A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

CES 2025: as you read the acronym and year, your brain registered an image like consumer technology and the start of a new year, or some variation of those thoughts.

When you saw the title of this post with the acronym “GLP-1,” your brain might not have connected the dots between a medicine and “CE,” consumer electronics.

But here we are in real-time, in real life, at the convergence of pharmaceuticals and medicines and consumer-facing technology. And keep in mind that we’re at the annual meeting of CES which is convened by the Consumer Technology Association, CTA.

GLP-1s are showing up at #CES2025 in many ways. Here’s what I’m seeing on the ground, in press releases, and in emailed invitations to meetings and exhibitors….

CTA’s research on Tech Trends for 2025 cites GLP-1s in its macro-trend of Longevity, and longer living. In their live delivery of the trends yesterday on Day 1 of Media Days at CES 2025, Brian Comiskey and Melissa Harrison of CTA discussed GLP-1s, with a mention that GLP-1s could be more economy-altering than AI — which was a forecast from Professor Scott Galloway for 2024 that, in the post mortem of Scott’s expectations, came to pass last year.

In the health/care ecosystem, GLP-1 medications are now delivered omnichannel, via physician prescriptions from medical exam rooms for branded products heavily advertised on broadcast media….but also through direct-to-consumer channels such as Ro, Hims & Hers, and Noom, some channeling compounded GLP-1 products quite apart from the branded novel pharmaceuticals.

Beyond the Digital Health track of CES 2025, there’s a food-tech agenda sponsored by The Spoon. A session on this track addresses the future of personalized nutrition in the era of Ozempic, and features speakers from January AI, one.bio, and Digbi Health. This session will focus on the convergence of food and pharma, which joins a sister trend in health/care: food-as-medicine.

Content is a growing aspect of CES in the past decade, and this aspect of the conference is generally covered in the C-Space campus of the ARIA Hotel.

Havas, a global communications agency, is convening a session on the GLP-1 revolution in culture and consumption, leveraging the company’s expertise in its TRIPTK group with experts from sister company Havas Health and the YMCA of Metro Chicago adding the organization’s gravitas in the discussion. This promises to be an important brainstorm around peoples’ behavior beyond the pure clinical aspects of GLP-1s’ efficacy.

Other content sessions related to the impact of GLP-1s on consumer lives focus on changing dining patterns in restaurants, “FoodGPT” applications leveraging AI for food and nutrition innovation, among other relevant sessions across the meeting’s venues.

Walking the conference floor in search of digital health tools relevant to peoples’ adoption of GLP-1s to deal with diabetes and weight loss will involve thousands of steps on one’s activity tracker this week: this graphic illustrates the categories I will track (!) at #CES2025 this week, and ongoing….from food and weight tracking to heart function and mood, all directly relevant to a person’s use of Zepbound, Wegovy, Ozempic and the entire portfolio of these medicines.

But one exploring GLP-1s’ impacts on consumers and the larger economy would be wise to look beyond “healthcare” to understand the macro GLP-1 landscape. In an interview I did in 2024 with Bloomberg (Canada), I talked about how GLP-1s were reshaping other consumer-facing business sectors beyond medical and health care — from hospitality and airlines to mobility, consumer goods and clothing. Many innovations we’re seeing this week at CES 2025 will be part of this morphing ecosystem. For example, L’Oreal is showcasing a skin care innovation, Bioprint, that GLP-1 users seeking care for skin health might check out. Or a connected refrigerator from Samsung partnering with Instacart could prove useful for a specially-curated, personalized food shopping list.

On reflection, we come to realize that Scott Galloway’s observation about the drug category profoundly impacting society and the macro-economy was spot-on and prescient.