CTA: Challenges Remain for Tech Industry, but U.S. Market Is Poised for Growth
While the tech industry faces continuing challenges, the global tech and durables market will hit $1.3 trillion by the end of this year, said Brian Comiskey, senior director for innovation and trends at the Consumer Technology Association, in an opening keynote Monday at CES. Overall, the market is “static,” he said, with growth in some regions and contraction in others. He cited challenges including uncertainty and pressure from Trump administration tariffs. “Consumers are still buying technology, just more intentionally.”
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In releasing CTA's industry forecast Sunday, CEO Gary Shapiro underscored those concerns. "The impact of economic uncertainty is becoming more visible as companies move through pre-tariff inventories and face tougher cost decisions heading into 2026," he said.
While overall growth “remains steady, the burden of rising costs is falling unevenly across the industry, with smaller companies more likely to face margin pressure or supply chain disruptions,” CTA said in a news release.
While North America is “holding steady” for the year, there's some growth expected in the U.S., where the industry will reach $565 billion, up 3.7% year over year, Comiskey said. Unit shipments are expected to remain flat, though. “We’re in a long-tail refresh cycle following the pandemic, with longer device life spans and delayed upgrades.” At the same time, software and services are hitting record revenues “even as subscriber growth slows, especially with the rise of ad-supported streaming.”
Comiskey also said the current era is one of “intelligent transformation,” with AI changing business operations, workers' functions and consumers' lives. “We are in the middle of a foundational leap that will impact and improve millions of lives,” he said. Cloud computing is “creating the infrastructure that makes innovation elastic and global.”
Consumers used to use AI just to write emails, but that has evolved to using it to help manage the mailbox itself, Comiskey said. Think of it as AI moving from responding to prompts to taking initiative, he said. Some AI models are becoming smaller and more specialized to serve a single industry, such as health care or agriculture, he added. Industrial AI “embeds intelligence directly into sectors like infrastructure, logistics and manufacturing.”
In addition, robots are an example of “physical AI” and are broadly on display this week at the conference, while AI is making self-driving cars possible, “leading to a safer future of transportation,” he said.
During a CES panel discussion Monday on AI and robotics, Mikell Taylor, director of robotics strategy at General Motors, said there remains “a gap” between videos and lab demonstrations of robots in action and a “useful return on investment.”
Robot kickboxing videos don’t mean that “robots are ready,” said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics. “The hard stuff” is finding a problem robots can solve “at a cost that brings value to the customer.”
Addressing the safety and security of robots used by industry, as well as privacy questions, will take time, said Carolina Parada, senior director at Google DeepMind. But the models are moving quickly, she said. “It’s going to be a combination of really advancing the models' capabilities and making sure that they’re available at the edge” while working on safety. Industry shouldn’t wait until “everything is perfect,” and “we’ll learn a lot” by deploying robots.
People are underestimating how quickly the use of robotics will become commonplace, said Nakul Duggal, executive vice president of automotive, industrial and embedded IoT and robotics at Qualcomm. “Things will actually accelerate massively,” he predicted. “This isn’t something that you can do in lab” or through simulation. Robotics have to happen “in a real-world environment,” and “that is going to show the acceleration that’s possible.”