CES used to be about smart fridges and 8K TVs nobody asked for. Not anymore. When the doors open January 7-10 in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show won't be very consumer-focused at all. Instead, expect humanoid robots lifting boxes in warehouses, AI systems that book your business travel without asking and chips powerful enough to run it all at the edge.
This isn't science fiction. It's the practical, industrial AI revolution?and it's happening faster than most people realize. The robots are here, they're affordable and they're about to change how work gets done.
The Shift: From Gadgets to Workhorses
Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association, didn't mince words: "Robotics is going to be talked about ? big time at CES." Not robots that vacuum your floor or dance for YouTube views. Robots that work alongside humans in environments too dangerous, repetitive, or physically demanding for people to handle efficiently.
CES 2026 marks a turning point. After years of flashy demos and vaporware promises, the focus has shifted to physical AI?machines that understand their environment and act on it autonomously. As Arm puts it, we're entering an era where "vehicles, robots and machines are not just seeing and understanding the world?they're acting on it."
Meet the Robots Actually Shipping This Year
Hyundai's Atlas: The $150K+ Humanoid
Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot, now owned by Hyundai, will be on display demonstrating its latest capabilities. Atlas is designed for manufacturing and logistics?lifting heavy objects, navigating complex warehouse layouts and working in spaces built for humans. It's not cheap (expect $150K+ when it hits commercial availability), but for companies dealing with labor shortages and repetitive-strain injuries, the ROI calculation is straightforward.
Atlas can handle objects up to 25 pounds, navigate stairs and recover from being pushed or losing balance. In factory settings, that means it can work third shift without breaks, overtime pay, or workers' comp claims.
Unitree G1: The $16K Game-Changer
Here's where it gets interesting for mid-sized businesses: Unitree's G1 humanoid robot costs just $16,000. For context, that's less than a year's minimum wage salary in most states. The G1 stands 4'3", can carry up to 4.4 pounds per hand and operates for about 2 hours on a single charge.
It's not as capable as Atlas, but it doesn't need to be. Small manufacturers, logistics companies and even retail operations are testing G1 units for inventory management, light assembly work and warehouse restocking. At $16K, the payback period is measured in months, not years.
DEEP Robotics LYNX M20 Pro: The Industrial Inspector
Not all robots need to look human. DEEP Robotics' LYNX M20 Pro is a quadruped (think robot dog) designed for industrial inspection and emergency operations. It can traverse rugged terrain, climb stairs and operate in environments where wheeled robots fail?oil rigs, construction sites, disaster zones.
Equipped with thermal imaging, gas sensors and 360-degree cameras, the LYNX M20 Pro conducts inspections humans either can't reach or shouldn't risk. Energy companies are already deploying these for pipeline monitoring and refinery inspections, reducing both insurance costs and human exposure to hazardous conditions.
The Rest of the Robot Roster
- Roborock: Commercial-grade cleaning robots for offices, hotels and hospitals (because someone still needs to clean up after the humans)
- PUDU Robotics: Delivery and hospitality robots already deployed in restaurants and hotels across Asia, now expanding to North America
- K-Humanoid Alliance: A coalition of 40+ Korean organizations pooling resources to accelerate humanoid robot development and manufacturing
Agentic AI: When Your Software Actually Does the Work
Robots are the visible part of CES 2026's industrial AI story. But the real revolution is happening in software?specifically, agentic AI.
Here's the difference: Traditional AI assistants answer questions. You ask ChatGPT for dinner ideas, it gives you a list. You ask Siri to set a reminder, it sets one. But agentic AI executes multi-step workflows autonomously on your behalf without constant hand-holding.
What Agentic AI Actually Looks Like
Imagine telling your work AI: "Book travel for the Chicago conference in March. Keep it under $1,200 total, prefer direct flights, hotel within walking distance of McCormick Place."
Traditional AI gives you a list of options and waits for you to decide. Agentic AI:
- Checks your calendar for conflicts and suggests optimal travel dates
- Searches flights across multiple airlines, comparing price vs. convenience
- Books the flight using your corporate travel account
- Reserves a hotel room based on your preference history (you always pick Hyatt when available)
- Adds ground transportation from O'Hare to the hotel
- Updates your calendar with itinerary details
- Notifies your assistant and team that you'll be out those days
- Stays within the $1,200 budget constraint
You gave one instruction. The AI handled eight tasks. That's the promise of agentic AI and CES 2026 is where vendors will demonstrate how it works in enterprise environments.
Use Cases Beyond Travel Booking
Sales & CRM: Agentic AI reviews meeting notes, updates CRM records, drafts follow-up emails, schedules next touchpoints and flags deals at risk of stalling?without you touching Salesforce.
Supply Chain Management: Monitors inventory levels, predicts stockouts based on sales trends, automatically reorders from preferred vendors, negotiates shipping rates and alerts you only when manual intervention is needed (like when a supplier misses a delivery window).
Customer Support: Handles tier-1 support tickets end-to-end?password resets, account updates, refund processing?and escalates complex issues to human agents with full context and suggested resolutions already drafted.
