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As I prepare to throw myself into another CES in 2026, there’s simply no escaping AI. It’s everywhere… or, at least as far as the tech industry is concerned, it should be everywhere… and tech companies simply will not stop talking about how AI is going to change everything until everyone believes it.
As of right now, though, the marquee use cases we’ve gotten for AI are chatbots that are increasingly problematic, whether from a mental health standpoint or as a tool for harrassment and abuse, or image and video generators that are filling social media with so much AI slop that ‘Slop’ became Merriam-Websters word of the year for 2025, and not in a complementary fashion.
‘Coming soon’ – but when?
The office productivity tools that we’ve been promised would transform the workplace still seem to be just over the horizon, right along with Elon Musk’s promise of full, level 5 self-driving for everyone’s Teslas. The various medical breakthroughs we were supposed to get thanks to AI are likewise still “coming soon”, while in the meantime appearing to make our doctors less capable of diagnosing diseases they used to be able to spot before they started using AI assistants.
And that’s not even touching on the problem of AI ‘hallucinations’, a tech industry buzzword that obscures what an AI is actually doing, which is making potentially disastrous errors because, fundamentally, AIs are simply making stuff up that looks like it is likely to be an answer to whatever its prompt or objective happens to be, regardless of whether that solution or answer is correct or not.
News stories of people relying on AI, or even simply using AI, in its current form and meeting with professional embarrassment or possible disaster have been plentiful since these tools went public, with many more reports of these tools being used for some truly horrific ends. If you’ve read about what Grok has been getting up to over the past month or two, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Then there’s the widespread concern that these tools, despite their sloppiness, might still manage to put many millions of people out of work, or the absolutely enormous environmental damage all of this is causing.
I say all of this as I get ready to head into the Las Vegas convention center for yet another CES, because there’s only one thing I want to see: an actual, workable, useful, and revolutionary use case that justifies all of this. It’s only fair. It’s the leading figures of AI who have been evangelizing that we were on the brink of a new Industrial Revolution thanks to this technology, not me.
The world has pumped trillions of dollars into this technology over the past two-plus years, more than enough money and resources to pull something out of the “it’s almost here” future and into the present.
I’m not asking for it to deliver on all its promises. I’m asking it to deliver on one of them with an actual socially or economically beneficial product or some incredible efficiency of an existing process that only an AI can deliver. It’s time for AI’s killer app, and if we don’t get it in 2026, then we need to start pulling back from what is increasingly looking like a novelty that is growing more stale and expensive by the day.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
