With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicking off next month, tech companies from around the world are excited to showcase their latest products. Despite the many tech advancements that will be highlighted, generative AI is likely to be the one that takes center stage.

Bob O’Donnell, TECHnalysis Research President and Chief Analyst, joins Yahoo Finance Live and shares what he expects to see at CES.

Although there are going to be startups leaving their mark in audio and video applications, O’Donnell makes the case that the big tech companies are going to see the greatest earnings in 2024.

The smaller companies are going to be financially challenged with building the foundation models that are essential for creating new and accurate AI systems, O’Donnell says, while companies like Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) will be a case of the "big getting bigger."

For more from this episode of NEXT:

To see the full NEXT episode: Next in Tech: Why generative AI will explode in 2024, click here.

To read more about AI from Yahoo Finance's Tech Editor Dan Howley, click here.

Video Transcript

DAN HOWLEY: In about a month's time, a little more than a month, the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, kicks off in Las Vegas. We're already hearing rumblings of what we might see. I guess, how will AI dominate the stage there in Vegas?

BOB O'DONNELL: Well, everybody's going to talk about it, right? I mean, you know, it's almost become a joke now at tech conferences if you don't mention generative AI like 10 times in the first two minutes. And so we're going to see everybody talk about it.

How it plays out at CES is going to be interesting. Because in it, I believe we're going to see more of an impact initially in business than we are consumer. Certainly, there's going to be consumer I'm going to talk about a couple of things related to that in a second.

So we'll see a lot of noise. And we'll see people talking about devices that can do generative AI. And that's going to be important. And there are going to be devices like PCs that I think are going to be a big factor in 2024. And of course, consumers and businesses will use them.

We'll see other gadgets. We'll see other types of services. There's going to be-- there's a lot of startups who are trying to make a splash in generative AI. You talked about audio and video applications. Certainly, we're going to see that at CES.

So I think that's going to be important. But I think there are some other interesting long picture trends we also need to think about for 2024

DAN HOWLEY: I just want-- you know, to your point about companies having to say something about generative AI, you just look to Apple where they didn't mention anything about generative AI. They kept kind of mum on that. Did a lot of machine learning talk but nothing--