Randy and Brian continue their CES 2026 coverage by focusing on infrastructure technology and what it means for accounting firms and finance teams. The discussion moves beyond flashy gadgets to the foundational technologies powering AI, automation, and modern cloud platforms. Check out the TaxBandits partner program at https:/cpate.ch/1099. The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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SPEAKERS:
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab brought to you by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, this episode of the accounting Technology Lab is brought to you by tax bandits. You’re feeling the pressure of juggling 1090 nines and W twos. Listen up. Tax bandits is the solution you’ve been waiting for over a decade of experience, they support e filing for over 100 federal and state tax forms. Tax bandits is IRS certified, meaning they offer instant form processing and real time status updates for peace of mind. Tax bandits provides 10 matching USPS, address validation and the Bandit commitment, their promise to stand behind your filings, including free corrections, retransmissions, all by all backed by their money back guarantee if a form can’t be accepted or duplicated, plus delivering recipient copies is easy with postal mailing or online access. Tax professionals can also enjoy Pro features like Secure Client Portal, team management tools and branding customization. You’re ready to take control of tax season and and join 1000s of tax professionals who trust tax bandits head on over to tax bandits.com. That’s T, A, X, B, A, n, d, i, t, s.com, and we thank tax bandits for their support of the accounting Technology Lab.
Randy Johnston 01:14
Welcome to accounting Technology Lab. I’m your host. Randy Johnson, the co host. Brian Tankersley, welcome to you live from CES 2026 and we wanted in this episode to talk to you about infrastructure improvements. Now, one of the things we both noticed is that AI applications were moving out to the edge, and we’ve talked to you about that in some length in various sessions, noticing it first in 2016 so it’s been 10 years in the making.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:46
Brian, it has, but it’s funny, it’s gone out to the cloud, and it’s come back on prem now, and it came back on for some of the concerns we had about putting all of our, you know, all of our naughty
Randy Johnston 01:58
bits out there. Yeah. And so one minor starting point the big vendors, Lenovo, Dell, HP, even Intel, had off floor product demonstrations of their various machines. We’ll probably pull a little more of that in later, but the ones I wanted to pull out in particular and note for this podcast was, we knew that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon x2 elite chips were going to be a pretty major deal right now. We think that is a release late first quarter of 2026,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:35
now, and now that’s, I think, that elites are out now the two the plus is the next plus is the one, and it’s going to come out hugely.
Randy Johnston 02:45
Yeah, that’s the one we’re after, right? Yeah. And so what happened here is all of the big vendors, Dell in the x plus, Lenovo, and some of their products, HP, and multiple of their products and others. There were eight machines on the floor that had these processors in them. And the reason this
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:04
is in the Qualcomm booth. And remember, this is an ARM processor that uses the chips more like the ones in your cell phone or your iPad. And it’s not a processor that uses the traditional Intel AMD x86 mark.
Randy Johnston 03:18
That’s right, and we suspect the timing might be partially related to Windows 12. Don’t know that, in fact, but that’s what it looks like. But the key here is battery life extended out to filled in hours a week’s worth of runtime.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:32
Battery life is measured in days instead of hours, and
Randy Johnston 03:36
performance is increased. So those chips are very interesting, and later in the year, we’ll have an update on computers for you, because the new Panther Lake chips will also arrive. There’ll be a bunch of new computers all kind of converging in late once. But I thought it was very interesting that they put those on display there, along with some glasses, ar, VR, glasses, that were actually somewhat usable. I think I’m correct in saying there were two cases of five glasses apiece, if
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:11
yes, yes, and some of those were truly the birth control glasses we see that looked like the kind that are issued to marine recruits at Boot Camp, that are very functional and not very fashionable. But, you know, and some of them saw one of them, it was a half inch thick. So, I mean, it’s some of them were crazy, but there were some very interesting ones. There’s one we saw at showstoppers that was one that was designed for macular degeneration, and so people with severe needs, really big zoomed in the you they would put your prescription in there first, and then they had cameras in the front, and they would display the stuff that needed to be magnified at super high resolution on the lenses themselves.
