The Weekender – 6PR Radio – Consumer Electronic Show
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
The Consumer Electronics Show is less a product showcase and more a signal landscape. Each year’s exhibit floor maps the direction of investment, the convergence of previously separate technologies, and the problems industry believes consumers will accept solutions for. What’s missing from CES is often as revealing as what’s present — gaps in the showcase typically mark categories where market uncertainty remains highest.
The most useful question isn’t ‘should I buy this?’ but ‘what human behaviour does this assume?’ Consumer electronics that succeed long-term usually solve an existing frustration so well that the device disappears into routine. Those that fail typically add a new friction in place of an old one. Watching which products actually stick after the announcement cycle ends is more instructive than any launch event.
Connectivity creates convenience and dependency simultaneously. Every device that learns your patterns and automates a task also creates a point of failure, a privacy exposure, and a dependency that’s hard to reverse. Most consumers don’t make that trade-off consciously. Understanding what you’re exchanging for the convenience — not to refuse it, but to choose it with eyes open — is basic preparation for the connected world.
Consumer electronics are downstream of cultural shifts, not upstream of them. Remote work accelerated demand for home office technology. The attention economy drove wearable growth. The desire for health visibility is now reshaping personal devices in ways fitness trackers only partially anticipated. What people buy reflects what they value and fear — the electronics aisle is a surprisingly reliable cultural barometer.
The category worth watching is ambient computing — technology that operates without requiring active engagement. Not screens you look at, but environments that respond. This includes spatial audio, environmental sensors, and AI that infers context without explicit instruction. When computing becomes invisible rather than interactive, the questions of consent, control, and trust become far more complex for consumers and regulators alike.
