Our friend Daniel sent in a prompt that I've been genuinely looking forward to. He's asking about the top-tier international trade shows — CES, Mobile World Congress, Computex — and what makes them tick. Not the regional meetup with bad coffee and name tags, but the big ones. The ones where companies spend millions on booth real estate and the world's press shows up. His real question is, what's the enduring value? Because there's always pushback that these things are a waste of time and money. But clearly something keeps them going.
Computex is a perfect example. People don't realize the scale. Computex twenty twenty-five in Taipei drew over eighty-five thousand attendees and more than sixteen hundred exhibitors. That's not a conference. That's a city temporarily built inside another city.
Eighty-five thousand people all pretending their feet don't hurt.
And here's what separates these shows from the regular conference circuit — they're not primarily about learning. If you want to learn about a technology, you can read whitepapers, watch keynotes online, listen to podcasts. The value of these shows is something much harder to digitize. It's about signal density.
Explain that one.
The number of consequential business conversations that can happen in seventy-two hours in a single building. At Mobile World Congress twenty twenty-six in Barcelona, the GSMA reported over a hundred and nine thousand attendees from two hundred and five countries. That's not just scale for scale's sake. That's every relevant player in mobile telecom, in one place, for four days. If you are a mid-tier component manufacturer from Shenzhen, where else do you physically stand next to the people who design the chips that go into the phones that go into the pockets of three billion people?
That's the thing Daniel was getting at. If you're not Samsung or NVIDIA, if you're one of the countless ordinary companies that show up, what are you actually doing there? It's not like you're going to wander up to the Apple booth and pitch them your startup.
No, but Apple people are wandering the floor. That's the open secret of these shows. The executives from the big firms don't just stay in their booths. They walk the halls. They have meetings in the back rooms. They send their scouts to the startup pavilions. CES has an entire section called Eureka Park dedicated to startups — over fourteen hundred of them in twenty twenty-six. And the reason that exists is because the big players asked for it.
It's a hunting ground. The gazelles pay for a booth so the lions can browse them conveniently.
That's the slightly predatory version, but yes. The more charitable framing is that it's an efficiency mechanism. The cost of discovering a new technology partner through cold outreach, LinkedIn messages, emails that go nowhere — it's enormous and mostly fails. The cost of sending a team to walk Eureka Park for two days and physically meet fifty potential partners is trivial by comparison. Even if you only find one.
There's also the thing Daniel mentioned about being wary of sharing too much. If you're a smaller company with something novel, you're walking into a room full of competitors with deeper pockets. What's the calculus there?
That's the tension at the heart of these shows. And it's real. I've talked to people who have had their booth photographed extensively by competitors. There are stories of designs being copied within months. But here's the counterbalance — speed to market matters more than secrecy for most companies. If you have something good, you need distribution partners, you need manufacturing partners, you need early customers who will give you feedback before you scale. A trade show compresses all of that into a single event. The risk of exposure is real, but the risk of being invisible is usually worse.
The risk of being invisible. That's the quiet terror of the tech industry, isn't it?
It really is. And these shows are the antidote. There's a reason CES is still drawing over a hundred and forty thousand attendees and more than four thousand exhibitors. It's been running since nineteen sixty-seven. The format has survived the internet, survived video calls, survived a pandemic that temporarily shut down in-person events entirely. That's not inertia. That's revealed preference.
Okay, so let's do the hierarchy thing Daniel asked about. If someone says "top tier international trade show," what's the actual ranking? And specifically for AI, which he mentioned — where do you go if you want to see what's coming?
The hierarchy is real and it's surprisingly stable. At the absolute top, you have CES in Las Vegas in January. Consumer electronics, but that label is almost misleading now — it's really the everything show. Automotive, health tech, AI infrastructure, smart home, chips. If it has a circuit board and a marketing budget, it's at CES.
The everything show. The Costco of conferences.
The Costco that also sets the agenda for the year. CES keynotes set narratives. When NVIDIA's CEO does the CES keynote, the entire tech press writes about it for a week. That's agenda-setting power you can't buy with ads.
What's below CES?
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, usually late February or early March. MWC is more focused — it's telecom infrastructure, mobile devices, network technology. But "focused" doesn't mean small. As I mentioned, over a hundred and nine thousand people in twenty twenty-six. The thing about MWC is that it's where the plumbing of the internet gets decided. 5G standards, spectrum policy, network equipment deals. It's less consumer-facing than CES but arguably more important to how the digital world actually functions.
