“Humanoid robots danced, boxed, and folded laundry. Zoox shuttled attendees in driverless robotaxis. Quadrupeds traversed fake, rugged terrain. The show floor was literally a parade of moving devices.”
Dave Copps
CEO and Co-Founder
Worlds
… on the physical AI takeover at CES 2026, via LinkedIn.
Physical AI dominated CES 2026—and Dallas entrepreneur Dave Copps had a front-row seat.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang set the tone early, Copps said, declaring “The ChatGPT moment for robotics is here.” TechCrunch also noted the theme, calling the Las Vegas showcase a parade of robotics—from Boston Dynamics‘ redesigned Atlas humanoid to AI-powered ice makers—and reporting, “After years of chatbots and image generators, AI is finally leaving the screen.”
Worlds CEO Dave Copps
The CEO of Worlds, a Dallas-based company building spatial intelligence infrastructure for industrial operations, spent the week watching it all unfold.
Copps saw the evidence everywhere he looked. But he came away thinking less about the robots themselves and more about what makes them actually work.
“The focus on physical AI at CES was definitely device-centric, but here’s the thing about devices: they’re only as intelligent as the environments they operate in,” Copps wrote on LinkedIn. “The bigger game is connecting those devices intelligently and in real time.”
Every robot navigating a factory floor, every autonomous vehicle reading a roadway, every system making real-time decisions—they all depend on what Copps calls spatial intelligence: “The ability to fuse sensor data, understand physical context, and transform raw signals into actionable awareness.”
It’s a distinction that separates “impressive device demos from operational reality,” he wrote. It’s also the “why” behind his company.
The serial entrepreneur launched Worlds out of stealth in early 2020 with a $10 million Series A. The company—which Copps says delivers AI for the real world, in real time—builds platforms that connect existing cameras and sensors across industrial environments like refineries, manufacturing floors, and critical infrastructure, transforming signals into live spatial data. Worlds says it can train AIs “100X faster than anything else on the market.”
“The robots will keep getting better. The AVs will keep advancing,” Copps said. “But the enterprises that win will be the ones who make their environments intelligent first.”
CES 2026 ran January 6–9 in Las Vegas, with Media Days and CES Unveiled beginning January 4.
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