With 2026 underway, DBC’s Bill Daddi shares his thoughts on this year’s CES event:
This year’s CES agentic AI-palooza brought to mind Disney’s The Incredibles and villain Syndrome explaining why he wanted to give everyone super powers, “because if everyone is special, no one Is.”
The agentic AI platforms launched at CES were indeed impressive and will certainly transform the industry – but now that just about everyone has this superpower, who will be special?
Agentic AI quickly turned the corner at CES from innovation to table stakes.
And while this technology will shape the future of the ad industry, prospective clients of these companies have no real ability to independently assess the quality or utility of one agentic AI platform over another – and therefore a level of sameness is being introduced.
Of course, these platforms are differentiated by the unique institutional knowledge of each company that they draw upon and help access, but the heightened focus on process, over product, which is ultimately what agentic AI is – a process – runs the risk of commoditizing each company’s product.
As with most technology, it will be difficult to differentiate on the basis of agentic AI. It will still come down to the one thing that AI cannot do well, which is demonstrating a unique, intuitive and proprietary understanding of the challenges, needs and concerns facing a prospective client.
People want to work with companies that they feel “get them.” In our agentic AI future, as it has always been, prospective clients want assurance that you understand their problem and can solve it.
So as the push continues to improve and enhance the process through agentic AI, let’s maintain focus on what is truly important – the product – and the need to ensure that the one party that truly needs to feel special, the client, is not lost in the shuffle.