CTA’s Shapiro: Pivot or Die!
Gary Shapiro, CEO and Vice Chair of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) welcomed CES attendees to the State of the Industry keynote address on Tuesday with a rousing call to action.
“These days it feels like everyone is pivoting,” Shapiro told attendees. “Progress has never come from standing still. It comes from those who took a chance and tried something new. As humans, we’ve done this over and over — pivoting and innovating to survive and thrive. And that’s especially true in the rapidly evolving world of technology where we have to adapt or become obsolete. Pivot or die!”
“At the end of the day, technology matters because it helps millions of people around the world,” enthused Kinsey Fabrizio, President of CTA. “And it’s far from replacing people. Technology empowers them! Think about AgTech which helps farmers make better decisions about the crops they plant and augmented reality glasses that provide real-time language translation. And how about cybersecurity tools that are helping us protect ourselves and our data? From AI to robotics and health care and sustainability, CES 2025 shows what’s possible when the entire tech ecosystem comes together in one place.”
Never one to shy away from taking a stand when it comes to making “Tech for All” a reality, CTA has pushed forward and encouraged governments around the world to enact policies that foster innovation.
“Each year at CES we see that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere,” said Shapiro. “But for good ideas to become great, product innovators need pro-innovation policies. To keep our economies thriving and inflation in check, we need policies that enable startups, allow businesses to flourish, and create the next generation of tech leaders. [We need] policies that create rules of the road for tech companies and offer guardrails to protect safety, privacy, and fairness.
“Here in the U.S., that means finding a way to break through the gridlock and pass sensible immigration reforms to promote highly skilled immigration and recognizing that tariffs are taxes paid for by American businesses and the American people and the world.”
Research recently released by CTA during the CES Tech Trends presentation shows the proposed tariffs on tech products “could tank U.S consumer purchasing power by as much as 143 billion dollars in just the first year.”
CTA also honored this year’s Innovation Champions, a prestigious award based on the 2025 Global Innovation Scorecard that measures the political, economic, and demographic factors that foster innovation. Seventy-four countries and the European Union across 16 categories and 56 metrics were evaluated, making it the most comprehensive analysis to date.
The following country representatives accepting their awards on stage:
- Erkki Keldo, Minister of Economy and Industry, Estonia
- Leena-Kaisa Mikkola, Ambassador of Finland to the United States
- Dr. Volker Wissing, Federal Minister of Justice and Federal Minister for Digital and Transport, Germany
- Dirk Beljaarts, Minister of Economic Affairs, The Netherlands
- Ebba Busch, Minister for Energy, Business and Industry and Deputy Prime Minister, Sweden
- Ralf Heckner, Ambassador of Switzerland to the United States
CTA also announced its continued support and investment of the Innovation for All Fund, pledging to invest an additional $5 million in ten venture capital firms that support women, people of color, veterans, and other underrepresented entrepreneurs.
“Even as we embrace new things, some technologies and companies thrive long term, like the bicycle invented before any of us were born,” concluded Shapiro. “It’s been reinvented over the years to become the e-bike. That kind of agility is what I hope all the companies, entrepreneurs, and innovators can embrace here at CES 2025 because CES is where the future is made.”