Over winter break, I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one of the largest and most influential tech trade shows in the world. For three days, the Vegas Strip transformed into a showcase of innovation. I witnessed holograms, transparent solar panels, 3D-printed shoes, coffee-making robots and countless other displays promising a more efficient, futuristic world.
But amid the buzz of technological progress, the most striking trend wasn’t about doing less work. It was about feeling less alone.
Companies like Ollobot, Dipal and Ludens AI weren’t pitching tools to manage calendars or vacuum floors. They were selling companionship.
Take Dipal, a Chinese tech startup that raised over $1.5 million through crowdfunding on Kickstarter for its product, the Dipal D1. The device is a small cylindrical display with a curved screen that features an anime-style character. This character speaks, dances and is fully customizable, allowing users to shape its appearance and personality. The slogan is telling: “A companion that’s just as real as you are.”
This isn’t a smart speaker designed to play music, set alarms or answer trivia questions. It sits on your desk, using cameras and sensors to track eye movements and learn your habits. It adapts to you. The goal isn’t utility; it is emotional presence. These figures are designed to simulate having a person you can rely on when the room is empty.
Another striking example of emotion-centered technology was Cocomo, a companion robot unveiled by Japanese startup Ludens AI at CES 2026. Cocomo looks more like a robotic pet than a traditional machine. It moves independently on a wheeled base, follows its owner around the house and interacts through touch and sound. The invention’s outer shell is engineered to stay close to human body temperature — around 98 degrees Fahrenheit — to avoid the cold, mechanical feeling of most robots.
The rise of artificial intelligence companions isn’t happening in a vacuum. It reflects a deeper issue in modern society: a growing loneliness epidemic. In May 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health crisis. In early 2024, 30% of adults reported feeling lonely at least once a week, with younger adults especially affected, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
Social media offers constant interaction but little intimacy. Adults in the top quarter of social media use are more than twice as likely to report being lonely. At the same time, Americans are spending less time with friends, with weekly social time dropping from 6.5 hours in 2014 to just four hours in 2019. Young people now spend significantly more time alone than they did a decade ago, reinforcing a sense of isolation even in a hyper-connected world.
Structural shifts in how we live and work have only deepened this isolation. In 2025, 45% of employees reported feeling isolated at work, and remote workers are nearly twice as likely to feel lonely as those working onsite. Meanwhile, single-person households in the United States have more than doubled since 1960, reaching 29% in 2022. Together, these trends help explain why technologies designed to simulate companionship are gaining traction.
Even so, seeing machines step in to fill our emotional gaps is unnerving. AI companions offer a shortcut to connection, but deprive us of the necessary vulnerability or complexity involved in dealing with real people. Tech companies are risking a future where we treat loneliness as a product flaw to be fixed by a vendor.
CES is about how the future might look. The prominence of AI companions at this year’s show suggests a future in which our emotional needs are increasingly addressed, but often superficially by technology. These inventions could be hopeful: offering comfort, support and companionship for those who are isolated or struggling. Yet the risks are real. Research shows that relying on technology for emotional fulfillment can weaken human connection and deepen loneliness. Whether this future is hopeful or troubling depends on how we respond now. We can use AI to enhance connection, not replace it, or risk a world where our emotional needs are addressed, but never truly met.
If AI companions are becoming necessary, it may be time to ask not just how advanced our technology is, but why so many people feel alone enough to need it in the first place.
Jewel Wang is a freshman studying Finance and Real Estate at the Kelley School of Business.