AI at CES is Not Just Cheesy Gadgets Anymore

Today on the AI Daily Brief, why CES is telling an extremely different story about AI this year than it has in the past. Before that in the headlines, what investors and analysts think are the most important AI risks in the short term, which frankly Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsor, Zencoder, Assembly, robots and pencils, and super intelligent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Subscriptions start at just $3 a month. If you are interested in sponsoring the show or frankly finding out anything else about the show, whether it's speaking opportunities, etcetera, check out aidailybrief.ai, or you can shoot us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai. To learn about our forthcoming intelligence products, check out aidbintel.com. You can also get the highlights of our AI ROI benchmarking survey there. And lastly, you absolute animals, aidbnewyear.com, our ten week self guided resolution, is up to over a 100 teams and nearly 2,500 people participating. Look for more operator content focused on that coming soon. But with that out of the way, let's dig into today's episode. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We are in the first full week of business being back in session for 2026. And as such, everyone is kinda trying to get a vibe for what this year is going to be like. Now, of course, we're not gonna learn all that much in the first days of the year, but they do kinda set a tone. And this year certainly has not been without drama. We have a whole new situation in terms of the geopolitics of North And South America, all sorts of interesting questions around politics this year, which is, of course, an election year in The US, and some big market questions around AI, which has been the most important theme in markets for the past several years, all contributing to what is a really interesting environment. Now in that context, I've recently seen a couple of different assessments around what some of the big risks in general, but also with AI are. And they're not necessarily the things that you normally think of when you think of AI risk. According to Wall Street analysts, for example, one of the most overlooked risks for this coming year is AI driven inflation. Morgan Stanley strategist Andrew Sheets wrote, the costs are going up, not down in our forecast because there's inflation in chip costs and inflation in power costs. Sheets and Morgan Stanley are forecasting that inflation will remain about the Federal Reserve's 2% target until the end of next year, in part due to heavy CapEx spending on AI infrastructure. Now one of the economic forces we saw in the latter part of last year was a lack of cost sensitivity when it …