS booth with 18 stations that demonstrated their broad range of solutions for bringing the vehicle into their cloud-native vision of the future of automotive as well as their solutions for reinventing the car buyer’s journey. A highlight of our AWS Automotive tour was a company called ZeroLight that provides tools to help marketers develop and deploy configurable product catalogs and promotional media in AWS.

Before heading over to the massive Fountainebleau hotel (which finally opened after more than a decade of ground breaking) for dinner, we had a chance to meet with Danny Shapiro, VP of Automotive Marketing at Nvidia, who we have met virtually on analyst briefings but not in person, at the Mercedes-Benz booth which showcased their CLA Class concept car. Danny Shapiro shared the progress that he and his team had in continuing to advance the rethinking of the car and the shift from autonomous toward more capable ADAS and Gen AI-enabled automotive design and manufacturing.

CES 2024 Day 2 – More Automotive and Private Demos

The second day of CES 2024 started off at the West Hall which seemed very difficult to escape given a tremendous amount of attention semiconductor companies put on automotive for CES. In fact, Qualcomm’s entire booth presence was in the West Hall where we went to attend sessions on on-device AI as well as the automotive tour that occupied a good part of our morning. 

Qualcomm’s automotive tour was kicked off by an overview of the Snapdragon Digital Chassis showcase by Qualcomm’s SVP of Automotive, Industrial and Cloud, Nakul Duggal who impressed upon a group of analysts and journalist the broad portfolio of tooling that Qualcomm provides to its automotive customers to support the full life cycle of digital automotive design and develop. Nakul also highlighted the benefits of the Snapdragon Ride Flex SOC which was introduced at CES 2023 in providing a centralized, heterogeneous computing platform for automakers to “flexibly” pursue their SDV ambitions as they look to digitally rethink the architecture of their vehicles.

Generative AI was another big theme for Qualcomm. We had a chance to sit in the Snapdragon Digital Chassis concept car to experience several in-vehicle Gen AI features that are being gingerly introduced into the Snapdragon Ride portfolio. Ironically, there wasn’t a lot of talk about 5G or connectivity, but it did seem that whether the Gen AI agent resided on device or in vehicle, you would need to tap the cloud.

Later in the afternoon we had a chance to get a briefing from AMD with John Anguiano talk about the AI PC. Last year, we attended AMD’s press event where they unveiled their Ryzen 7040 Series processors which they asserted at the time was the first x86 laptop processor with an integrated “AI engine”. John Anguiano to gave me the details of their new 8040 Series processor, their second generation AI PC laptop processor and their first generation of AI PC desktop processors, the Ryzen 8000G Series, with the Ryzen AI NPU.

The final briefing and highlight of Day 2 of CES 2024 was a private briefing, largely under NDA, with Intel Colin Helms who provided us with a preview of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake that Michell Johnston Holthaus teased at the Intel press event on Monday. What we can’t share much but we had the opportunity to demo a Gen AI-driven avatar of one of the Intel employees. It was cool and creepy at the same time. Regarding Arrow Lake, it is touted as the first Intel gaming processor with an AI accelerator, and Lunar Lake will deliver a x3 faster NPU than Meteor Lake.

CES 2024 Day 3 - Innovation Awards and Immersive Reality

No CES is complete without a tour of the CES Innovation Awards exhibit that showcases the products of winners and nominees of the 29 product categories that are evaluated. We got there early to avoid the crowd which really slows down your ability to get through all the displays.

Oddly absent, generative AI. Given all the hype of generative AI 2023, the representation of products attaching to Gen AI was sparse. Very surprising. Categories that seems to get a lot of love, the converged healthcare, wellness, and fitness categories where features, functions, and purpose seem to bleed across these tightly related domains.

Some of the products that we thought were interesting include: 

• SiLMach and their MEMS hybrid micromotor for electronics

• Samsung Semiconductor and their Exynos Connect U100 UWB module

• MetalImmuneTech Inc and their CyllyticsTM NK portable lab 

• Afference and their Phantom haptic glove

• DeCloak Intelligence Co. and their DeCloakVision privacy-enhancing surveillance system

• D&C Biotechnology Inc. and their next-gen urine analyzer and optical bio sensor

• Frore Systems and their AirJet Mini solid-state active cooling chips

• CMI Health, Inc. and their AsthmaGo asthma management platform

• Vuzix with their Ultralite S wireless smart glasses

We then took off toward the Central Hall of the LVCC but not before hitting the metaverse section in the South Hall. This year, the vibe in the metaverse section was very different. Last year, there were many companies, mostly out of South Korea, showcasing their “metaverse” applications. They were largely absent on the exhibit floor this year. Even Microsoft, which has a prominent but odd presence in this section didn’t make a showing. The immersive capture companies seemed to have a smaller presence as well. 