The plumbing conference.
The plumbers are the ones who keep your toilets from flooding. Show some respect.
What's next?
Computex in Taipei, usually late May or early June. Computex is the silicon show. Taiwan is the global center of semiconductor manufacturing, so Computex is where the chip industry congregates. TSMC, MediaTek, ASUS, Gigabyte — the companies that make the components that make everything else. Computex is less about finished products and more about what's coming at the silicon level.
That's where the eighty-five thousand people came in.
And if you're in AI, Computex has become essential. NVIDIA's CEO gave a keynote there in twenty twenty-four that was basically a roadmap for the entire AI industry. The chip announcements that shape the next two years of AI development happen at Computex.
If CES is the showroom, Computex is the engine room.
That's a clean way to put it. Then you have IFA in Berlin, which is Europe's big consumer electronics show. It's older than CES — started in nineteen twenty-four — and it's where a lot of European brands make their flagship announcements. And then for AI specifically, there's a newer entrant that's risen fast.
What's that?
The AI Summit series, particularly the one in London. But honestly, the AI-specific conference landscape is still shaking out. The funny thing is, the most important AI conversations are happening at the big general shows — CES, Computex, MWC — because AI is no longer a separate category. It's being baked into everything. The automotive hall at CES now has more AI content than a dedicated AI conference did five years ago.
That's the knock-on effect. When a technology becomes infrastructure, the dedicated conference for it starts to lose relevance, because the real action is at the shows where it's being applied.
And that's one of the things that makes these big shows resilient. They're not tied to a single technology cycle. They're platforms. The content changes, the exhibitors rotate, but the convening function persists.
Let's talk about that convening function. You mentioned signal density earlier. What does a productive day at one of these shows actually look like for someone who's not a keynote speaker?
It's highly structured, which is something outsiders don't realize. Nobody productive just shows up and wanders. The people who get value out of CES or MWC have their schedules booked weeks in advance. They've got back-to-back thirty-minute meetings in the private meeting rooms. They've identified which booths they need to visit. They know which parties to attend in the evening — and the parties are not frivolous, by the way. An enormous amount of business gets done at the evening events.
The hallway track at scale.
The hallway track on steroids, with open bars and canapés. And here's a dynamic that's specific to these mega-shows — there's a hierarchy of access. The show floor is the public layer. Anyone with a badge can walk it. Then there are the private meeting rooms, which require an invitation or a pre-arranged appointment. Then there are the executive suites in nearby hotels where the actual deal negotiations happen. And then there are the private dinners and events that don't appear on any official schedule.
You've got four layers of increasing exclusivity. The public floor, the meeting rooms, the hotel suites, the secret dinners. And the value of being there increases as you move up the layers.
Yes, but — and this is key — you can't access the higher layers without being present. You can't get invited to the private dinner if you're not at the show. You can't bump into someone in the hallway and get pulled into a meeting. The physical presence is the entry ticket to the entire stack.
Which is the answer to the "why not just do this on Zoom" question. Zoom gets you the meeting. It doesn't get you the accidental encounter that leads to the meeting that leads to the deal.
The serendipity factor. It's been studied. There's research on this — the value of weak ties in business networks, the importance of unplanned interactions. These shows are serendipity engines. They manufacture accidental encounters at industrial scale.
I like that. It's like a particle collider for business relationships. You smash people together at high speeds and see what new entities emerge.
That's exactly the metaphor. And like a particle collider, the results are probabilistic. Most collisions produce nothing. But the ones that produce something produce something you couldn't have gotten any other way.
Let's go back to the hierarchy for a second. Daniel asked about the top five shows for AI. You gave us CES, MWC, Computex, IFA. What's the fifth?
I'd probably put GITEX in Dubai on that list. GITEX has grown enormously. It used to be a regional show and now it's global. Over a hundred and eighty thousand attendees in twenty twenty-five. It's where a lot of the AI investment and deployment conversations happen for the Middle East, Africa, and Asia markets. If you're a Western company looking for AI deployment partners in those regions, GITEX is where you go.
The geography matters. These shows aren't interchangeable.
