 Hello, and welcome to this Analyst Angle, a preview of next week's CES show in Las Vegas, here on theCUBE. I'm Rob Streche, Analyst with theCUBE Research, and today, let me welcome Savannah Peterson, CUBE host, analyst, savvy millennial owner, importantly, for this conversation. And I'm so excited about this because I've actually never met somebody like this judge at CES. So this is so much fun to have you on Savannah in this role. Thank you so much, Rob. It's always a pleasure co-hosting with you on theCUBE. And this is definitely a very special segment for us. I appreciate you and the team taking the time to make it happen. And I'm honestly, I'm incredibly honored by the process, as well as the selection of being a CES Innovation Awards judge for 2024. And it afforded me a really unique preview of this year's show that I'm excited to tease through a bit with you today. No, I think that is why it's so exciting. I mean, I haven't been back since 2020 when I picked up a little virus there on the way out. That was my parting gift from CES 2020. So I spent two weeks recovering from that afterwards. But hey, things have changed and it seems like the energy is really back with 2024. As I recovered, it seems like CES is recovering. And there's a ton on cloud and AI. There's a lot coming to chips, connected automotive, home automation and more. But let's kick it off because you have a unique perspective on the trends and what's going on from having kind of seen, I know you can't get into specifics, but the trends of what you've seen as you sat there and judged this. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of what you mentioned are definitely inclusive of the trends. I was able to judge a really unique category. There are actually, let me check my notes just so I don't goof this up, there are 29 different categories for the Innovation Awards. There were over 3,000 different entries. And the category that I was judging was the Human Security for All category, which is based on the UN principles for designing technology for good. So that's things that are going to improve our climate, reduce emissions, make the world a better place for us as human beings, make things safer for folks with various impairments or in disaster situations. I really got to see an absolutely fascinating snapshot. One of the things that I think is awesome, I mean, you and I do a lot of enterprise technology work. And enterprise obviously plays a huge role in the consumer technology space. It's the backbone powering a lot of these devices. But the thing that always, well, there's actually a lot of things that always really excite me about CES. And it's one of the reasons I've been going since 2012, including Frank and CES in 2020 when most people pulled out at the very last minute because of Omicron, and it was a really unique experience. But the thing that really excites me is that it's all consumer-facing applications. And even though a lot of the things that we'll see on the show-no floor and in private rooms under NDA will be largely showcars or MVPs of what some of these technology applications could be, each one of these applications touches the end consumer. And not just nerds like you and I, but people like our families and our friends all around the world, whether that's connected vehicles, whether that's better medical devices for a variety of different things, whether we're looking at tools built into our smartphones that allow us to learn more about the environment around us to make us safer. There's so many different things that will not just be cool to look at. I think a lot of people talk about the gadgets of CES, which are always awesome as well, certainly something that I geek out on too. But it's truly that end consumer application that touches a lot of different ages, everything from our waking hours to our sleep, our performance to even stuff in the adult space. There's nothing that isn't at CES. And there's a reason that it attracts over 150,000 people to the show each year. Yeah. No, I've always looked at it as a bellwether as well, because I think what happens in a consumer space, like you said, has impact back on the enterprise space in a big way and vice versa. But I think that to me was really interesting. And you kind of touched on it. Sustainable IT is a very big push this year as well, which makes a lot of sense. There's a lot around accessibility for ADA reasons and things of that nature. And just that it's an untapped market for many, many different organizations, enterprise and consumer. And I think this is why it's really exciting. It seems like, again, it's AI everywhere from the palm of your hands, your house, your car at the edge with IoT devices and chips and IoT devices and more. And I think that to me is really exciting. And I think also ties into the category you had, how do you do that safely and securely so that when you're bringing this type of information out there that, again, people consume it properly. How do you see kind of the AI trends going this year? Oh, man, I feel like if you've ever seen that episode of Portlandia where they talk about put a bird on it, I feel like that was the version of that in the consumer tech world with AI. And it was very interesting because as a judge, we're asked to look at three different criteria for each product in our specific category. And we're looking at the overall engineering, the overall design, and then the overall innovation. And it's interesting to see the folks who had been building with perhaps this future in mind wisely or developing solutions already in a space that then was just accelerated by AI and all the products have to be actually launched between April of last year and April of this year. So it's all new things, which is cool, or at least new applications of things. And so you can see the folks where AI was baked into this. They'd been working with large language models and machine learning for a while versus the folks who wanted to put an AI bird on it and just be a part of the revolution. And in my mind, I definitely