There’s no I in team, but there’s B2B in CES. Despite its name once standing for “Consumer Electronics Show,” CES is very much about businesses doing business with each other, both during the event and all year round.
It’s not just about all the networking that happens in Las Vegas between its more than 138,000 attendees, or the fact that cars are also a huge part of the show; B2B companies, too, see value in attending the gigantic fair.
“About 75% of attendees say their business is primarily B2B, or both B2B and B2C. We struggle with the name. Some people call it the Consumer Electronics Show, but it’s just CES. There’s so much there that’s B2B,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the parent organization of CES, in a recent interview.
For instance, the French Tech delegation that traveled to Nevada this year includes Kumulus Water, a company that aims to provide hotels, offices and off-grid sites with atmospheric water generators that transform air into drinking water. In other words, a B2B startup. And of course, what’s true of startups is also true of big companies in this regard.
Nvidia in the spotlight
Nvidia is a good example of this; its CEO, Jensen Huang, gave one of the most anticipated keynotes of the event. While the company has a strong presence in consumer tech, particularly in gaming, it’s the rapid growth of its B2B segments, particularly in data centers and AI, that made it a market darling. But it’s not just one or the other; “Nvidia is pioneering breakthroughs in AI and accelerated computing that touch nearly every person and every business,” Shapiro highlighted when introducing the keynote.
In the Q&A session that followed his presentation on CES Tech Trends during the FDDay 2024 last June, CTA’s futurist, Brian Comiskey, had mentioned that both robotics and AI had a role to play in automating logistics. As the sector faces a productivity gap, “there’s usually going to be a robotic [or otherwise] automated process that can help work alongside human workers,” he predicted. Mega, a fleet manager for warehouse robots that Nvidia detailed during CES 2025, fits right into that trend, and has already been adopted by German supply chain firm, Kion Group.
It’s to cover these kind of announcements that more than 5,000 journalists attended CES last year. Whether they are talking to the media, other businesses or consumers, CES participants are in for a busy schedule. “The statistic we’ve used before is that the average attendee has about 29 meetings during the show,” Shapiro told VentureBeat.