Accenture’s top 5 predictions for what will be hot at CES 2017

Roughly 177,000 people are expected to converge on Las Vegas next week for the Consumer Electronics Show. CES 2017 will have around 2 million square feet of exhibit space, and I’ll be there checking out the event with VentureBeat writers Ken Leung and John Brandon. We’ll all be trying to figure out what the big themes of the show will be.

John Curran, managing director for communications, media, and tech at Accenture, has come up with his annual predictions of the prevailing themes at CES 2017. I interviewed him about those predictions, which can serve as a guide through the madness. His first big prediction is that artificial intelligence will be huge at the show, thanks to breakthroughs in the past few years that have made AI practical for use in a wide range of consumer services. He also believes intelligent assistants, from Siri to Alexa, will also be hot.