Not at all. Each has a regional gravity. CES is North America and global. MWC is European and global, with a strong telecom tilt. Computex is the Asia-Pacific silicon nexus. IFA is European consumer. GITEX is the emerging markets bridge. If you're a company deciding where to exhibit or attend, you're not just picking a show — you're picking a market.
That brings us to cost. What does it actually cost to be at one of these things? Because Daniel mentioned the countless ordinary folk who show up. They're not sending fifty people with a million-dollar booth budget.
The range is enormous. At CES, a basic ten-by-ten booth in Eureka Park might run you a few thousand dollars. A mid-sized booth on the main floor, maybe fifty to a hundred thousand. The big experiential booths — the ones with two-story structures and custom lighting rigs — those can run into the millions. And that's just the floor space. Add booth design, construction, shipping, staffing, travel, hotels. For a major exhibitor, a single CES can be a seven-figure commitment.
For the attendee who's just walking the floor?
A basic CES pass is a few hundred dollars if you register early. But you're also paying for flights to Las Vegas, hotels during peak pricing, meals. For an individual, figure two to three thousand dollars all-in if you're frugal. For a small company sending two or three people, you're looking at ten to fifteen thousand dollars. The question is, is that a good investment?
Depends entirely on preparation. The people who get ten thousand dollars of value out of CES are the ones who did ten thousand dollars of homework before they got on the plane. The people who show up without a plan, wander the floor for two days, collect some swag, and go home — they're the ones who say conferences are a waste of time.
The value is front-loaded. The conference itself is just the execution phase of a process that started months earlier.
You need to have identified who you want to meet. You need to have reached out to them before the show. You need to have confirmed meetings. You need to have a clear objective for each day. The show is the arena, but the strategy is what determines whether you win or lose.
What about the press dynamic? One of the things that makes these top-tier shows different is the media presence. Thousands of journalists show up. That has to be part of the value proposition.
It's a huge part. At CES twenty twenty-six, there were over five thousand media and analyst attendees. That's five thousand people whose job is to tell the world what's interesting. If you're a small company with a novel product, getting coverage from even a handful of those journalists can be transformative. And the journalists are actively looking for stories. They're not there to cover Samsung's slightly better refrigerator. They're hunting for the weird, the novel, the surprising.
There's an alignment of incentives. The journalists need stories, the small companies need coverage, and the big companies need the journalists to show up so the whole ecosystem feels worth covering.
The big companies effectively subsidize the media infrastructure. The massive Samsung and LG booths draw the press. The press then has time to wander and discover the smaller players. It's a weird symbiosis. The giants pay for the party, and the startups get to network at it.
The giants are the venue. Not literally, but functionally. Their presence creates the gravity that makes everything else work.
And that's why these shows are so hard to disrupt. You can't replicate that gravitational pull with a virtual event. You can't replicate it with a smaller regional show. The density of important people and important companies is the product, and it's a product that only a handful of events in the world can deliver.
Let's talk about what's actually being shown. Daniel mentioned that these shows are often where tomorrow's tech gets previewed. How real is that? How much of what gets announced at CES or MWC actually ships?
It varies by show. CES has a reputation for vaporware — concept products that never make it to market. But that reputation is somewhat unfair. A lot of what gets shown at CES does ship, just not always in the form that was demoed. The concept car with the radical new interface might not ship, but the sensor technology in it might end up in a production vehicle two years later.
It's a spectrum. Fully shipping products on one end, pure design fiction on the other, and a lot of things in between that are real technology looking for a product to live in.
Computex is different. Computex is much more about things that are actually going to ship. The chip announcements at Computex translate directly into products you can buy within six to twelve months. MWC is somewhere in between — the network infrastructure announcements are concrete, the device announcements are sometimes aspirational.
For AI specifically? If I want to see what's actually coming in AI, not just what looks good in a demo video?
Computex is probably your best bet, because AI right now is fundamentally a hardware story. The models get all the attention, but the chips are where the real action is. NVIDIA's roadmap, TSMC's process nodes, the memory and interconnect technologies that make training runs possible — that's all Computex territory. For AI software and applications, honestly, the landscape is more fragmented. The major cloud providers have their own events. The AI labs do their own announcements. There isn't yet a single show that dominates AI software the way CES dominates consumer electronics.