XR essentially is limbo. Those of you who have been tracking our research know why.

If we were to designate our top pick of CES 2024 we would give that accolade to 2Pi Optics out of Boston. This team of MIT researchers have developed an optical metasurface that enables the design and construction of ultra-thin and light optical devices with a very wide field-of-view. Dr. Tian Gu and his team provided us with an impressive demo that showcased the field-of-field and image quality that are possible with their prototype device. These innovators could very well bring about an important step change in XR, vision systems, and immersive capture applications. 

Our next stop in the early afternoon was the Central Hall of the LVCC which is the traditional home of all the big TV brands. Here you find Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, Panasonic and others. 

The Samsung showcase citadel had a very different vibe this year. Last year, it was dense and solution themed around the home, work, and entertainment, and sustainability. This year, the exhibition seems to focus more around intelligence centered around SmartThings.

In contrast, LG’s citadel had a heavy focus on their newly unveiled Signature OLED T transparent television. While LG announced their first transparent OLED TV, Samsung merely showcased their transparent MiniLED technology. No word on when we could expect a transparent TV offering from the South Korean electronics giant. They did tout their latest wireless 8K OLED TV.

Before returning to the Venetian, we made a stop at the North Hall to visit some of our IoT friends, namely Blues (formerly Blues Wireless) and Telit Cinteron. Both companies have become poster children for the shift by module makers to packaged solution providers. While Blues provided IoT as a Service type offerings from the get go, Telit announced their NExT Connected Modules. We like the play on the "neXt" in neXt Curve. 

Our final stop of the day was a visit to Lenovo which made their camp at the excellent Greek restaurant at the Venetian, Milos. This year, Lenovo had over 40 new product announcements. We managed to get a glimpse of most of them starting with a demo of the VRX headset which is Lenovo’s passthrough MR headset for enterprise that we first checked out at CES 2023. 

We were surprised to discover that Lenovo was into automotive. The company offers ADAS and cockpit domain controllers, ADAS smart camera, and an in-vehicle Gen AI agent called CabinMate. Lenovo already has a large consumer and enterprise tech footprint across what they call “pocket to cloud”. This footprint evidently extends to our vehicles.

Other highlights from Lenovo include:

• Yoga Laptop Pro 9i and Pro 9i 2-in-1 – Lenovo’s newest consumer laptops featuring a Lenovo AI Core Chip that powers on device AI that bring a bit of that Core Ultra magic to the 13th Gen Intel Core processor. The new models feature the Copilot key with the latest version of Windows 11.

• Lenovo Yoga Creator Zone – A new software that comes loaded with a selection of Yoga AI laptops that help creators and artists generate images with text-to- and sketch-to-image features with privacy and security in mind.

• Lenovo Legion Gaming Laptops – Lenovo launched the LOQ 15IRX9, 18IAX9, and 15AHP9 gaming laptops loaded with a new version of the company’s LA AI accelerator which improves FPS and power efficiency.

• Motorola MotoTalk – An intelligent assistant geared for retailers with an image recognition feature that can support clerks with inventory counting, pricing, route planning, and a PTT (push-to-talk) feature.

With the imminent release of the Apple Vision Pro and the excitement brewing around spatial computing, our second go with the ThinkVision 27 3D display reaffirmed our impression that immersive reality will be the thing to watch in 2024. Lenovo with its portfolio of personal computing devices ranging from XR headsets, gaming laptops to smartphones is in a unique position to make spatial computing happen outside the Apple ecosystem if they play their cards right. They have all the bits and pieces to make moves in what could be the hot market of interest in 2024. 

CES 2024 Day 4 - Eureka Park and The Generative AI Footprint

The fourth and final day at CES 2024 was a busy half-day as we tried to get to Eureka Park to check out the start up scene. Situated in the basement of the Venetian Convention Center, Eureka Park was bustling with activity. There was no last day lull. Few if any of the vendors had packed up as the general feedback from exhibitors was that traffic and interest was good the whole week.

