CES 2026 Smart Home Trends! Spatial Awareness Takes Over
I spent part of my week at CES 2026—thanks to Aqara for inviting me to spend time at their booth, highlight the Aqara Forum, and preview the upcoming Aqara Studio. I also made some new friends. Aqara’s team is awesome.
CES is overwhelming with so many brands and products. But as I walked the floor, a few clear patterns kept showing up, so I’m going to highlight those instead of focusing on specific stand-out products.
Here are five themes that stood out across the smart home space this year.
1. Outdoor Living Is Going Smart
There’s a noticeable push toward connected outdoor spaces: entertainment, lighting, pool systems, lawn and pool robots, and more. I’m still waiting for a truly compelling, mainstream smart low-voltage landscape lighting solution, but it’s clearly an area of growing focus.
Also: smart bird feeders were everywhere. Apparently one of the most gifted tech products of 2025.
I didn’t get one.
2. Spatial Awareness & “Invisible” Smart Homes
The goal is clear: less interaction, more automation.
Aqara leaned into this with presence sensors (FP400), the W200 thermostat with built in mmWave, the S100 switch, and the UWB-based U400 lock.
But this wasn’t just Aqara. XThings/UltraLoq highlighted upcoming UWB locks, Hue introduced spatial-aware lighting, and mmWave is being integrated into sensors and devices by many providers.
The common message: smart homes will learn where you are and respond automatically.
3. Robots Everywhere (and Why Local Control Matters)
Robot vacuums, mowers, pool cleaners - you name it. Some humanoid-style robots looked impressive, but fell short when they stopped mid-demo due to network issues. I don’t know how much of that intelligence lives on the robot versus in the cloud, or how much of this was early prototype behavior, but it highlighted something important.
It was a good reminder that as robots get more capable, local intelligence matters more than ever both for reliability and privacy… but there are limitations.
4. AI Is Real—But Often Cloud-Based
AI was everywhere, and this year it felt practical rather than hype. AI Lighting, AI Climate, AI Art, AI Cameras, AI Robots (review part 3).
Some brands emphasized local AI processing via hubs, while others leaned into cloud-based systems and subscriptions. Several companies admitted that fully local AI still struggles to scale, which limits what’s possible today. As we’ve seen from the foundational technologies for AI, it’s compute heavy and expensive, which favors cloud - hence the building of “AI Factories.”
The trade-off between capability, privacy, and reliability is becoming more visible.
5. The Fight for Your Smart Home
Matter adoption continues to grow, which is great for consumer and manufacturers, BUT the openness creates opportunities for brands to control the experience. And many brands are building tightly integrated ecosystems designed to keep you inside their platform.
That isn’t inherently bad. Many people prefer the simplicity of sticking with one brand. Others want flexibility and interoperability. But AI is accelerating this trend, because advanced features often rely on cloud services, subscriptions, and data that doesn’t move easily between ecosystems.
You can see this in how TP-Link is positioning Tapo as a platform, not just a collection of devices.
Ring continues to expand beyond cameras into sensors and switches while remaining largely closed, with more emphasis on launching their own App Store for partners than on Matter. Brands like LifeSmart are intentionally targeting full-home ownership in the luxury space.
Aqara seems to sit in the middle, offering the widest reaching approach, pushing deeper automations with Aqara Studio while still supporting Matter through hub-based controllers and bridges.
Final Thought
CES 2026 made it clear: companies aren’t just selling devices anymore, they’re competing to become the foundation of your home.
Curious what others noticed this year…especially around Matter, presence detection, and local vs cloud AI.