It suggests AI is still in a phase where the infrastructure conversation and the application conversation haven't fully merged. The hardware people go to Computex. The software people go to a dozen different places.
That will probably consolidate over time. As AI becomes less of a specialized discipline and more of a horizontal technology that every industry uses, the AI conversation will increasingly happen at the vertical industry shows. The automotive AI people will go to the auto shows. The healthcare AI people will go to the medical conferences. The general AI shows might actually get less relevant, not more.
The infrastructure becomes invisible, and the conference landscape reflects that.
That's the pattern. It happened with the internet. In the nineteen nineties there were internet-specific trade shows. Now the internet is just part of every trade show. The same thing is happening with AI.
Let's circle back to something Daniel raised — the difficulty of starting conversations with the big firms. If you're a small player at one of these shows, how do you actually get facetime with the people who matter?
This is where the unspoken etiquette of trade shows comes in. You don't approach someone at their booth and try to pitch them. That's amateur hour. What you do is you find out which sessions they're speaking at, which parties they're attending, which coffee shops near the venue are the unofficial meeting spots. You do your reconnaissance. And then you engineer a context-appropriate encounter.
It's not networking. It's tradecraft.
It's absolutely tradecraft. And the people who are good at it treat it that way. They have target lists. They have dossiers. They know who the decision-makers are, what they care about, what their pain points are. They don't walk up and say "here's what my company does." They walk up and say "I saw your talk on X, and I think we might have a solution to the problem you described.
That's a completely different posture. It's not about what you're selling. It's about the problem you're solving for them specifically.
That's why so many people fail at these shows. They show up with a pitch deck and a stack of business cards and think that's the game. The game is preparation, targeting, and relevance. The pitch is the last two percent of the process.
What about the counter-argument? The one that says these shows are dinosaurs, that they're held together by institutional inertia, that the real business gets done elsewhere. Is there any truth to that?
There's always some truth to the skepticism. Some percentage of attendees at any large show are there because their boss sent them, or because they've always gone, or because they want to see the spectacle. And the spectacle is real — these shows are overwhelming. The CES show floor is over two million square feet. You can't see it all. You can't even see ten percent of it. So there's definitely an element of FOMO-driven attendance that isn't strictly rational.
Two million square feet. That's what, forty football fields?
Closer to thirty-five, but yes. It's absurd. And at a certain point, the scale becomes counterproductive. You spend so much time just navigating the venue that you lose opportunities for the kind of deep conversation that actually creates value.
There's an optimal size, and these shows are probably past it.
For some purposes, yes. That's why the private meeting rooms and the off-site events have become more important. The show floor is increasingly the public-facing layer, while the real business happens in the quieter spaces around it. The show is the excuse to be in the same city at the same time. The actual work happens in the margins.
The show as pretext. That's a useful frame.
It's not a criticism. The pretext has value. Without the show as an organizing principle, you wouldn't have all these people in the same city at the same time. The show creates the container. What you do inside the container is up to you.
Let's talk about the international dimension. Daniel's in Jerusalem, he's originally from Ireland, he works in tech. If he wanted to go to one of these shows, which one should he pick? Not asking for a personalized recommendation, but generically — if you're a tech professional who can only attend one major international show a year, how do you choose?
It depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for broad technology trend-spotting, CES is the default answer. You'll see more different kinds of technology in four days at CES than you would in six months of reading tech news. If you're in mobile, telecom, or connectivity, MWC is the one. If you're in hardware, semiconductors, or AI infrastructure, Computex. If you're focused on European markets, IFA. If you're looking at emerging markets or AI deployment, GITEX.
That's a clean decision matrix. What about the experience differential? Daniel mentioned he's been to big tech conferences but nothing on this scale. What's actually different when you walk into a venue with a hundred thousand people?
The first thing that hits you is the noise. These shows are loud. Not just the ambient crowd noise, but the booths are competing for attention with sound systems, video walls, live demos. It's sensory overload. The second thing is the sheer physical scale. You will walk miles. Comfortable shoes are not a suggestion — they're a survival requirement. The third thing is the pace. There's no downtime. From the moment you enter until the moment you leave, you're being pulled in multiple directions. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to describe.
Daniel's instinct that these are in "a separate stratosphere" is correct. It's not just a bigger version of a regular conference. It's a different category of experience.
