Q&A: CES 2025 & the role of specialist tech media in educating consumers about AI-powered future

Last week, Future showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in full force with over 40 editorial team members from specialist media brands like Tom’s Guide, TechRadar, Laptop Mag and more covering all of the excitement and innovation happening on the show floor.?

For the latest article of our LinkedIn AI series, we sat down with Paul Newman , Managing Director of Tech at Future to learn more about his top takeaways from the show, Future’s ongoing efforts to understand how everyday consumers perceive AI – from the benefits they seek to the barriers they face – and the role of technology news media in informing consumers about it all in the year ahead.?

Q: Year after year, what brings Future’s tech brands back to CES?

At Future, we talk about creating content that connects. What that means is that we serve as a conduit between an industry or a specific hobby and the end-user, helping our readers make sense of changes and developments so they have a clear understanding of what matters most to them. In turn, this enables our commercial partners to land sometimes quite complicated messages in a way that resonates with their target customers. CES is an essential forum for enabling that process in the world of technology, so we’re primarily there to discover what will drive the industry forward in the next year and beyond, to sculpt our editorial content more effectively, and also get a pulse check from brands and our commercial partners so we understand where their priorities lie.

Q: AI was once again a hot topic at CES. To what extent are you seeing your audiences across Future’s tech portfolio embrace or seek out the topic?

When you address over 100 million people per month across platforms, including our popular brand social channels, you will find a small nucleus of “power users” who understand AI and expect new features. But there’s a much larger cohort of everyday folk that perhaps lack all of the technical knowledge and context and may still be unsure about AI. We did a major piece of research last year that showed AI functionality was ninth on a list of considerations for tech consumers in general when considering a product purchase and only seventh for tech geeks. What unites them both is they expect a rich and intuitive user experience – 64% of the people we surveyed agreed with the statement “I don’t care about whether something is AI, but I am interested in things that improve my daily life.”. We do have some updated research coming very soon and these attitudes will inevitably shift – the question is by how much! Watch this space…?

Q: What are your thoughts on what specialist media brands can better do to educate consumers about how AI fits into their daily life? What is Future Tech’s approach??

For me at least our role is to separate the signal from the noise – sometimes that can be about pinpointing the best of what AI can do and helping our users to discover that, other times it can be about breaking down complicated technologies and messages from industry participants to help consumers better relate to them. AI has rapidly become a catch-all term and it means many different things to many different people in many different contexts – it’s almost becoming an unhelpful label in that regard. So our role is to remain focused on the way AI can really make a difference in the daily lives of our readers rather than to encourage them to embrace ‘AI everything’ for the sake of it.

Q: What is your big focus as Managing Director of Future Tech in 2025? What can we expect to see from an editorial perspective??

I always think that goal number one is to stay relevant when you exist at the sharp end of the convergence between media and Technology – the market moves fast and consumer expectations are a force multiplier. Our focus this year is very much about evolution and diversification in both the editorial products we offer readers and the way technology can shape that experience. For example, I’m very excited about our new newsletter, The Re|set, that we are currently in soft launch mode on – it’s the brainchild of TechRadar’s Lance Ulanoff and Adriana Toma Rabunski and a completely new touchpoint with our readers. I’m also looking forward to making some big leaps forward in terms of how we use AI on our portfolio of websites, but I can’t say too much more on that right now!

Q: Tell us a bit more about how AI and editorial content can co-exist, not at the expense of the latter?

The important thing to say upfront is that we do not use generative AI to create content at Future. In fact, we have policies in place to ensure that can’t happen. No serious, well-run media business believes that AI is a substitute for trusted editorial content based on authentic human expertise - that requires a very limited imagination. We see AI as an enabler, a keystone technology that can be integrated into every stage of the publishing workflow. This can mean anything from AI functioning as an editorial co-pilot in our CMS that helps our writers and editors work more efficiently to customer-facing functionality like chat bots and other tools that improve the on-site experience.

Q: Were there any new AI-enabled gadgets or products you came across on the show floor that you were particularly impressed or surprised by?

I am absolutely fascinated by the innovation happening across environmental and agricultural tech and how it is developing. We talk a lot about AI, but this is a flagship example of how AI can really transform the world we live in and help solve complex problems – that’s really important to counter viewpoints that see AI as misanthropic and dystopian.

Q: If you could describe your key takeaways from CES using only three words, what would they be?

Personalization. Reinvention. Acceleration.

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Visit Future's leading technology media brands such as Tom's Guide, TechRadar and more for 'Best of CES 2025' roundups, product reviews and insights unpacking the event.

?? Tom's Guide - https://lnkd.in/ektyGu4b

?? TechRadar - https://lnkd.in/exmjd7QS

?? Laptop Mag - https://lnkd.in/ewG-hcHP

?? Tom's Hardware - https://lnkd.in/eP_sBxCz