Hemant Taneja, Bob Sternfels: Why AI will dwarf every tech revolution before it: robots, manufacturing, AR glasses from CES 2026

The session opens at CES 2026 with a broad claim: AI is the most important theme of the show and will be "the most important transformation of our lifetimes." The opening argument is comparative. The speaker lists the technology waves of the past 30 years (the PC, cloud computing, the internet, mobile) and says all of them will be "dwarfed in comparison to the impact that AI is going to have on society." The evidence offered at this point is the show floor itself: gadgets, chip launches and self-driving systems.

An introductory video presents the two guests. McKinsey is described as one of the largest and most influential consulting firms in the world, with work spanning boardrooms and the White House and a stated interest in bringing private-sector insights to government efficiency and national defense. General Catalyst is introduced as a venture capital firm with "40 billion assets" under management as of mid-year, whose stated aspiration is "to be the best seed firm in the world."

The conversation also uses CES as a signal of momentum. After the pause during COVID, the speaker recalls that people in Silicon Valley wondered whether CES was still relevant. Now it is described as "one of the largest ones ever," with leaders from AMD, Nvidia, Uber, Nuro and Waymo present. One panelist later puts attendance at "over 150,000 folks" for the week and argues that the value of such a gathering is that people from different perspectives meet, which is where new ideas come from. The same panelist notes that attendees now come from nearly every industry, because technology "doesn't sit on the side. It's central to everything we do."

The first question asks the guests to compare the roughly two years since ChatGPT launched with the previous 30 years of their careers. One answer is blunt: the change is "night and day," almost a before-and-after moment. The practical consequence, in this panelist's account, is that CEOs now ask one question above others: how to get their organizations moving faster.

I think we're moving at literally warp speed now.

It's quite frankly, less about strategy. It's more about organizational speed.

The second answer frames the moment as uncertainty layered on uncertainty. "We've often said this is peak ambiguity," the panelist says, pointing to large geopolitical change, countries pursuing strategic autonomy in different industries, and shifting alliances. Under all of that, the technology used to implement change keeps moving too: what can be built today differs fundamentally from what language models could do two years ago or around the late-2022 arrival of ChatGPT. That creates two design problems for a company. It must decide what future world it is building toward so its value lasts, and it must choose tools that will not become obsolete and undercut its value proposition over time.

The clearest concrete evidence in this section comes from venture returns. A panelist contrasts two investments. Stripe, backed in 2010, became a roughly $100 billion company about 12 to 13 years later. Anthropic, which the same firm also backed, is described as going from a $60 billion valuation last year to "a couple hundred billion dollars." The panelist insists these are "not pie-in-the-sky" valuations but are based on actual business growth. The explanation offered is a compression of value creation that happens "when code self-rights and access to distributions change." The panelist expects this to accelerate further.

Asked how long it takes companies to reach $100 million or $1 billion in revenue, and noting that OpenAI is said to be trending toward $20 billion a year, the panelist describes Anthropic as having one of the best language models plus a product layer on top that is, in their view, the essence of transforming enterprise engineering departments. They call it "a killer application where everybody is now using these tools."

Figures given for Anthropic in the discussion: - At the time of the investment, the business was doing about $880 million, described as 10x growth over the prior year. - Last year it announced growth of another 10x or more. - The firm invested at a $60 billion valuation, assuming roughly 3x growth from there, and growth instead came in at 10x. - In hindsight, the panelist says the firm invested at "a $8, 9, $10 billion kind of run rate business at $60 billion," calling it "the cheapest deal that got done last year" in venture capital in financial terms.