Field Notes from Computex 2026 and the Future of Marketing

Computex 2026 left me with a sense of cultural and technological whiplash like I haven’t felt before.

This isn’t going to be one of those tidy trend roundups that flood your feed after every big show. They all say the same five things, and we all know they were written by AI without a second glance in the race to be first. This is not that.

Instead, I want to give you something closer to what it actually felt like to be there, because describing it to you might pull us outside of the noise in the increasingly polarizing conversation around AI, and help us (me) get a lay of the land out there.

So here’s what stuck with me.

The Part I Actually Enjoyed: Tech Self-Expression

The headlines out of this show are all about agents, data centers, and trillion-token revenue. I’ll get to that.

But the thing that made me stop and smile was seeing a change I had a personal stake in predicting a few years back: increasingly personalized aesthetics for technology.

When Hyte was building the Y60, I was the marketing manager there. And one thing I pushed for hard was that the brand had to treat a PC as art in the home, because PCs would become an increasingly present general appliance, and women would want to customize it far beyond it’s current aesthetic range.

That conviction didn’t come from nowhere. My first real doorway of interest into technology was seeing PC modding at Newegg Studio. Learning how to build and how computers were designed to work was interesting, but the art of modding made something click that I was missing. More women were joining tech and hardware companies, and I knew in my gut that they would be taking their grasp on technology and sprinting with it toward form, bringing balance to function, and influencing tech to unlock options for appearance that had not yet been considered. This would further inspire modders to push the limit in performance, to accommodate more materials, design options, and lower risk of overheating or malfunction.

Here’s one of my favorite women in tech, and her tour of the best builds this year:

You get it: increasing color options, fandom homages, materials, 3D printed parts, and PCs that looked like something else entirely were everywhere this year. Seeing “PC as functional art” go from a position I argued for at one brand to a full-blown industry trend? Honestly, it got me a little emotional.

I think we’re hitting a real turning point. PCs are about to start looking fundamentally different from one another. More materials, the ability to 3D print your own custom add-ons, whatever you decide to show on the little screens that are now built into everything; all of those choices hand you a way to decide not just what your PC is for, and what it says about you.

If you’ve seen the cyberdeck trend, and the girls that have taken it over, you know exactly what I’m talking about- and it’s going to hit gaming PCs and consumer tech in a big way, fast. Some people will keep it strictly utilitarian. Others will build art for their living room. I’m so stoked to see what people are about to create.

There’s a deeper concept in all of this, and once I noticed it I couldn’t unsee it: craving a human element from our tech.

Look no further than how it shows up in marketing. Diagrams designed to look hand-sketched instead of cleanly rendered. Natural materials, textiles and wood, worked into hardware more than ever.

Right now, it’s surfacing through design and aesthetics first. Texture, imperfection, unique design, apparent evidence of a hand.

So here’s the question I keep sitting with: how else does this show up as AI develops?

If the longing for the human appears first in how things look, where does it go next? How things are written? How they’re sold? How brands prove there’s a real person behind the curtain at all? Most importantly – can AI reasonably meet (or withstand) that demand in order to be truly profitable?

As it gets cheaper and easier to mass-produce hardware that all looks the same (and AI and robotics are making “the same” easier than ever), people start craving a way to make their tech, their art, their voice, theirs.

Self-expression, unique vision, becomes the scarce thing. Counterculture drives culture. Does AI help meet that need? Or is it the thing people rebel against in the pursuit of self-ownership?

Hold onto that. It comes back around.

The West Is Skeptical, and the Industry Is Trying to Answer It

I noticed it quickly; under the larger-than-life headlines, a lot of the show’s language was quietly built around reassurance. It answered my existing sense that the industry is nervous, and it should be; in the West, the skepticism it’s answering is real.

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index found that fewer than 45% of Americans see AI as more beneficial than harmful. Only about 38% say AI products make them excited.

A separate Annenberg Public Policy Center survey from early 2026 is even starker. Only about 17% of Americans expect AI to be positive for the country over the next decade. Roughly 42% expect it to be negative. And around 65% say the government has done too little to regulate it.

Treat those numbers as directional rather than gospel. But the direction is, ah, hard to miss.

It’s no coincidence that words about privacy, resource efficiency, and quality assurance were everywhere.

You could see the industry trying to answer that nervousness. Zero-trust security. A real focus on cooling efficiency, green energy, and the physical footprint of all this compute. On-device AI products where the model runs locally and never needs a data center at all.

Think about why that matters. The single loudest objection people have is simple: I don’t know how much of my data these companies hold (but I know it’s a lot), and I don’t know what they do with it. Privacy and surveillance fears run especially hot in the US. And there’s a genuine attempt here to design around those fears instead of arguing with them, in order to profit on new tech.

The Enthusiasm Gap

And yet. Here’s the contrast that stuck with me.

The enthusiasm I saw in Taiwan was something else entirely.

Not just from executives (though of course, they’re going to be loud at a tech conference). From shopkeepers. Restaurant owners. Regular people.

The number of everyday folks who wanted to talk to me about OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent, genuinely surprised me. Person after person told me the same thing, in different words: the technology is here. It’s a one-way road. There’s no getting off. So you might as well get on, learn what you can, and use what you can. I’m excited for the future.

