AI Briefing: CES 2025 showcases more AI for TVs, wearables and advertisers

At CES 2025 last week, a startup called TheTake announced new deals with LG and Samsung, bringing its total footprint to more than 30 million devices. Founded a decade ago, TheTake uses visual AI to let users click on items within a show to see what it is, where to buy them, and view similar items. The on-screen display also shows both organic recommendations and ads from brands and retailers.

The goal is to take a “pull more than push” approach to product discovery and the ads around them, said TheTake founder and CEO Tyler Cooper. With LG, the expanded partnership includes a new “click to search” feature to identify the products, places, and people on-screen. With Samsung, the startup debuted a new way to browse and shop for products within content, along with updates for advertisers to reach high-intent audiences.

“We’re taking this high intent moment,” Cooper said. “You’re looking at the TV, you’re captured by these shoes, you hit the button, it pulls it up and now we can say we know exactly what shoes those are.”

The features might sound familiar to anyone who’s used tools like Google’s “Circle To Search” and Lens to find products online or in real life. However, TheTake aims to improve user privacy by processing images on-device instead of the cloud.

What stood out — and didn’t stand out — during CES 2025?

Beyond tech startups and tech giants, other brands made their debut at CES 2025, hosted at the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of those was Eli Lilly, which had an exhibited at CES for the first time to talk about LillyDirect, the pharma giant’s new direct-to-consumer prescription medication platform.

Diogo Rau, chief digital officer and chief information officer of Eli Lilly, noted how the company aimed to use lessons learned at the conference to improve consumer experiences and clinical trials. Before joining Eli Lilly in 2021, he spent a decade at Apple as head of engineering for Apple’s retail stores and online Store.

“We’re really good at the science, we’re really good at manufacturing and making safe medicines, but the industry as a whole is terrible in terms of its interaction with consumers,” Rau told Digiday. “Just think about the last time you had to get medicine for yourself and all the challenges you had…So we’re turning a spotlight on the consumer experience.”

While AI was yet again everywhere at CES, some attendees said companies that were able to showcase practical applications stood out among the buzz. Attendees also noted the convergence of brands and hardware, which have new integrations with new or improved AI and augmented reality integrations.

“Although ‘AI-washing’ was prevalent across the show as companies slapped those two letters on their booth signage and material, it’s no surprise that the most practical, usable tech demos resonated with attendees,” said Greg Swan, senior marketing partner at Finn Partners. “… How long will saying your product has AI be a marketable attribute? In the coming years, it could be that saying your product has AI will be as blasé as saying it runs on electricity.”

AI’s capabilities and applications are moving beyond creation to using AI for personalized experiences and designing new products, said Dave Meeker, who just joined Monks as the agency’s head of AI.

“Doing AI-generated video is much more costly than an AI-generated background for a banner ads,” Meeker said. “However, it may also be way more impactful… now the technology exists, and we have to figure out how to pay for it.”

Are marketers out of place at CES?

CES veterans wondered if the conference is even the right place for marketers to be when it comes to looking for new ways to tackle problems marketers face. Some questioned the value of attending CES, arguing the event’s focus on flashy technology distracts from the industry’s core mission of understanding consumer behavior. 

Tom Goodwin, founder of the consultancy All We Have Is Now, noted CES often showcases futuristic gadgets that never gain widespread adoption or address ongoing issues like ad measurement and budget allocation. He said there’s also a false assumption that CES reveals a big paradigm shift while hardware often moves much slower than software: “The more time we spend in Las Vegas looking at the future, the less time we spend looking at how to get someone to choose our fabric softener over somebody else’s.”

“I feel like the whole world of advertising has really distanced itself from normal people,” said Goodwin, who skipped CES 2025. “We’re so keen on looking ahead that we don’t really look at our own country. [Marketers] don’t know what it looks like to live in Kansas or know what it looks like to buy gas in Anchorage… It’s our job to sort of see why people are changing brands.”

Here’s a quick recap with some of the AI- and non-AI news from CES:

• Nvidia’s keynote featured numerous updates for its AI chips and applications. One standout was the debut of Project DIGITS, a personal AI supercomputer for developers that’ll cost $3,000. 
• Generative AI is being integrated more deeply into smart TVs, with Microsoft integrating Copilot with Samsung and LG devices for personalized content and Google debuting a new TV OS that will summarize news and other updates. 
• Amazon announced a new Retail Ad Services program. The updates will let other retailers use Amazon’s machine learning models to analyze data; use Amazon tech to improve ad placements in search, browsing and product pages; and provide more retailer control over creative formats.
• X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced the company is planning a new payment system called X Money to help creators earn more on the platform. 
• Microsoft also announced updates for e-commerce and advertising, including a new “Curate For Commerce” platform to help retailers use first-party data and “Sponsored Promotions by Brands” for ad placements on e-commerce websites.
• Delta Airlines announced a deal with YouTube to let Skymiles members access ad-free videos, podcasts, and music onboard flights.
• Smart glasses showcased at CES included Meta: Solos AirGo 3, Halliday, and Spacetop
• Dell unveiled a rebrand for its AI-powered PCs — including the debut of the Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max — which many noted sounds quite like how Apple brands its products.

Prompts and products — Other AI-related news and announcements

• Getty Images and Shutterstock announced plans to merge. (Both companies have been aggressively developing generative AI platforms for image and video content.)
• Contentstack announced the acquisition of Lytics, which brings more consumer data capabilities to Contentstack’s AI creation and automation platform
• Following its recent $95 million settlement, Apple issued a statement claiming conversations recorded by Siri aren’t used for marketing profiles or related purposes. 
• A new report from Reuters and Oxford examines the journalism and tech trends for 2025. The report also mentions a majority of newsrooms surveyed said generative AI tools are transforming newsrooms through automation, content creation and chatbots. 
• A judge will hear oral arguments from the New York Times and OpenAI in the lawsuit the Times filed against OpenAI related to AI and copyright.

AI news from across Digiday

• A Q&A with Stagwell’s Mark Penn & the streaming ad data disconnect
• The topics and trends that will be the talk of CES this year
• Omnicom Media Group hits CES with a blitz of search-related partnerships, starting with Google
• Reddit debuts new tools for tracking trends and advertising AMA
• Media agencies face the uncertainty of a Trump 2.0 presidency and the rise of agentic AI in 2025
• The state of AI: Where WPP, R/GA, IPG and other marketers stand in 2025
• CES Briefing: Ad industry peeks at the ‘agentic’ era & confronts low-quality ad experiences
• Agency compensation models in the AI era, a speedrun of the CES show floor & Disney’s tech showcase
• AI in 2025: Five trends for marketing, media, enterprise and e-commerce