The news: While we’ve seen many successful products come out of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES)—think the Commodore 64 in 1982 or Sling TV in 2015—some items may never move beyond niche appeal.

Let’s look at a few of CES 2026’s weirdest AI products and those that may remain in the prototype phase.

The products: Some innovations could come across as uncanny, have unclear value pitches, or may not have a realistic price point for mass consumer adoption.

• Razer Project Ava. This hologram desktop anime companion, powered by xAI’s Grok, can view what’s happening on your computer screen and offer gaming, productivity, and personal advice. Lepro debuted a similar 3D anime companion, called Ami.
• Glyde Smart Hair Clipper. The “mistake-proof” barber is made up of a wearable “fade band” that helps guide smart clippers around your hair for an assisted haircut.
• GoveeLife Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro. It uses AI to reduce the typical noise made by ice makers and is designed to detect when the machine is about to freeze up and automatically defrost.
• AI Tails. This smart cat feeder measures an animal’s food and water intake and monitors its temperature and appearance to detect abnormalities and potential health issues.

Past failures were often overly complicated or unconvincing in their promise to improve daily life, such as smart fridges few used to shop or AI-enabled cribs that raised red flags around user privacy.

Zooming out: Another trend at CES and beyond is the growing tendency to label products as “AI-powered,” when machine learning is doing the heavy lifting. AI has become a catch-all buzzword, and its use hints at how marketing ambitions could outpace clear consumer benefits.

What it means for the industry: For many of these products, the challenge won’t be technical feasibility, but rather proving a compelling value proposition that justifies price points covering the costs of compute and development. CES contenders without clear, everyday use cases could struggle to break through as the AI novelty wears off.

Other CES coverage:

• CES 2026 turns TVs into walls, makes rings mainstream, and brings robots home
• CES 2026 shows AI becoming core to consumer health innovation
• DoubleVerify brings clarity to CTV buys with DV Authentic Streaming TV
• Peacock fleshes out livestream advertising ahead of a blockbuster 2026
• Reddit brings AI automation to social ads as costs rise

Credit: Lepro

This content is part of EMARKETER’s subscription Briefings, where we pair daily updates with data and analysis from forecasts and research reports. Our Briefings prepare you to start your day informed, to provide critical insights in an important meeting, and to understand the context of what’s happening in your industry. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.