A regular conference might have a thousand people, a few dozen sessions, an exhibit hall you can walk in an hour. These mega-shows are more like temporary cities. They have their own transportation infrastructure, their own food systems, their own security apparatus. The logistical operation behind CES is staggering. It takes months to set up and weeks to tear down.
The temporary city metaphor is useful. It suggests all the complexity of a city — the neighborhoods, the traffic, the unofficial gathering spots, the different social strata. You have to learn the geography of a place that only exists for four days.
The geography changes every year. Booth placements shift. New exhibitors appear. Venues get reconfigured. You can't just learn the map once and coast. You have to re-learn it each time.
Which adds to the preparation burden. It's not just "I went last year so I know the lay of the land." The land has shifted.
And that's another filter that separates the effective attendees from the ineffective ones. The effective ones study the floor plan before they arrive. They plan routes. They know where the bottlenecks are going to be and they schedule around them. It's almost like military logistics.
The logistics of attention. That's the real resource being managed at these shows. Not time, not money — attention. Everyone is competing for it, everyone is overwhelmed by it, and the people who succeed are the ones who manage it most deliberately.
That's a great way to frame it. And it connects back to what we said about preparation. You can't manage your attention in real time at one of these shows. The environment is designed to fragment your attention. You have to arrive with a pre-built attention allocation plan and stick to it.
It's the same principle as a well-managed investment portfolio. You decide your allocation in advance, and you rebalance only when there's a compelling reason. You don't chase every shiny object.
The shiny objects at CES are very shiny. They're literally designed by teams of industrial designers and marketers to be as attention-grabbing as possible. Resisting that takes discipline.
Let's talk about one more thing Daniel raised — the enduring appeal. These shows have survived everything. The dot-com bust, the financial crisis, the pandemic. What's the core thing that keeps them going?
I think it comes down to one thing that technology hasn't solved: trust. Business relationships, especially high-stakes ones, still require trust. And trust is much easier to build in person. You can't assess someone's competence, integrity, and reliability over email. You can't read body language over Zoom the way you can across a table. These shows are trust factories. They compress months of relationship-building into days.
That's a strong claim. But it rings true. The handshake still matters.
It matters enormously. And it's not just the handshake. It's the unguarded moment after the meeting. It's the conversation that happens when you're both waiting for coffee. It's the shared experience of navigating the chaos together. Those things build trust in a way that structured communication channels simply can't.
That's the thing the "conferences are obsolete" crowd misses. They're optimizing for information transfer. But business isn't just information transfer. It's relationship formation. And relationships are stubbornly physical.
They really are. We've had decades of communication technology now. Email, video calls, Slack, Teams, Zoom. And yet the demand for in-person meetings hasn't gone away. If anything, the pandemic proved how much people value face-to-face interaction. The bounce-back in conference attendance has been remarkable.
Absence made the heart grow fonder, and also made the deals harder to close.
That's exactly what happened. Companies realized that while remote work works for a lot of things, business development is not one of them. The pipeline starts to thin out when you're not meeting people in person. Deals take longer. Partnerships are shallower. The trust deficit accumulates.
The trade show is, in a sense, an antidote to the atomization of modern work. It's a forced re-densification of the professional network.
That's beautifully put. Forced re-densification. You're taking a network that's been spread thin by remote work and digital communication and you're compressing it back into a high-density state for a few days. And in that compressed state, things happen that can't happen in the diffuse state.
Which brings us back to the particle collider metaphor. You're creating conditions that don't exist in nature.
The conditions produce results that don't happen in nature. That's the enduring value proposition. These shows aren't going anywhere because they solve a problem that no software has solved and probably no software can solve. The problem of human trust at scale.
That's a good place to land the core discussion. Should we do Hilbert's fact?
Let's do it. And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The word "pharos" — as in the Lighthouse of Alexandria — derives from the Greek name for the island on which it stood. But the earliest known lighthouse keepers were not Greeks. They were priests at the Temple of Thoth in ancient Egypt, who maintained beacon fires on the Nile's rocky outcrops as early as the third century BCE. The job was considered so sacred that keepers were exempt from taxation and military service.
Tax-exempt lighthouse priests. A career path I was never told about.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, and thanks to everyone who listens. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps. We'll be back soon with another one.
