NEXT 2019 Conference Series - Lesley Rohrbaugh - Consumer Technology Association

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Lesley Rohrbaugh, director or research at Consumer Technology Association. Find Lesley Online: LinkedIn Website: https://www.cta.tech [00:02 Lesley with CES.  Thanks for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast today.   [00:07]     Thanks for having me. [00:08] We are live at the NEXT Conference in Chicago.  What do you think about the show? [00:12] It’s amazing.  It’s so nice to be here with so many of our colleagues in the research community.  A lot of great turnout from all sides of the research community. So we have exhibitors here, and we have analysts on the corporate side, the non-profit side.  So it’s great to pick each other’s brains. [00:28] CES is a big deal.  I mean it’s the trade show of trade shows of trade shows, right, the mother ship.  But I hear that you guys have a track specific for research.  [00:39]    We do.  So, a few years ago, we started a research summit at the show that precedes the actual show days.  And we have a ton of participants there. We have multiple panels; we have speakers from big and small companies.  So we have startups and then we have the big, large corporations. But it’s attended by a few thousand people, and all we talk about for a few days is just research, research, research when it comes to technology.       [01:06] So, the application of technology to enable customer conversations sort of bent?  Is it user experience research, market research, kind of broad umbrella of just consumer points of view?   [01:22]       It’s a mix.  We also have B-to-B in there as well.  So, with technology, you have to be able to adopt it somehow, and what better way than to talk to companies in their space and see how they’re actually using things like voice, things like AI, robotics, all these different areas.  So it’s a mix of folks, and it’s really interesting to see the application of things like Artificial Intelligence being built into the data computerization and seeing how people are actually making these ideas come to life.     [01:49] I loved your talk this morning, especially as it related to smart devices.  The microwave is still frustrating to me because of all the stupid buttons on it.   [01:58] Right. [01:59]  And a microwave that actually can identify the objects, the items that are going in there, and then smartly uses that information to not burn the popcorn, as you aptly said, right?  Why don’t you give them sort of the highlights of your 30-minute chat?  [02:14] Yeah, sure.  So, obviously, 30 minutes is not long to talk about the entire 350+ billion-dollar technology world.