AI toothbrush. AI sleep mask. AI baby monitor. AI coffee maker. AI cat feeder. AI pen. AI pin. AI massage chair. An AI mirror that "reads your face." An AI refrigerator that needs to know me better than I know myself. AI smart ring, AI smart necklace, AI headphones, AI OH MY GOD WHATEVER.
On day one of my first CES, I started keeping a list in my notes app. Not a list of companies to follow up with, but of products that had been given the AI treatment for no discernable reason.
Some of the products were fine. Some were silly. A few were genuinely impressive (looking at you, massage chair). But they all suffer from the same problem: Too often, AI isn't solving a real problem. It's simply a marketing strategy.
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It being my first time at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas, I expected to be overwhelmed. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world packed into two venues in one of the most extravagant cities ever? Yeah, I was prepared for the sensory overload. But what I didn't expect was how quickly "AI" would start to become mind-numbingly meaningless. By the third day, every pitch blurred: AI-powered, AI-driven, AI-enabled.
CNET
Most of them? AI nonsense.
I found myself oscillating between fascination and fatigue. Fascination by the sheer ambition and grandeur of the displays promising the key to the future. Fatigue at how often that future looked like a nonsense solution in search of a nonexistent problem, all wrapped up in an LLM.
The problem at CES 2026 wasn't the AI itself. But how liberally and casually it was being applied.
AI fatigue doesn't mean we should reject the technology as a whole. It's about watching something that could be genuinely powerful become flattened into a buzzword and bolted onto any and every product and device that doesn't need it. When everything is AI, nothing feels innovative. It's a checkbox. A mandate. An expectation. And that's when the fatigue sets in.
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