CES 2026: Day One Highlights Including Lego

Announcements and unveilings at CES are tables takes for a brand that’s meaningfully participating. Now whether these cause desired commotion and interest is another story. Overall, what we are seeing so far is about systems, collaboration, and how technology is quietly reshaping how we work, create, and play.

Siemens is partnering with NVIDIA to build an Industrial AI Operating System and launch the Digital Twin Composer. This isn’t flashy consumer tech…it’s the invisible infrastructure that will power factories, cities, and supply chains. The kind of innovation most people never see, but everyone feels.

“Together, we are building the Industrial AI operating system — redefining how the physical world is designed, built and run — to scale AI and create real-world impact,” said Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG.

“By combining NVIDIA’s leadership in accelerated computing and AI platforms with Siemens’ leading hardware, software, industrial AI and data, we’re empowering customers to develop products faster with the most comprehensive digital twins, adapt production in real time and accelerate technologies from chips to AI factories.”

“Generative AI and accelerated computing have ignited a new industrial revolution, transforming digital twins from passive simulations into the active intelligence of the physical world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.”

On the agency side, Havas announced AVA, an AI platform designed to help teams move from brief to breakthrough faster. That phrasing matters. The real opportunity with AI isn’t replacing creativity and it’s removing friction so ideas can move. This is much more about the future of work at agencies and poses deeper questions for me like how future marketers will be able to create and collaborate while understanding both the process and the richness of what has come before so we do not have “generative” efforts but standalone work product.

However, having worked at a firm that worked on its own version, it’s hardly groundbreaking “news”.

Disruption is possible at CES, just ask Lego…

They didn’t just unveil a new brick — they introduced the SMART Brick, embedded with sensors, sound, motion, and light. The signal? Play is no longer static. It’s responsive. Experiential. Alive. And it meets kids where digital and physical worlds already overlap.

But is it all fun and games or are we then rewiring children’s creative adaptability in the process?

“…Josh Golin, executive director of children's wellbeing group Fairplay, believes Smart Bricks could "undermine what was once great about Legos" - harnessing children's own imagination during play. He said the toy did not require extra features to generate sounds or other effects. "As anyone who has ever watched a child play with old-school Legos knows, children's Lego creations already do move and make noises through the power of children's imaginations," he told the BBC. " Andrew Manches, professor of children and technology at the University of Edinburgh, agreed the beauty of Lego lay in "the freedom to create, re-create, and adapt simple blocks into endless stories powered by children's imagination".

I can’t recall when a “traditional” toymaker made such a splash at CES and so I’m looking forward to any brands that might join them this week.