Big Tech Kicks off 2026 With AI Product Updates and Releases

Meta Enhances the Smart-Glasses Frontier

At CES 2026, Meta doubled down on its smart-glasses strategy with new Ray-Ban Display enhancements that push the boundaries of hands-free interaction and augmented experiences for users and developers.

Meta introduced a surface electromyography (sEMG) handwriting feature that uses the Meta Neural Band, a wrist device to capture muscle signals and convert them into text, letting wearers “write” on any flat surface without phones or keyboards. This eases long-standing UX challenges for augmented reality (AR) wearables and hints at a future where neural and gesture inputs become primary interaction modes.

Meta also unveiled a teleprompter feature: Users can upload notes to the glasses and navigate through them using the Neural Band. Additionally, beta expansion of pedestrian navigation in new cities reflects a new development in location-aware augmented reality use cases.

These moves come even as Meta faces supply-driven slowdowns in global Ray-Ban Display rollouts, underscoring the complexities of scaling hardware. Despite the device’s strong reception in its initial U.S. market, international expansion has been delayed as demand outstrips supply, emphasizing the tension between innovation and logistics.

Microsoft Looks to Transform Data Engineering

Microsoft this week announced its acquisition of Osmos, an AI-driven data engineering platform built to automate complex data preparation and engineering flows. The acquisition will fold Osmos’ capabilities into Microsoft Fabric, the company’s unified analytics platform centered on the OneLake data repository.

According to Microsoft, Osmos’ autonomous agents can turn raw data into analytics-ready assets, reducing manual labor and accelerating insights, a key competitive advantage as organizations grapple with growing data volumes and scarcity of skilled engineers.

Microsoft’s hurdle now is integrating agentic workflows into the broader Fabric ecosystem such that autonomy improves reliability and governance without sacrificing compliance, a perennial concern for enterprise adoption.

Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind Raise the Bar

At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind announced a new AI partnership to equip humanoid robots with advanced foundational AI capabilities. The collaboration will use DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics foundation models, multimodal AI systems designed for perception, reasoning and tool use with Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robots. The goal is to create robots that can perform a wide variety of industrial tasks, particularly in complex manufacturing environments.

This partnership is significant because it combines physical robotics with AI cognition, an example of embodied intelligence where AI systems not only reason but act in the physical world. For the robotics industry, this could accelerate use cases that have remained aspirational, such as assisting humans in dynamic factory floors or hazardous environments. DeepMind’s work on scalable, safe models aims to ensure that as robots gain capabilities, they also meet operational reliability and safety standards critical for real-world deployment.

As competitors like Tesla and Agility Robotics push robotics, this collaboration highlights the growing premium on AI that can navigate, manipulate and make decisions in physical contexts.

Amazon Expands Alexa+ Ecosystem

Rounding out the week, Amazon revealed expanded integrations for Alexa+ at CES, extending the voice assistant’s reach into Samsung smart TVs, BMW vehicles, Bosch appliances and health devices like Oura rings. These integrations aim to unify voice, entertainment, health and mobility experiences under a single conversational interface.

In BMW cars, for example, Alexa Custom Assistant, powered by Alexa+, delivers natural language control of vehicle functions and access to navigation and media without rigid command structures. Samsung TV owners will benefit from voice-driven content discovery and smart-home control directly through Alexa. Bosch coffee machines will respond to conversational prompts, and health integrations can bring personalized insights and routines into everyday life.

Amazon’s strategy points to voice as a connective tissue across devices and contexts—home, mobile, car and wearables—and highlights how AI assistants are evolving beyond standalone utilities toward central nodes in multi-device ecosystems.