This isn’t just my anecdote. That same Stanford index puts AI excitement in China at roughly 84%, more than double the US figure, with over 85% seeing AI as more beneficial than harmful.

That gap (the nervous West and the all-in East) is the most important thing I carried home. And it’s exactly where marketing gets interesting.

So Where Does That Leave Us, the Marketers?

Let me think out loud here, because I don’t have this fully figured out. Does anybody? Send me a message if you do.

Some uses of AI in marketing are easy yeses on paper.

We already use audience targeting, auto bid adjustments, and machine learning tools, and those tasks required deep manual data analysis that used to eat a whole afternoon (at least). Hand that to a machine? Sounds great… nobody is emotionally invested in who optimized the bid, just that it’s done accurately. Seems like a good idea.

But based on what we just talked about, its going to get harder for AI companies to showboat to US customers. People don’t like AI, so people are getting really good at sensing AI-generated content. Instead, as we just observed, they deeply want to sense the human. So the second they don’t sense it, they pull back.

Roughly 52% of American consumers say they reduce engagement when they suspect content is AI-generated. Around 60% already doubt the authenticity of what they see online (reporting on the anti-AI backlash).

Flip it around, though. About 55% of people, and roughly two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials, say they’re more likely to trust a brand that publishes human-generated content (MarTech).

This immediately begs the question – is AI really saving any sensible American business money, if your customers don’t engage with your brand as a result of its use?

The Association of National Advertisers even named a tie for its 2026 word of the year: “authenticity” and “agentic AI.” The point makes itself.

So… What Do We Do?

An uncomfortable question I can’t stop turning over:

Is the only way to “get away” with using AI in your business, to just lie about it? To hide that you used it at all, or to obscure it, letting it assist with decisions or low-risk operations, but not messaging? And… is that actually more efficient?

I don’t love this moment as a marketer; feeling caught between the requirement to understand and use this tech, and the requirement to deeply understand an audience that doesn’t want what’s being sold. Pretending this isn’t the big question is silly in the face of American backlash.

Good news! It gets even harder, because a growing slice of people are stepping back from technology altogether. Dumbphone sales reportedly climbed around 25% last year. Phone-free events are surging as burned-out Gen Z and Millennials go looking for real-world connection (INMA on the 2026 digital detox trend).

So ask yourself: if you can’t reach those people on a phone, and you can’t reach them through traditional digital channels, what’s left?

And then the pointed business question: do you even want to reach that audience?

Are they worth the cost of engaging, for your kind of business? For some brands, the honest answer is no. For others, it’s the whole ballgame.

Knowing which one you are is going to matter enormously. I suspect we may start to see marketing specializations based on audience, especially if there are groups that want to keep their insider knowledge offline (away from people who will simulate or replicate faster than ever, with fewer safeguards on IP than ever).

The Bigger Thing I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Europe is increasingly wary of leaning on US technology. China is building its own everything. And America is at risk of becoming an island. A tech ecosystem that much of the world distrusts and would rather route around, while everyone else moves forward on their own infrastructure, their own security standards, and their own path off of dependence on US tech.

That puts the US in a genuinely peculiar spot. Either it gets its own people to fully adopt this technology, or it finds a way to cooperate with the other blocs building parallel systems.

I don’t know which way it breaks. Whether it cracks Big Tech open, or just reshapes who wins where.

And right in the middle of all of it sits Taiwan. Quietly becoming a mecca for AI and hardware innovation, while being wedged, geographically and politically, between the US and China. As the divide over this technology widens, China starts to look like an awfully attractive business partner, with a consumer base that actually looks eager.

How that tension resolves is, I think, one of the most important business stories of the next few years.

I don’t have the ending. Nobody does yet.

But after walking that floor, I’m more convinced than ever that the marketers who win the next stretch won’t be the ones with the flashiest AI stack.

They’ll be the ones who understand people. What they’re excited about. What they’re afraid of. And when they’d rather you just talk to them like a human.

More soon.

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Sources

• Stanford HAI, 2026 AI Index Report (Public Opinion): https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/public-opinion
• Annenberg Public Policy Center, “Many Americans Pessimistic about AI’s Impact”: link
• Mojo Creative Digital, “The Anti-AI Backlash Is Real”: link
• MarTech, “In 2026, human connection becomes marketing’s real advantage”: link
• INMA, “Digital detoxes, the death of clickbait will shape media in 2026”: link
• OpenClaw (open-source personal AI agent): https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw
• CNBC, “Europe unveils tech sovereignty package amid growing concerns over reliance on U.S. tech”: link
• CEPA, “Code War: Europe Launches Tech Independence”: link
• CNBC, “China’s strategy in AI race with US — big chip clusters, cheap energy”: link
• EE Times, “Geopolitics, AI, and Jensen Huang Fuel Electronics’ Rock-and-Roll Era”: link
• Stimson Center, “All-In on AI: How the United States and Taiwan Are Deepening Their Chip Partnership”: link
• Newzoo, “The Global Games Market in 2025”: link
• Newzoo, “Three in four women play games”: link
• Deloitte Insights, “Rise of women in tech leadership” (TMT Predictions): link
• Forbes, “Who Runs The World? Women Control 85% Of Purchases, 29% Of STEM Roles”: link