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CES is an annual trade show owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association. At CES each January, thousands of companies convene in Las Vegas to show off the latest and greatest technology to an audience of well over 100,000 media, buyers, investors, and innovators. Some of our attendees come with plans for partnership or acquisition. Others simply come to be inspired. It's the proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators. It's where brands get business done and meet new partners, and where industry's sharpest minds take the stage to unveil their latest releases and boldest breakthroughs. While I've worked with CTA and CES in various capacities for more than forty years—including more than thirty as CEO—the show has a long and storied history that predates even me.

The first CES was held in New York City in 1967. It had 17,500 attendees, just a fraction of the more than 138,000 who traveled to CES 2024. It's a huge physical event, with exhibits sprawling across millions of square feet of space. In 2024, exhibits covered more than 2.5 million net square feet—an area larger than forty-three American football fields, or the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, and Buckingham Palace combined. It also delivers a massive boost to the Las Vegas economy, with an estimated economic impact of some $300 million each year as attendees flock to hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues.

In July 2020, I announced a pivot to our first all-digital CES show, a full seven months before the event. At that point, COVID cases were surging, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had just testified that the US could see as many as 100,000 new cases of COVID a day. The US was two months into "Operation Warp Speed," a federal public-private partnership to speed up vaccine development, and while Moderna was just about to announce promising results in its early-stage trials, widely available vaccines were still many months away.

Leaning on advice from medical advisers, the physicians on our board, and my wife, Mal, it had long been clear to me and the CTA executive board who approved the decision that we could not responsibly host CES 2021 as an in-person event. We wanted to give our exhibitors and attendees as much time as possible to adjust. After all, CES isn't built in a day. (For those less familiar with the trade show world, the planning and execution of the big brand showcases—and even the smaller-scale booths hosted by smaller companies—happen many months in advance.) Despite what we felt was both a responsible and practical decision, we immediately faced questions and even criticism from other event producers who thought our pivot was premature. But we stayed steadfast in our plans.

To put this in perspective, canceling the physical presence of CES 2021—which also meant investing in an all-digital presence for the show that year and creating a fair refund policy for companies that had already committed to physical exhibit space—cost CTA millions of dollars in expenses and in lost revenue. It meant forgoing an opportunity to bring together thousands of exhibitors, members of the media, and executives from around the globe. It was not a decision I took lightly.

What's more, the huge drop in revenue meant that CTA had to cut expenses. Along with so many other CEOs at that time, I had to make an extremely difficult and painful decision—to lay off employees. In one terrible day, we lost 10 percent of our staff.

At the same time, we were focused on pivoting to reinvent CES as the world's premier digital innovation event. At that point, a digital event of that size was unprecedented. We had no idea how the exhibitors we worked with would react. We had no idea whether a digital CES would, or could, have the same impact. Would people show up? If they did, would they find that the wonder and serendipity of CES translated to a virtual platform?

Planning CES 2021 required a totally reimagined experience. We had to create an event that let exhibitors, media, thought leaders, and executives connect in ways that were both safe and meaningful. We knew we couldn't re-create the beauty and magic of Las Vegas or the five-sense experience that comes from being on the show floor. We were painfully aware of the hit to the Las Vegas economy when the show moved online—estimated at nearly $300 million. But we saw it as an opportunity to do something that had never been done before.

We had to pivot, as a team, from producing the world's biggest physical business event to creating the world's coolest online digital event. More, we had to do it quickly and present an experience consistent with the CES brand. After soldiering through crises at previous CES shows, our team was confident that we could handle anything. But our Las Vegas expertise revolved around floor space, hanging signs, union labor, busing, and the many other logistical questions and quandaries that go into producing the massive physical CES. This was different.

Karen Chupka, then our CES show lead, had an inspired idea: along with the move to an all-digital show, we could shift the show a week later without causing any problems with hotel or convention center arrangements or travel plans. In January 2021, our CES audience was at home anyway, and the shift bought us extra time to explore the possibilities of a purely digital platform.

That decision proved prescient, given the challenge of finding a platform to host the first all-digital CES in our history. Even before the pandemic, we'd seen dozens of demos from software and digital platform vendors, pitching us on the idea of taking CES digital. But in the prepandemic world, we were skeptical that our executive audience wanted to create avatars and explore virtual exhibits.

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***** TABLE OF CONTENTS *****

INTRODUCTION

1. What Is Pivoting?

2. Pivotal Shifts in the Tech Industry

3. The Startup Pivot

4. The Forced Pivot

5. The Failure Pivot

6. The Success Pivot

7. The Emerging Technologies Reshaping Our World

8. How the US Must Pivot

9. The Personal Pivot

Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here?