struggled a bit to take some of the entries as seriously as I could if they were just saying AI to say AI. And, you know, we're smart enough to see through the AI curtain a bit, given all the intelligent people were lucky enough to interview on the cube through our variety of different shows. And I think I was lucky that we have the knowledge that we do to be able to see through the veil here of folks who were just trying to jump on a trend. I mean, we saw this same thing with blockchain a few years ago. There's crypto winter. There's a lot of things that jump on the hyper versus actual applications. And there were definitely some standout products, both applying AI and also just genuinely new hardware innovations that really impressed me this year. There's there's certainly a lot of relevance and reason to attend CES. Yeah, no, I agree. And I thought it was very interesting because I think that when I started looking through all the announcements that we get from an embargo perspective and started to kind of contemplate what are people talking about? What are they not talking about? It's really, I mean, like you said, put a bird on it with the AI on everything. Everything had an AI slant. Some was really deep AI. And I think I was talking to a colleague, former colleague of mine who is a CIO of a company and his comment was, you know, the big interesting thing was how do you do more at the edge? How do you do more in smaller devices? How do you bring that type of inference AI? And I think this is to your bird comment. In fact, I replied back to one of the vendors and said, I need to know what you mean by AI because you keep you just say AI and it doesn't make sense in the context like this chip that they were doing. And I'm like, OK, you need to you need to kind of help me out here and give me a vowel. And so I think that to me is really interesting of what's real and what's not real, what really has because it can have some significant implications because as we talk about in our power law of AI, there's a lot of specialized or segmented large language models that go out and are going to be used for finance, used for retail, used for a lot of these things where you'll be able to go into stores and say, hey, you're pulling something off the shelf and you'll automatically get a notification that says, if you like this, this is what pairs with that, you know, these recommendations engines that happen in split seconds using inference at the edge. And I think it all starts at CES. I mean, to me, this is where people come with those really cool ideas. What's what's your your view kind of on the relevance of CES nowadays? Yeah, it's it's a great question for you asking. And I can say without revealing too much that you will certainly enjoy some of the innovation you get to see on the floor based on the statement that you just made. I mean, we as consumers are essentially edge where we are edge users with edge devices in the palm of our hands every single day. And so my favorite innovations were not actually necessarily a ridiculous leap in physical hardware, but were really intelligent leaps in the applications of the hardware that's already a part of our daily lives. So I'm super excited about that. CES is I mean, I've been going since 2012. I actually got my start in the Silicon Valley throwing parties at CES, which is kind of crazy to think about. And that was 12 years ago now, quite the journey and bringing clients there every year. I've been a member of the media at CES now for seven years, eight years. Maybe I don't even know anymore and and did some special reporting when I was there during the crazy COVID years. So CES has been relevant to me in my business for for many years, as well as the thought leader in the technology space. The thing that I think is going to be really great this year is is two folds. One we we've heard from some of the guests we've had on the cube, like Johnny Dallas from Z that he is saying engineering teams of three do the same thing as engineering teams of three hundred. We're also seeing teams really focused on speed and agility. And we've had other CEOs like Jonathan Ross at GROC also confirmed similar things in terms of the trends that he's saying across the company is that they're talking to now. Of course, people always want to do more with less, faster and better. But what's really interesting and why this affects the show specifically this year is I'm looking forward to saying some of the teams that we haven't heard from or seen before that pop up in debut or make big announcements either in terms of partnerships with large enterprise partners or just in terms of an MVP of their technology on the show floor. Because in the consumer technology space, it's someone who started in consumer tech and it's been in hardware for a decade and a half. Now, I can tell you one of the most challenging things is resources. Hardware requires large engineering teams that requires a lot of supply chain challenges. There are many things that have to go into the napkin to product on the shelf journey. And and it's impossible to do in less than nine months. And usually it takes a couple years, sometimes even longer than that. What we're seeing right now, thanks to AI and the advancements here is not only can can existing teams be much more efficient and and develop more faster, but I think we're also going to see some very new players creating new solutions in ways that we haven't thought about before. And given that, CES brings so many people together. It's the largest show in our space, really in the tech space. I know I believe in the country, if not one of the largest in the world. And so the synergy there, it's truly a place of great synergy between big companies, small players and and worldwide startups. And that's the last thing I'll say to answer this question. Not so succinctly is that I always get really excited to go into the startup pavilion, because what I don't think a lot of people realize is in addition to the household tech brands you're used to hearing about, there are