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‘It’s AI or die,’ keynoter warns sensor makers at SC26
The wrap-up day of Sensors Converge 2026 offered interesting contrasts.
Young, confident robot competitors and entrepreneurs espoused the virtues of Edge AI at the same time hundreds of sensors companies displayed sophisticated wares.
Meanwhile, industry veterans offered strong guidance verging on a warning to wary engineers concerning the ways edge technology should develop in coming years.
First the high points.
At the end of the final day on Thursday, high school students from First Robotics deployed one of their student-designed competition robots to dance and play with a robot dog from Toborlife AI from the booth next door. The robot dog and gaming bot bowed and gestured to the amusement of much older engineers looking on.
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Nearby, on the Main Stage, teenage entrepreneur Shanya Gill talked about her experience founding Vigil Inc., a company that develops AI-powered surveillance cameras that monitor environments for safety threats. Shanya was a TIME Kid of the Year honoree in 2024 and her stage appearance at Sensors Converge clearly left a lasting impression with the crowd, judging from audience comments. “She’s so young and yet so professional,” one said.
Elsewhere in a ballroom, keynoter Pankaj Kedia, founder of 2468 Ventures, warned sensors engineers and investors about the dangers of missing out on “the Edge AI revolution.” Ticking off previous tech innovations with the Internet and more, he added, “The real revolution is coming in the edge.”
He recounted historical societal patterns that have caused millions of people to die that could be confronted by coming AI tools: preventable doctor errors, driver errors, mental illness, students dropping out and more.
“Every one of these things are preventable and AI will bring every one to zero,” Kedia said. “Sensors will play a central role in how AI does that…AI is a much bigger force than previous [technologies]. We are not in a bubble. Maybe it’s the end of the picnic, but it’s certainly not the beginning of the end.”
Sensors are no longer the low-cost commodity item in the bill of materials for an application, he said. “Sensors are becoming the difference where the value is” because they must function in a multimodal, always-on fashion and can be combined with compute functions. He called the result the “on-device sensor-computer for sensing, thinking and reasoning.
“Edge is just getting started…My estimation is you ain’t seen anything yet.”
Finally, he delivered a warning to developers and companies broadly. “It’s AI or die. If you don’t inject AI in the product line, the company will die…This is the opportunity of a decade, a lifetime, a century. What we do this decade will define what happens beyond that.”
Karthic Shivaram, an Apple engineer for 13 years, took a more technical approach to Kedia’s theme in a talk in the Live Theater area of the Sensors Converge showfloor.
“The boundary between sensor and inference is dissolving,” he declared. “The system, not silicon, increasingly defines what the sensor can do…The story isn’t in the hardware…it’s sensors that don’t produce data at all, but produce meaning. This is where the most unappreciated shift is happening.”
Shivaram also issued a warning with Edge AI. “Ambient privacy is collapsing and I don’t think industry has confronted it. Most privacy networks assume the sensor is dumb, but increasingly it knows who you are are. I don’t have a clean answer for that, but we need to be thoughtful about it. The hard engineering problem is trust: How do we build a sensor that depends on a model that changes over time? Sensors may become electrically healthy but semantically wrong.”
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“Sensors used to see and now they understand. It must sound glib: the transducer-centric model will feel quaint in the next decade,” he concluded.
The Sensors Converge conference and expo in its 41st year had become an event about “AI and power,” one vendor rep said in summing up the event on the final day. It also had become a place of promise for young engineers and a congress for engineering veterans to contemplate sage advice.
