CES 2020 happened in early January in Las Vegas, exactly the way it had happened every year for decades. Roughly 170,000 people walked the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center looking at concept cars, ridiculous televisions, robotic suitcases, and every product category you could imagine with the words AI inside printed on it somewhere.
Looking back at the coverage from those few days is a strange experience. The major themes were familiar from previous years and entirely consistent with what you would expect. AI in everything. 5G everywhere. Smart homes more connected than the previous year. Foldable displays still searching for a use case. Concept cars promising autonomy that was always five years away.
What nobody at CES 2020 knew was that this would be the last major in-person tech event before the world stopped doing in-person events for a long time. Within six weeks, Mobile World Congress would be cancelled. Within ten weeks most of the people who had been walking the CES halls would be working from their kitchens, learning what Zoom was, and trying to figure out how to do their jobs without leaving their homes.
The most observable trend at the show was AI being applied to consumer products in ways that were getting more mature. Voice assistants in cars that actually understood follow-up questions. Cameras with on-device machine learning that recognised what you were photographing. Television sets that adjusted their picture based on what they thought you were watching.
Some of these capabilities mattered. Many were marketing. The challenge that CES never really solved was distinguishing between products with genuinely useful machine learning underneath and products with the words AI applied to features that had existed for years.
The other significant theme was 5G. Telecom companies and phone manufacturers spent significant time on 5G demonstrations. Most of the use cases shown were unconvincing. The promise of 5G had always been a network so fast and low-latency that entirely new applications would emerge. By January 2020, the rollouts were progressing but the new applications had not arrived. They would not arrive in 2020 either, for reasons nobody at CES anticipated.