CES Unveiled Milan 2026: Insights on trends in consumer technology

CES Unveiled Milan 2026 was less about shiny prototypes than about timing. Brian Comiskey, a senior director and futurist at CTA, used his talk to argue that AI has already crossed a line: it is no longer just a startup toy, but a technology being built into products and used in the real world.

His bigger point was that consumer tech rarely arrives all at once. It can take five to 15 years for a technology to move from commercial availability to everyday use. Smartphones are his favourite proof point: over 12 years, ownership went from roughly one-third of adults to nine in ten. That kind of shift is why he thinks the next widely adopted technology may be quantum, even if the 2030s end up being its decade rather than its breakout moment.

Comiskey also sees AI reaching consumers sooner than quantum, especially through agentic systems. That market, he says, has mostly been enterprise territory so far, but consumers in the US are already starting to get access. If people end up using agents daily to manage the information they choose to share and move between apps without friction, he says, the consumer economy itself starts to look different. The old app economy gives way to something more like an agentic economy, where digital proxies do the work.

He pushed back on the idea that AI has one obvious future. In his view, people lean too hard on large language models when the right tool may be smaller, or not language-based at all. In healthcare, for example, a small model or symbolic AI might make more sense. He compared AI’s disruptive potential to the internet, but its adoption pattern to cloud computing: broad, messy, and far from a single path.

Robots, too, are already closer to mainstream than many people assume. Nearly 20 million consumer robots were sold in 2024, and Comiskey pointed to robotic vacuums and floor washers as signs that households are already living with them. He expects autonomous vehicles to pull robotics further into daily life, once regulations settle down. Humanoid robots are a tougher sell because safety and dexterity still matter a lot, but he thinks cheaper production and better components will help. Household adoption, he said, is most likely in the 2030s.

Away from AI, he singled out space technology as one of the most underappreciated areas in consumer tech. He pointed to Space Map, a South Korean company working on mapping satellites and their trajectories, and to the idea of putting data centres in space. Google, he said, is exploring that concept through plans to test it. The pitch is simple enough: use solar energy in space to support computing and cut the environmental cost of Earth-bound infrastructure. CES Foundry, meanwhile, is trying to speed all of this up by mixing panels, live demos, networking, and startup engagement in one place.