Eureka Park is always a difficult section of CES to cover. CTA estimates that there were over 1,400 startups exhibiting in Eureka Park. Needless to say, we managed to see and meet with a fraction of that. But after years of scanning companies in crowded convention halls, we managed to bump into a few interesting ventures of promise. 

SilMach is a company out of France that specializes in MEMS micromechanics on silicon for eventually actuating very tiny robots. At the moment, their products are going into digitally powered watches.

Deep Fusion AI is a startup out of South Korea working on perceptive sensor fusion using 4D image radar for automotive, maritime, and satellite SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) applications on Nvidia’s Orin platform.

Finally, we bumped into a system integrator called AR Genie that specializes in custom AR and self-service applications for enterprises. We had an interesting conversation with the company’s CEO, Tarun Mehta, about their generative AI assistant application that is in development which they plan on incorporating into their self-service solutions for their customers.

Surprisingly, there weren’t that many “generative AI” start ups at Eureka Park this year. This really surprised us given all the hype. In fact, we probably encountered more generative AI startups last year than we did this year.

In closing a very long week at CES, we had lunch with our Transforma Insights partners at the Venetian. Check out our recap of the CES 2024 for our key takes. 

neXt Curve KEY ANALYSIS

Details of our analysis are available in the full version of this report found on the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com.

• TAKEAWAY 1: Enterprise Presence Increasing 

• TAKEAWAY 2: The Smart TV is Waging a War for Smart Home Supremacy

• TAKEAWAY 3: The AI PC, The Bigfoot of CES 2024

• TAKEAWAY 4: A Mission to Supplant the Smartphone

• TAKEAWAY 5: Generative AI Expressed Itself in Modest Ways

• TAKEAWAY 6: Security vs. Privacy Is Confused As Ever

• TAKEAWAY 7: AR Finds Footing in Smart Glasses

• TAKEAWAY 8: Vision Pro, the Apple Elephant in the Immersive Room

• TAKEAWAY 9: Persistent Healthcare & Wellness

• TAKEAWAY 10: MicroLED and MicroOLED have a Hey Day

RELATED MEDIA & PRESS RELEASES

• CES 2024 Event site (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve + Transforma Research Collaboration for CES 2024 (link)

• LinkedIn: Media Day 2 of CES 2024 (link)

• LinkedIn: Media Day 3 of CES 2024 (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve’s Day 1 of CES 2024 with Transforma Insights (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve’s Day 2 of CES 2024 (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve’s Day 2 recap of CES 2024 with Dr. Brad Canham (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve’s Day 3 of CES 2024 (link)

• LinkedIn: neXt Curve’s Day 4 of CES 2024 (link)

• YouTube: CES 2024 Playlist (link)

COMPANIES ENGAGED: 

Many thanks to all the companies that talked to us at CES 2024!

Lenovo, Qualcomm, Intel Corporation, Micron Technology, AMD, NVIDIA, The Things Industries, Blues, Telit Cinterion, Samsung Electronics, Samsung Semiconductor, TCL, Siemens, Sony, Hyundai Motor Company (현대자동차), LG Electronics, Cox Communications Mobile, Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kia Worldwide, Eaton, Bosch, HORWIN INC, Doosan, Mercedes-Benz USA, Mobileye, LetinAR, Panasonic, LG Innotek, Jabil, Dassault Systèmes, Neuchips Inc., Black Sesame Technologies Inc, Orbbec Inc., Abbott, Verge.io, Honda, Shiftcall, Evie.ai, Mymanu®, Timekettle, Narwal, PhotonFi, Holoconnects, XPENG, XREAL, Trip Pass, Nation A, HUROTICS, SocialDream, Dracula Technologies, Mobiltech, Cognata, Eatron Technologies, ZeroLight, ArgosVision Inc., SOLIDVUE, Vuzix Corporation, MetaVu, 2Pi Inc. Optics, Sheeva.ai, Sharp Electronics Corporation USA, ECB-Sensors, SILICIUM ESPAÑA LABORATORIOS SL, Deep Fusion.ai, AR Genie Inc., Afference, Inc.  

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