specific cohorts and crews that are sent from every country. Essentially it is delegates that have specific space on the show floor or from Japan to France to the Netherlands to Korea. And and governments invest in supporting these companies in coming or so that this energy can happen so that they can take meetings so that they can apply for the innovation awards. I would say 95 percent of the entries that I personally judged were international. It's very inspiring. When you think about that, we think of the Silicon Valley and the United States as the epicenter of technology. It certainly is still the center of a lot of venture funding. But that doesn't mean that the newest and best ideas are all going to come out of here. I think we're already seeing that. And I'm really looking forward to the surprise and delight, not just of seeing familiar faces and key players that have been crushing in SES for years, but to also meet some of the newer faces and really exciting products and solutions and minds behind them that are going to help shape our future and end up playing ball with with some of these larger companies that we talk to more frequently. So, you know, I can't wait to be surprised. What about you? You haven't been in a while. What are you excited for? Yeah, I'm excited because I think that AI and where data lives and how you bring that together and how it brings it to cars, how it brings it because I mean, the cars, the autonomous cars and autonomous driving and a lot of that, you know, what three or years ago with Elm. Yeah, I guess it's four years ago. It was a lot about how we how we make that next leap in automotive, how we make that next leap in home automation and security and how I think in that four year span, a lot has come together between enterprise tech and consumer tech. And they've kind of it kind of meshed in a very significant way. And I think it's accelerating with, as you were saying, AI enabling smaller teams become basically efficient, larger teams to bring more code to bear and solve problems faster. I think there's a lot in those spaces. I'm really excited to see because I think there's some interesting tech with AI being implemented. And I'm really interested to see the safeguards that they're putting in place because I think that to me is one of those, you know, it's like not the AGI type thing where everything's going to take over the world and all that. I'm not worried about that in the least. But what I do worry about is data leakage and how, you know, how does it really learn? Is it really just doing inference? How does it store the data? OK, I'm driving down and it's trying to figure something out and I ask it and, you know, the car is driving itself and then it's using an LLM, you know, inference portion of an LLM locally to go and find that next stop that I've tried to ask or trying to infer where I want to go when I'm looking for something. I think to me, there's a lot that can happen in connecting human and machine technology in that way that's extremely helpful. You know, having a brother who's blind, for instance. And I hope to get him on one of these days in the near future to show the AI he uses on a daily basis that helps him determine what type of Apple is he looking at in the store and using those apps. And that all came out of CES and a lot of his friends and former colleagues are actually there presenting on the accessibility aspect of it. And I think this is a leap forward for not only blind, but deaf and other different disabilities and what people can achieve. That on top of it with the sustainability, I have this extreme worry. And I've been saying it that, you know, it's five chat GPT queries equals 16 ounces of water. So it's not just about the power aspect of building these data centers. It's about the water, the footprint, you know, the cooling aspects that go into that besides the power aspect. And I think the power aspect for data centers, I don't want to say it's easier to solve, but it tends to be, hey, there are carbon neutral ways we can go power these data centers. And there's I think that also coming to the home is something that is very interesting to me because that's a piece of tech where big cloud providers have been really leaning in on the renewable energy and buying it all up and buying all kinds of different wind farms and so forth, solar farms and all that. But at a certain point, you know, how do we get to a good equilibrium where it's not just the data centers that are doing it, but you'll also get it all the way back to the home where, you know, my home, I think at last count had 56 different smart devices running in it. And, you know, again, when you start to break, I had 20 people over for for the holidays, so I had another 20 device, at least 20 devices, because some of the younger guys brought their laptops and stuff like that. You start to look at it. I had close to 100 different connected devices in my house over the holidays. That's that's not a normal home issue. That's an IT issue or that's a platform engineering issue, as we would talk about it, you know, with people who are sitting there and I'm like looking at my firewall, complaining about all of the new things that it sees on there and their uploading data. And you see where all the data is going from all of these connected devices and you start to wonder, OK, you know, is that really the right place where to be going? Is that, you know, some bucket in on S3? Is that out to Google? Is it off to Microsoft? Is it out to their own data center? And I think, you know, as you add things like washers, dryers, refrigerators that are going to help you meal plan based on what's and, you know, being able to use computer vision inside your refrigerator. It's just all of this data becomes intellectual property of those companies. And that leads back to the enterprise. So this is like the pointy end of the spear for what enterprises are going to be dealing with with data and data platforms, AI and security. And I'm super interested because a lot of the big players are there. I will