CES 2025: how to tell an AI feature from an AI sticker
Las Vegas is full of AI-labelled products this week. Three questions separate the ones that do something from the ones that say something.
CES 2025 opened in Las Vegas on 7 January, following Nvidia’s keynote the evening before, which covered gaming hardware, robotics, autonomous vehicles and desktop AI machines. Almost every product on the floor carries an AI label.
Most of that will not reach a Swiss SME. But the labelling habit will, because the same marketing will be on the business software you are offered this year.
Three questions that cut through it
What could it not do last year? If a vendor cannot name a concrete thing the product now does that it previously could not, the AI is a label on existing functionality. Rules-based sorting is not machine learning because the brochure says so.
What happens when it is wrong? Real AI features are probabilistic and their vendors know it. A vendor who talks about confidence levels, review steps and fallbacks has built something. A vendor who implies it is always right has not thought about it, and you will do that thinking later at your own expense.
Where does the processing happen? If the answer is vague, the feature is calling somebody else’s API and the vendor either does not know the data path or would rather not discuss it. Either answer is useful.
The pattern that actually matters from this week
Not the products. The direction: the hardware to run capable models is getting cheaper and physically smaller, including machines aimed at a desk rather than a data centre.
That is a slow-moving trend and it points somewhere relevant for Swiss companies with confidentiality obligations. The option to process sensitive material on hardware you control is becoming less exotic each year. It is not yet ordinary, and for most SMEs a hosted service under a proper contract remains the right answer in 2025.
The practical filter
When a supplier shows you an AI feature this year, ask which of your actual tasks it does and how you will check it. If the demo changes the subject, so should you.