Compliance & Documentation: Tracks regulatory changes relevant to your industry, updates internal policies, generates required reports and ensures filings happen on time. (Ask any CFO what they'd pay to automate SOX compliance documentation.)
The Hardware Making It Possible
Agentic AI and physical robots require serious computational power. CES 2026 will showcase the chips making it happen:
Intel Panther Lake (Core Ultra Series 3)
Intel's using CES to launch Panther Lake, its Core Ultra Series 3 processors designed specifically for AI workloads. These chips include dedicated neural processing units (NPUs) that handle AI inference locally?meaning your laptop can run agentic AI models without sending data to the cloud.
Why does this matter? Privacy, latency and cost. Running AI on-device means sensitive business data never leaves your network, responses happen in milliseconds instead of seconds and you're not paying per-token cloud API fees.
AMD's AI Vision
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su will present the company's roadmap for AI solutions spanning cloud, enterprise, edge and consumer devices. Expect announcements around AI-optimized server chips for data centers running agentic AI backends and laptop processors competing directly with Intel's Panther Lake.
Tesla's AI5 Chip (Built on Arm)
While Tesla won't have a booth (Elon's not big on trade shows), the impact of its AI5 chip will be felt throughout CES. Built on Arm's compute platform, the AI5 delivers 40x faster AI performance than the previous generation. It's powering Tesla's Full Self-Driving system, but the architecture is already being licensed for industrial robotics and autonomous vehicles across the industry.
The takeaway: AI chips are no longer just for data centers. They're in cars, robots, laptops and edge devices?enabling AI to run where the work happens, not in some distant cloud server.
The Real-World Impact: Who Wins, Who Loses
Winners
Manufacturers facing labor shortages: Humanoid robots can staff second and third shifts when qualified workers aren't available. No benefits, no turnover, no training time.
Logistics and warehousing: Robots handle the physically demanding repetitive tasks (lifting, sorting, moving pallets), while humans focus on exception handling and quality control.
Knowledge workers drowning in admin tasks: Agentic AI handles the tedious work?expense reports, meeting scheduling, CRM updates, email triage?freeing humans for strategic work.
SMBs that couldn't afford enterprise software: Agentic AI democratizes capabilities that used to require dedicated IT teams. A $500/month AI agent can replace a $60K/year junior operations role.
Losers
Entry-level white-collar jobs: If your job is primarily data entry, scheduling, basic customer support, or tier-1 IT help desk, agentic AI is coming for your role. Not eventually?now.
Repetitive manual labor roles: Warehouse picking, assembly line work, inventory management?these jobs won't disappear overnight, but the trajectory is clear. As robots get cheaper and more capable, the economic case for human labor weakens.
Companies slow to adapt: The competitive advantage of early AI adoption is real. If your competitor can process orders 10x faster with agentic AI while you're still manually updating spreadsheets, you're not competing on equal footing.
The Privacy and Control Questions Nobody's Answering
Here's what won't be prominently featured in CES keynotes but should be:
Who controls the agentic AI? If your AI assistant books a flight, uses your credit card and signs a contract on your behalf?who's liable if it screws up? What happens when the AI misinterprets instructions and commits you to a deal you didn't want?
What data is it trained on? Agentic AI learns from your behavior, emails, calendar, documents and communication patterns. Where does that data go? Who owns it? Can competitors buy access to aggregated behavioral data from AI vendors?
Can you audit its decisions? When agentic AI makes a choice?like selecting a vendor or prioritizing one customer over another?can you see why it made that decision? Or is it a black box that "just works" until it doesn't?
CES 2026 will showcase the capabilities. The hard questions about governance, liability and transparency will come later?probably after something goes wrong.
What to Watch at CES 2026
If you're attending (or following coverage), here's what matters:
Wednesday, January 7 - Opening Keynotes
- AMD (Dr. Lisa Su): AI chip roadmap and partnerships
- Intel: Panther Lake launch and on-device AI demos
- Robotics sessions: How humanoid robots are teaming up with humans in warehouses and factories
Thursday-Friday, January 8-9 - Show Floor Demos
- Humanoid robot demonstrations: Watch Atlas, G1 and others in live scenarios
- Agentic AI in action: Vendors will demo real workflows?watch for how much human intervention is actually required
- Edge AI applications: Look for AI running locally on devices (laptops, robots, vehicles) rather than cloud-dependent systems
Saturday, January 10 - Last Day
- Deal-making and partnerships: CES is where manufacturers meet buyers. The deals announced here will shape what ships in 2026-2027.
The Bottom Line
CES 2026 isn't about foldable phones or 8K TVs. It's about the industrialization of AI?the moment when robots and autonomous software move from demos to deployment at scale.
The technology is real. The economics are compelling. The timeline is now, not someday. If your business involves repetitive tasks, physical labor, or multi-step workflows, the tools showcased at CES this week will either make your operation more efficient or make you irrelevant.
Pay attention. The future of work isn't arriving?it's already here, walking the CES show floor on humanoid legs and running autonomously in the cloud.
CES 2026 runs January 7-10 in Las Vegas. Expect around 4,000 exhibitors and 130,000+ attendees. The real action happens in private demo rooms, not on the show floor?so if you're serious about evaluating this tech, book meetings in advance.
