The Future of AI Panel, CES Las Vegas 2025

CES 2025 crystallized the current moment in AI, with agentic AI, productivity, security, and changing expectations at the forefront. The consensus among industry leaders at the CES AI House: AI will eventually reshape human potential, societal structures, and our understanding of cognition. However, in the near term, there are a lot of more tactical developments that will drive AI activity across industries.

At the forefront of this discourse was the "Future of AI" panel, featuring Bret Kinsella, General Manager of Fuel iX, alongside notable industry pioneers. Moderated by Cathy Hackl of Future Dynamics, the panel included Leslie Shannon (Nokia), Resh Sidhu (Snapchat), Jon Vlassopulos (Napster), and Ani Chahal Honan (Yunity/Imagine), each offering critical insights into AI's transformative potential across technology and entertainment sectors.

Decoding the Next AI Frontier

The panel dissected AI's imminent role in reshaping the technology landscape. Beyond productivity enhancements, panelists envision a future where AI's integration into daily life will be as ubiquitous and transformative as electricity.

Resha Sidhu of Snapchat framed AI as a catalyst, stating it will "catapult human ingenuity and innovation in ways that we have not seen before."

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's announcement on agentic AI was arguably the most significant at CES 2025. Huang posited that we are entering the "Age of Agentic AI," a shift he projects will catalyze a multi-trillion-dollar revolution across industries.

Fuel iX's Bret Kinsella provided a nuanced perspective on the current AI adoption and agent landscape based on more than a decade in the industry. While acknowledging AI’s transformative potential, Kinsella highlighted the tangible impacts already visible in job performance and personal fulfillment. He emphasized AI's dual-pronged effect: elevating output quality while simultaneously raising the baseline of productivity across entire organizations.

Kinsella illustrated this with a case study from TELUS Digital, Fuel iX's parent company:

"What's been so impactful is that generative AI tools are just really good copilots that will allow you, at a point in a process, to do one thing, and then to do it better."
- Bret Kinsella

This approach lends itself to downstream benefits that will come from reinventing processes and transforming the work done by organizations. However, there are very real impacts being felt today, particularly when access to generative AI is democratized, where front-line employees are enabled to reinvent everyday tasks right now. That is an animating principle behind Fuel iX. Make generative AI benefits of customization more accessible to the people doing the work so they don’t have to wait for a development team or business analyst to get started. They can do it themselves.

One example outlined how using four different  AI copilots across a single quality engineering process has provided immediate impact, including reducing the time to execute one task by 50%. Over time, these four copilots will merge into a single tool, and some of the tasks will be delegated to AI agents. Four copilots offer four different points of discrete value on day one. The goal is that, eventually, a single AI copilot combined with agents becomes a solution to orchestrate the entire process and further streamline the process while increasing quality. Kinsella summarized that it starts by "helping people become better at what they do."

One example outlined how using four different  AI copilots across a single quality engineering process has provided immediate impact, including reducing the time to execute one task by 50%. Over time, these four copilots will merge into a single tool, and some of the tasks will be delegated to AI agents. Four copilots offer four different points of discrete value on day one. The goal is that, eventually, a single AI copilot combined with agents becomes a solution to orchestrate the entire process and further streamline the process while increasing quality. Kinsella summarized that it starts by "helping people become better at what they do."

AI's Democratization Trajectory

Leslie Shannon of Nokia drew a prescient parallel between AI's evolution and the historical democratization of electricity. Shannon projected AI's trajectory from centralized systems to ubiquitous integration, envisioning a future where AI is embedded in "absolutely everything," potentially rendering life "unrecognizable 10 years from now."

Shannon also commented that most organizations are still learning how to best employ the technology. She referenced the story about San Jose, California, and its first implementation of street lighting. The city created one “moonlight tower” that served as a single source of lighting at night.

Shannon also commented that most organizations are still learning how to best employ the technology. She referenced the story about San Jose, California, and its first implementation of street lighting. The city created one “moonlight tower” that served as a single source of lighting at night.

AI for Everyday Consumers

Resha Sidhu of Snapchat talked about the company’s success with Snap Spectacles. Now in their fifth generation, the augmented reality smartglasses are designed to fuse the physical and digital worlds. The first two generations were extremely popular, in part because they focused on a narrow benefit: enabling users to capture pictures and instantly share them with friends more easily.

That success led Snap to understand what consumers wanted from AI-enabled AR and where to add features over time. The critical point was that solving a simple problem led to insights about user behavior and adoption patterns, what was valued, and where the capabilities could be enhanced. The same lesson applies to enterprises. Experimentation with a narrow set of use cases and benefits accelerates adoption and an understanding of where additional value can be added.

Strategic Implications for Industry Leaders

1. AI as Innovation Catalyst: Resha Sidhu (Snapchat) emphasized AI's role in exponentially boosting human ingenuity and innovation across sectors. Learn by doing.
2. Productivity Paradigm Shift: Bret Kinsella (TELUS Digital’s Fuel iX) highlighted AI's capacity to elevate both individual and organizational productivity baselines, with far-reaching societal implications.
3. Ubiquitous AI Integration: Leslie Shannon (Nokia) projected AI's democratization path, paralleling electricity's historical trajectory and forecasting pervasive integration within a decade.
4. Human Augmentation: Jon Vlassopulos (Napster) posited AI's potential to create "supercharged humans," enhancing experiences, connectivity, and creative output.
5. Inclusive AI Development: Ani Chahal Honan (Yunity/Imagine) advocated for collaborative and inclusive AI development, ensuring diverse voices shape AI's evolution for universal benefit.

AI is at the front end of a thirty-year adoption cycle. At the CES 2025 AI House, we started to see the path that will transform the enthusiasm for new technology into a set of capabilities that augment a wide variety of organizations.