The Biggest Agentic AI Trends at CES 2025

Beyond ‘AI’

Marketers may love AI (for the most part), but it is still unclear how much people will.

There is an acknowledgement that a majority of consumers don’t yet trust it, don’t know how to use it, and are worried about privacy and technological intrusion. To accommodate, brands may want to rethink how to call it.

This year, LG’s crown-jewel unveiling and the centerpiece to its announced strategy is indeed AI: Affectionate Intelligence. That is the softer term to explain how the brand uses AI to connect home, screen, and lifestyle.

Expect more reframing of AI for other products, platforms and experiences—much like used cars became certified preowned and global warming became climate change.

Perhaps the biggest surprise winner at CES, however, was the positive mood—or rather, the lack of fear that other tectonic tech changes brought with them. There is little hysteria compared to previous years when VHS was going to kill Hollywood, social was going to kill media, the deprecation of the cookie was going to kill programmatic, etc. Most marketers and agencies are thrilled with AI, looking toward its potential without perhaps understanding the path to get there. 

Make no mistake, the advent of generative and agentic AI (artificial, augmented, or affectionate) into the marketing and advertising ecosystem is revolutionary. And you cannot have a revolution without blood in the streets, metaphorical or not. There will certainly be job replacement—that is in essence what efficiency and machine scaling means in our business. At the same time, the best way to train AI is with human-based data and human-applied insights, making humans empathetically understanding other humans a paramount differentiator for great work. 

And finally, perhaps most importantly, we have yet to grapple with how to organize around AI. If the technology is going to radically change workflow, clearly it will radically change how we build teams and processes to get to the work. And if creative output will undoubtedly be fully automated, how will we find, harness, and celebrate creativity itself?