CES 2025—3 AI innovations marketers need to watch

As conversations at CES inevitably hit on AI, three promising subsets of the technology are garnering the most attention—agentic, on-device and simulation AI. In Las Vegas this week, marketers have been hotly discussing these three emerging forms of AI that could offer new opportunities in the coming year. Agentic AI, which refers to “agents” that autonomously perform tasks, is a particularly compelling topic at CES as brands look for better ways to serve AI to consumers, said Jill Kramer, chief marketing and communications officer at Accenture. Simulation AI is opening new testing environments for brands to play with products and marketing in virtual settings, and on-device AI is embedding the technology in wearables and computers. Ad Age Tech Power List 2025 We’re looking for top digital innovators from agencies, brands, platforms, ad tech companies and tech startups Enter here AI agents Kramer is meeting with CMOs throughout the week to show them firsthand how agentic AI performs with little human supervision and is capable of altering its performance based on the kinds of data a brand feeds into it. The technology is relevant in consumer-facing products and services and within business operations, Kramer said. “This is a moment when you need to deeply understand this technology,” Kramer said. Accenture today launched a suite of 12 such agents, which cover marketing-related tasks such as centralizing different sources of data to provide insights for campaigns, as well as identifying growth opportunities and ways to optimize campaigns. Meanwhile, Salesforce recently debuted its own agent platform. Even though AI agents are currently available and not some far-off advancement, CMOs are unsure what to make of the technology. Kramer expected that top marketers will ask for clarifications in their talks this week, such as whether a brand should buy agents or build their own. CMOs also want to understand whether they should deploy agents sparingly within their organizations or embed them widely across a company’s entire workflow. Another serious consideration is whether to release AI agent as customer-facing applications, internally, or both. Also read: CMOs’ biggest concerns in 2025 Last year saw a major turning point for marketers in their use of AI, using it for national TV ads, as in the case of Coca-Cola, and to significantly cut agency expenses, as in the case of Klarna. This year will undoubtedly feature its own milestones that could come from AI’s newer forms, and those leaps in AI are shaping the technology on display and in discussions at CES this week, which started today and runs through Friday in Las Vegas. On-device intelligence In addition to agentic AI, another such form is on-device AI, which builds on the environmentally adaptive advancements offered by agents, said Cathy Hackl, CEO of tech lab Spatial Dynamics. Remotely connected AI—the standard foundation of AI systems—is limited in its ability to process data that is contextual to the user’s environment, such as details about the physical space they inhabit. This means the ability to personalize content and offer immersive experiences from that AI is also limited. While a user could explain, via keyboard, what is in their environment, much would be lost in this description. On-device AI is exactly how it sounds: AI systems that are built directly into a device. The primary benefit is sudden access to a plethora of new contextual data, Hackl said, and it will become more enticing as AI-powered wearables become more popular. Meta has already teased the future of its AI glasses, and last year saw the birth of a niche industry of AI-powered friends and wearable assistants. For marketers, on-device AI could enhance advertising by collecting more information about users and factoring that data into personalization, Hackl said. The technology could also offer brands more reasons to deploy immersive experiences for consumers within their wearable devices. “AI has to live somewhere, it has to have a container and that container has to become something in which you can engage with AI more and more,” Hackl said. Hackl said on-device AI will feature prominently in conversations at CES, and the technology's presence is already ubiquitous at the tech conference. AI chip-maker Qualcomm is actviating out-of-home placements throughout Las Vegas to promote its on-device products, with the tagline “On-device AI is your AI.” Read Ad Age’s 2025 predictions stories here Simulation services Simulation AI is another form of the technology garnering interest at CES, and it builds on “digital twinning” capabilities that marketers have been honing for several years, said Accenture’s Kramer. Digital twins are virtual representations of real world products and systems. Simulation AI runs data analysis on those digital versions of physical products and processes, Kramer said. One promising application for simulation AI: A brand could test marketing in the virtual world, where AI could play around with digital versions of products and run them through multiple scenarios to gauge how it will perform with consumers in real-world settings. While digital twinning isn’t new, AI is changing the degree to which twins can be manipulated and exploited for insights, said Spatial Dynamics’ Hackl. The benefit is similar to what agencies are finding with synthetic focus groups, in which AI versions of consumers are queried in a way they could never be in real life, Hackl said. The expansive domains that simulation AI can recreate are referred to as “large world models,” Hackl said, a term that AI giants such as Nvidia also use. Similar to large language models, large world models hinge on AI’s ability to not only hoover significant amounts of data, but also act on that data in useful ways. In essence, they are “virtual twins on steroids,” Hackl said.

CES 2025—3 AI innovations marketers need to watch

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