Why AI will dwarf every tech revolution before it: robots, manufacturing, AR glasses from CES 2026

Watch on YouTube ↗ | January 14, 2026 at 19:32 | 51:02 | All-In Podcast

Speakers

Hemant Taneja — CEO, General Catalyst

Jason Calacanis — Angel Investor / Founder, LAUNCH

Bob Sternfels — Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company

Summary

Live from CES 2026, Jason Calacanis interviews McKinsey's Bob Sternfels and General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja about how AI is compressing value creation, reshaping enterprises and the job market, and why venture firms are now buying hospitals and call centers to transform them with AI. The conversation covers Anthropic's hypergrowth, the CFO-versus-CIO tension inside enterprises, McKinsey growing client-facing staff while shrinking back-office staff, and the case for lifelong learning. Market-relevant takeaways include self-driving going mainstream in 2026, BYD and Chinese automakers outcompeting Europe on cost, robotics as the answer to manufacturing labor shortages, and Jason's view that Tesla's Optimus will define the company. The episode ends with Jason's time capsule of past CES gadgets.

Hemant Taneja: Anthropic grew roughly 10x year over year and GC's $60B entry was the cheapest venture deal of the year; trillion-dollar startups are now plausible.
Bob Sternfels: enterprise AI uptake is unprecedented, but non-tech companies struggle to realize value and CEOs are torn between cautious CFOs and urgent CIOs.
General Catalyst is buying a health system and call centers as distribution for AI-native startups, described as a new asset class of transforming incumbents.
McKinsey is growing client-facing staff 25% while cutting non-client-facing staff 25%, with 25,000 agents versus 40,000 humans.
Graduates face a tough job market and the return on skills has roughly halved; both guests argue for lifelong learning, resilience and radical collaboration.
Jason calls 2026 the year of self-driving and 2027 the year of humanoid robots, with Tesla's Optimus as his top transformative bet.
Hemant sees BYD and Chinese automakers winning on cost and features while European automakers struggle; the US must fix manufacturing cost to lead.
Bob argues robotics is the larger trend given 50,000 unfilled US manufacturing jobs and worsening demographics; Hemant thinks robotics adoption will be slower than expected.

Ideas

Hemant Taneja CEO, General Catalyst 12:19

AI makes call centers declining assets

A call center in an emerging country today is a declining asset because its work is going to be displaced by AI. General Catalyst buys such businesses not for their legacy economics but for the customers on the other side, pairing them with early-stage founders to accelerate AI adoption in the call-center space and scale faster. He frames it as a new playbook: acquiring businesses that have declining value but important customers that still need to be served.

Jason Calacanis Angel Investor / Founder, LAUNCH 34:08

2026 is the year self-driving arrives

Jason dubs CES 2026 the self-driving CES: consumers will actually experience autonomous vehicles this year, ahead of humanoid robots in 2027. Nuro and Lucid have an incredible product, Zoox is present, Waymo is leading the pack, and Elon's Tesla Robotaxi feels like it is closing in on a solution and getting very close, while Chinese players such as Baidu, WeRide and Pony AI make it a global race with second- and third-order impacts.

Jason Calacanis Angel Investor / Founder, LAUNCH 34:08

2026 is the year self-driving arrives

After visiting Tesla's Optimus lab with Elon Musk and seeing Optimus 3, Jason argues nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car: Optimus will be Tesla's defining product, Musk will make a billion of them, and it will be the most transformative technology product in history because LLMs let robots understand the world and do the things humans do not want to do. He expects a one-to-one ratio of humans to Optimus robots, thinks Musk has already won, and dubs 2027 the year consumers experience humanoid robots.

Hemant Taneja CEO, General Catalyst 35:09

BYD's low-cost cars outcompete European automakers

Chinese automakers led by BYD are penetrating deeply everywhere, from Europe to the Middle East, because their cars have all the features and functionality at really low cost, and European automakers are dejected because they do not know how they will compete with Chinese industry. The US has the self-driving innovation that lets next-generation automakers win the platform shift, but it lacks the manufacturing capability to build as cost-effectively as a Chinese maker, so the world order in autos is shifting toward China until the US fixes manufacturing cost; self-driving that is not cost-effective will never be a mainstream product.

Hemant Taneja CEO, General Catalyst 35:09

BYD's low-cost cars outcompete European automakers

Chinese automakers led by BYD are penetrating deeply everywhere, from Europe to the Middle East, because their cars have all the features and functionality at really low cost, and European automakers are dejected because they do not know how they will compete with Chinese industry. The US has the self-driving innovation that lets next-generation automakers win the platform shift, but it lacks the manufacturing capability to build as cost-effectively as a Chinese maker, so the world order in autos is shifting toward China until the US fixes manufacturing cost; self-driving that is not cost-effective will never be a mainstream product.

Bob Sternfels Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company 36:55

Autonomy costs collapse, transformation within 24 months

Bob sees a massive move down the cost curve in autonomous driving and expects a massive transformation over the next 12 to 24 months. The race is afoot between a Western stack and a Chinese stack, with the rest of the world becoming the battleground where it plays out.

Bob Sternfels Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company 37:16

Robotics essential for cost-competitive resilient manufacturing

Bob thinks robotics, especially in manufacturing rather than just human interaction, is a larger trend than autonomous driving. The CEO of a large contract manufacturer has 50,000 US manufacturing job openings she cannot fill, demographics are worsening in the US and even more in Germany and Korea, so the only way to build resilient supply chains at a competitive cost point is robotics at the heart. The race is wide open: Korea leads with roughly one robot per ten workers, Germany and China are tied for second, and the US is a distant third.

Hemant Taneja CEO, General Catalyst 38:19

Robotics adoption slower than people expect

Hemant cautions that robotics will take hold more slowly than people think. LLMs could be dumped in the cloud and become pervasive through something like ChatGPT, but good robotics models have no hardware, API-like infrastructure that diffuses them fast, so a lot still needs to be built. Leading in robotics is nonetheless essential to lead in manufacturing and therefore to play up the stack in industries like automotive.

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This All-In Podcast video, published January 14, 2026, features Hemant Taneja, Jason Calacanis, Bob Sternfels discussing Call center outsourcing, Autonomous driving, TSLA, Humanoid robotics, 1211.HK, European automakers, Industrial robotics, ROBO. 8 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.

Speakers: Hemant Taneja, Jason Calacanis, Bob Sternfels · Tickers: Call center outsourcing, Autonomous driving, TSLA, Humanoid robotics, 1211.HK, European automakers, Industrial robotics, ROBO