Randy Johnston 04:54
Yeah, and that company out of Ohio seems to be pretty well funded. They’ve got a good vision of what they’d like to accomplish. Of that. So, you know, we’re and we actually talked about that specifically too where, like, the name Metaverse got opted away real quickly here. But these assistive glasses, I think, might have some useful purpose. Now, there is another minor infrastructure thing that, you know, I was pleased to walk over the roof, and that was the HDMI, new cable. So what are the key things that our listeners need to know about that?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:29
Well, you know, you’ve heard about 4k displays, and many of you, most of you, probably have a 4k display somewhere in your life. The next generation is 8k which is four times as big, four times more pixels than 4k and then they’re they actually have now designed these new cables that will support 16k which is just obscenely huge. And you know, again, with those things, they’re transmitting 96 gigabits per second across this, across these HDMI cables. And so, you know, we’ve seen in the past when we’re doing extremely high res monitors, like some of the 5k displays Apple has, and others you have to have, you have to use either an alternative cable, or you have to use two HDMI cables with these. It looks like you could run pretty much anything, you know. And that was, I think it was 16k at 120 frames a second, or something insane. I mean, it was just more data than you could imagine.
Randy Johnston 06:25
So we’re traditionally, we’ve said, Look, if you’re buying HDMI cables, get the HDMI two point ones. I’m thinking that, you know, I’ll reflect on a little bit more. But right now, these new HDMI, you know, 64
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:40
Yeah, the 96 gig, and they’re through HDMI three. Now here’s something to know about them, though, too. They’re also very short. They have to be sub six feet if they use copper, and if they the they haven’t made the special chips. They need to take that amount of data, turn it into fiber and then run it through to the other extension, like they did with the fiber chip fiber cables we talked about a while back. Yeah, that. And, by the way, those, so we expect those to come out sometime in q2 q3 so those will be available, and those will really be the call for many of you, because you’ll be able to go out to 300 plus feet on those things
Randy Johnston 07:15
and for your conference rooms and the like, that is the right way to get that job done. So notice that’s a moving part, yeah, that we wanted to be aware of. Now, the monitors that we saw this year, I think the most impressive ones were the ones done by CTX. Not admit vendor we’ve talked a lot about,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:34
but I remember them back from the VGA and EGA days.
Randy Johnston 07:38
They’ve been around a long time, yeah, and you know, LG also had a very interesting monitor. So I want to call out those two monitors for our listeners. The first one, though, is the CTX. And again, just think of what the listeners need to know on this.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:51
So this is a 27 this is a dual 27 inch display that opens up with a clamp, like a clamshell, like a laptop. So you literally open this thing up and there’s 227 inch displays that are running off of there’s basically a power cable connected and then A then an HDMI cable connected to that, and and they’re running that off of that. Now, I did the math on it. I think you could put it in a roll aboard bag, if you had to get it on an airplane. Didn’t want to check it, but realistically, it’s just, you can’t imagine how big it is. Now, one of the trends we did see is a trend toward more of these clamshell type second monitors. So you have two monitors, or maybe you get two of those, and you have four, and then it looks like you’re some kind of pilot simulator or something. But that is, that was a that switched to the clamshell that opens like this. Was a big shift that we saw,
Randy Johnston 08:46
yeah, and we discussed that. Because the reason it actually makes sense is, by being clamshell, the screens are protected
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:53
while traveling, and they’re next to each other, and there’s nothing in the middle of them. So in
Randy Johnston 08:58
effect, you can wind up with three screens, quite conveniently that you can easily carry around, and we did see smaller ones. So where we’ve recommended, you know, fifteens and seventeens for to matching your laptop. Now think about having a clam shell multiple display which stands up,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:17
and that 27 is was clearly first gen. It was probably an inch thick on both sides. So it was extremely thick. And so it’s not quite optimized yet, but it was still pretty impressive. And everybody seemed, everybody that we saw that was doing monitors seemed to have an impressive one like that. And another thing happening with monitors is that the curved monitors now seem to be losing most of their bezel around the edges. That that’s, of course, the little kind of framing around the outside. And so the reason that’s important is that if you’re having putting multiple of these together, you don’t have those panes, you know, the bezel there at the edge, that’s not in there. So you can have all. Post all LCD to LCD, instead of having LCD framing LCD. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 10:06
And in particular, on this one, I wanted to call out the LG 39 now I’ve recommended 49 inch monitors to many of you who’ve emailed me and everybody that put on the 49 inch curved LG says that’s a deal, and it is, because it’s the equivalent of 220 sevens and relatively inexpensive. This new 39 inch one that we were specifically showing had upscaling, which I thought was fascinating. And you took pictures of that for us, Brian, but basically, the monitor 39 inch was basically producing 4k I think, on the left side and 5k on the right side through upscale, yeah.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:45
And that was very impressive, because it was, it had its own technology inside that was taking the inferior output and smoothing up. And you’ve seen this in movies and things like this for a while, because, you know, if you’re watching, say, your blu rays on a 4k TV. Blu rays don’t go up to 4k they’re just 10 ADP, as I recall, maybe they’re more. There’s something that are, there’s some, but there they are. The thing about the content is that the TVs will upscale them, and so now the monitors will do that too.
