Among the 130,000 people wandering this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it’s likely a good number of them plan meetings and events.
And it’s not a stretch to believe that what they’ve seen firsthand might lead to industry-wide unease about what could happen to the in-person event experience in the next few years.
In fact, business events might become somewhat less “in-person.”
[Related: Las Vegas C.C. Finishes Five-Year, $600 Million Renovation Ahead of CES]
This year, many of the 4,000 exhibiting companies at CES were focused on integrating AI into the physical world. For the meetings and hospitality industries, there are various robotic applications designed for the back of the house. But also on display were robots designed to do complex physical work, and others designed specifically to interact with, educate and entertain humans.
For back of house, the new offerings include LG's CLOiD, which can fold laundry and unload dishwashers, and the Allergen Alert Mini Lab that can quickly test food for allergens and gluten. There’s also the Atlas humanoid by Boston Dynamics, which can lift as much as 110 pounds and move it across a room or even farther, like from a loading dock. Hyundai Motor Group’s MobED is another such humanoid worker shown at CES; it’s able to deliver goods across considerable distance.
Robots Even in Front of House
The humanoid revolution is not confined to where only hotel employees or planning team members would see these robots. In addition to the Atlas and MobED products, which could soon be used to deliver items to guest rooms, CES 2026 displayed several other applications designed specifically for the front of the house.
In other words, robots designed for extended personal interaction with attendees and guests.
These include LG’s CLOiD, which can also act as a butler to deliver food and drinks. And then there is the Unitree Robotics G1 model, a 4-foot-tall, 77-pound humanoid robot that’s "AI avatar" trained through reinforcement learning and simulations. The base model is $16,000, while the high-end model with deep customization abilities is about $68,000.
On the CES show floor, the G1 was used to entertain those who came to the Unitree exhibit by doing the Texas Two-Step to country music. And the G1 has recently been used on the streets of Austin, Texas, as an entertainer that wears a cowboy hat, silver chain and Nike sneakers, and possesses a strong grasp of formal English as well as the slang of Gen Z.
The Dawn of ‘Booth Humanoids?’
Other possible robot applications might be more ominous for those in the meetings and events business. For instance, it could be just a few years before some companies’ trade-show booths are managed by a single human alongside several robot humanoids that act as company ambassadors, able to demonstrate product features, answer attendees’ questions and even have broader conversations.
Think that’s most unlikely? Don’t be so sure. During his keynote speech at CES 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that "The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here, where machines begin to understand, reason and act in the real world."