say one of the interesting things is a lot. I've seen a lot of the really super large players, especially in the telco space and pulled back a little bit, which was actually a little bit surprising to me, because this is kind of where they do get some of that. I guess you could say forward looking intention about how is AI going to be at the edge? But I think some of them over large ones are there. And I think some of the ones that are there kind of get it. A little bit more than others. And to your point, there's new startups. I was looking at all the chip providers that are out. There's a ton of startup chip providers, as well as the established folks. And I think to me, that's really interesting because a lot of AI is going to happen out at the edge, out in the small, smaller devices, smaller footprint, as well as in the home so that it can be disconnected. So I'm excited about that stuff. And it's definitely exciting. I think one of the things that I would not necessarily counter, but include in a discussion about some of the larger companies is there's a big difference in being in display on the floor and still having a presence. And I think that one of the things that I always notice and you can tell kind of the classic move when someone has their badge flipped over is they're a buyer. And I think that while you might not see certain brand names displaying at CES with a million dollar, 10 million dollar display like you used to as some companies have famously pulled out over the years, you see other people rise into that opportunity for that show floor space. And frankly, those large companies still send large teams to learn to meet with people. You know, there's not just the product end or the kind of cloud end of this. There's also the material science end. I mean, there's there's so many layers of every product that we touch that AI is built into that's at the show down to the the materials in the in the form factor and, you know, the engineering inside the carbon that's going to build the tires of our EVs. It's it's very granular, and I think that that part is really interesting, too. So I think sometimes when we think about about visibility of teams versus presence of teams, there is as much as a lot of things are on display and everyone's showing off their show card. There's very much this like secretive or you see yes, sometimes where there's very much meetings and alliances and and conversations. And like you said, as this tech emerges, that's yes, you know, we've you and I have both seen it. Tech will be shown off at CES and you either a never hear about it again because it's quietly purchased or you hear about it again in a very big way. When one of these power players decides to bring it into their innovation fold. So, yeah, I kind of think about it as an extension of Christmas. It's an opportunity to really not just forecast the year and the way that we do looking at data, but get the hallway track pulse on what's coming next and what's what's real and and also beyond cool examples of what could be see what's actually being implemented at that scale globally and and I really can't wait to see it all. Yeah, I'm with you on that and I'm actually a couple of my friends like you just actually countered and was good and positive because I think that one of my friends, one of his is at one of those over large companies and bringing a team there for those purposes. So I think again, to your point, they may not be there with the big signs and ten million dollar million dollar displays, but they are there. That's that is for darn sure for that. But no, they're and they're comfortable writing a ten million dollar check. So I think what we're seeing in terms of estimate is, you know, as companies really get strategic with their marketing spend, given some of the economic uncertainty we're facing right now, they're still there. They just might not have. So it's I think it's going to be really interesting. Attendance has been growing every year since things got wild after the twenty twenties show. And I I'm I'm really keen. I can tell at least from within my community, I bet you're saying the same that there is a lot of excitement, a lot of folks that I know from wearables to warehouse and supply chain distribution solutions are all coming into town. And it sounds like it's definitely going to be the place to be to kick off the technology year in twenty twenty four. I'm glad we'll be there together. I agree. I can't wait. And I think that's a great place to leave it. And I really appreciate you jumping on board with me today because I think again, you bring not only just today, but in general, you always bring such good perspective and with your experience in that market, it's it's killer. I really appreciate that, Rob, and I'm glad we could do this. And hey, just for all those listening, if you are going to CES and you've got something extraordinarily interesting to tell either Silicon Angle or the Cube, or if you just want to come hang out. I am hosting a meetup on Thursday at Huffborough House from four to seven. We'll find a way to drop the link to that. Find me on the Internet and I'll get to the RSV link for that. If you want to come hang out and have a casual off strip chat and connect with some very cool people, both about AI, but also about everything consumer tech in twenty twenty four. Awesome. Yeah, we'll get that into the description when we post this. So not a problem. And, you know, so thanks for coming on board and I'll see you in a couple of days. Really short. See you in Vegas. See you in Vegas. And thank you all for watching this Analyst Angle. I really appreciate you hanging in there and seeing this. Hope to see you all at CES. If you do reach out to both of us, we'll put our contact info in there. And thank you for joining this. Actual, you know, preview of CES that we really just could get into so much in that. And I just love seeing where we can go. So thank you for joining us and thank you for joining the Cube, the leader in enterprise tech and analysis. We'll see you soon.