De Marchis: vendors pitching an AI strategy instead of product should stay home

Carlo De Marchis's 10-point pre-show piece is the bluntest analyst read heading into NAB 2026. His headline warning, delivered in the first item: "If you are going to Las Vegas with a slide that says 'our AI strategy' and a plan for a plan, stay home." Vendors arriving with generic decks instead of shipping product, he argues, will be ignored by buyers who have already sat through two cycles of AI demos.

De Marchis flags the show's doubling of AI pavilions and points to concrete benchmarks buyers are actually quoting this week: JioStar's 72 million concurrent viewers as a new streaming scale reference, and AWS Elemental Inference demos that produce vertical video in six to ten seconds from 16:9 source — already deployed at Fox Sports Digital and NBCUniversal. Those are the data points he expects to dominate booth conversations, not capability slides.

He also notes NAB's transformation into a sports-business event — a 200% spike in creator and podcaster registrations — and warns that buying decisions are now filtered through macroeconomic anxiety in a way they were not a year ago. The subtext for vendors: vague roadmaps read as risk, not ambition.