At CES 2026, the most important conversations about AI were not about speed or scale, but about trust, responsibility, and keeping humans at the center of marketing.
What was most fulfilling about CES 2025 to 2026 was getting to see a lot of technology come to fruition, especially when it solved real human needs. Like cleaning the toilet. Now that is a robot I would buy.
Somewhere between keynotes and the show floor, a more important conversation was emerging. One that marketers should be paying closer attention to.
Not: ‘What can AI do?’ But: “Why are we using it in the first place?”
Because if AI is the answer, we need to be much clearer on the question.
There’s a common assumption in our industry that if you give people powerful tools, transformation will naturally follow. In reality, it rarely works that way.
As Jamie Seltzer, global chief data and technology officer at Havas Media Network, put it during CES: “Change is hard. As humans, it’s difficult for us to change behaviors and the ways we work.”
That reality shows up quickly inside organizations. When AI is introduced without context, education, or clear use cases, adoption is limited to a small group of enthusiasts. That isn’t transformation. That’s experimentation.
“We figured out that if you just put AI in people’s hands, you get only a subset of people who want to actively engage with it,” Seltzer explained. “You need multiple approaches to incentivize and engage different types of people in different roles.”
At Havas, that insight fundamentally changed our approach.
AI adoption starts with education, not access. Tools only create value when people understand how, when, and why to use them.
That’s why we made AI literacy a leadership mandate. Every global leader was required to complete AI training, not as a nice-to-have, but as a prerequisite to leading teams through change.
As Seltzer noted: “We need to make sure this is not just bottom-up. Leadership has to foster the change and really understand what we need to be doing.”
This thinking led to the launch of AVA, our global LLM portal. AVA provides secure, centralized access to leading AI models while protecting data, privacy, and intellectual property. More importantly, it removes friction so teams can focus on judgment, creativity, and problem-solving rather than chasing tools.
One of the most persistent myths about AI in marketing is that its greatest value lies in efficiency.
Yes, AI can save time. But time saved does not automatically translate into better outcomes.
“We have focused less on efficiency and more on effectiveness,” Seltzer said. “The goal is doing our job better and delivering better outcomes for clients.”
In media, planners have always built rich audience insights through deep research. Historically, those insights were then reduced at the point of activation because buying environments could only accommodate a narrow slice of that intelligence.
By applying AI within our Converged.AI operating framework, Havas has been able to close that gap. Audience insights now flow directly into activation at scale, preserving fidelity from strategy through execution.
“By leveraging proprietary LLMs and algorithms, we are now able to ensure audience fidelity from insights all the way through to activation,” Seltzer explained. “We are seeing exponentially better results in ROI, return on ad spend, and basket size for clients.”
That shift does more than improve performance. It validates the work of intelligence teams and reconnects strategy and execution in a way our industry has long struggled to achieve.
That’s not efficiency. That’s effectiveness.
While marketers push forward with AI adoption, consumers are watching with a mix of curiosity and concern.
Ben Downing, global managing director of sustainability and digital at Havas Media Network, shared insights from Havas’ Meaningful Brands global study, which has tracked consumer attitudes toward brands and technology across markets for nearly two decades.
The findings reveal a clear tension. While many consumers believe technology creates exciting possibilities, a significant portion worry it does more harm than good. Most notably, a strong majority believes society should regulate AI to address ethical concerns.
“Consumers want agency,” Downing said. “They want transparency. They want the ability to make their own decisions, and they want control.”
That desire for control matters deeply for marketers. Trust is not built through novelty. It’s built through clarity, choice, and intentional use.
As Downing noted during CES discussions: “There’s concern around regulation and legislation. Consumers are excited about AI, but trust remains fragile.”
Responsible AI, then, is not a communications strategy. It’s a trust strategy.
Nowhere is intentionality more important than sustainability.
AI has enormous potential to help businesses operate more efficiently, reduce waste, and accelerate decarbonization. At the same time, its energy demands, particularly from generative AI, are growing rapidly.
This creates a paradox. AI can help solve sustainability challenges, but only if it’s deployed thoughtfully.
Panelists at CES emphasized that much of the value AI delivers today still comes from classic applications such as optimization, anomaly detection, and recommendation systems, rather than from highly resource-intensive generative models.
As Downing highlighted, sustainability starts with intent. Using AI simply because it’s powerful is not enough. The real responsibility lies in matching the right tool to the right problem and understanding the environmental cost of those choices.
One message came through clearly at CES. Organizations cannot simply layer AI onto existing ways of working and expect meaningful change.
“Change is hard, and it is going to take ten times longer than you think to change an organization,” Seltzer said. “Human behavior does not naturally lend itself to that.”
True transformation requires rethinking processes from the ground up, with equal attention to mindset, capability, and leadership. It requires supporting managers as they navigate uncertainty and helping teams understand not just how work is changing, but why.
As Downing observed, AI is already embedded in everyday life, from fitness trackers to recommendation engines to automated customer service. “It is baked into every moment,” he noted. “Our definition of what AI is has already shifted.”
The challenge for marketers is to ensure AI enhances human judgment and creativity rather than replacing it.
For more insights from CES 2026 and Havas’ perspective on the intersection of creativity, media, and technology, visit: http://www.havassuperstream.com.