Randy Johnston 11:15
And the person who has explained this to us didn’t make any claims, but I’m listening to what he’s saying and thinking to myself, Okay, I’m running tax software, let’s say Ultra tax, and I’ve got downscaled resolution. I can upscale this on this right hand side of this monitor. On this monitor, it would actually look right, instead of looking wonky.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:35
And that has huge implications for people that work remote, because in many cases, they have to, they don’t have an internet connection fast enough to get again, if you think about a one gigabit, one gigabit ether, one gigabit connection, that’s nowhere near the 96 gigabits that you need to support 16k and so what you know, so again, we end up with not so many pixels in there. But the good news is, if we can have the hardware upscale it maybe, like you said, we can have the limited view and then have it show up and look actually pretty good.
Randy Johnston 12:05
Yeah. Well, one of the topics that we have planned for k2 business this year is talking about how to bring more infrastructure back in house, because the price performance of the cloud isn’t paying off, like some of the local and some of the security is a factor a vendor that you now
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:23
we have the internet connection as a potential bottleneck. Even if you’ve got fiber,
Randy Johnston 12:27
doesn’t matter how fast it is, yeah, and I believe it was two years ago. We threw it into a vendor who’s been around since 2012 but I believe two years ago was the first appearance here at CVS, and they showed us a network attached storage device, which we talked about starting two years ago, and they introduced a variety of new products. So the product vendor is you green, and they have three specific things that I want to call out now. We’ll save a little bit of this for the AI podcast episode we’ll do for you. But their new network attached storage devices were very impressive. They 6011 line and they have their sin Care video camera systems which are entirely premise based security systems which were AI powered. That’s important. And then they have Gayle and nitride charger unit, which was all pretty fascinating stuff. So when we look at these evolution of their network attached storage devices, I believe it was 2024 when we saw those first Kickstarter NASA’s, and we asked if they would run Linux and VMware and Microsoft Windows. And they said, Yes, I’m thinking,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:45
not knowing that VMware was going to commit suicide in the small business market.
Randy Johnston 13:49
Yeah, that’s unfortunate, but it wasn’t his. But it’s like, Oh, these are could be the real deal. Well, it turns out, I think they are the real deal, and they have some very high performance drives for very little money, as it turns out. So their IDX 6011 pro unit retail is going to be $2,600 but they’re selling it right now for 1559, that’s a really good deal. It’s a six Bay nails. And they also have some lower end units, but all of these are very capable
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:23
advertising these. Yeah, the important thing to understand here is that these are designed to also do some AI workloads that we’ll talk about later. But these things have, like, instead of four or eight gigs of RAM, they have like, 64 gigs of RAM. And instead of a Celeron or a low end processor, instead they have i seven so they can handle they’re more like light servers, kind of like the windows home servers were supposed to be.
Randy Johnston 14:46
Yeah, exactly. And they’re running tool dual 10 Gigabit ports in them, which was important, but also the AI piece Brian’s talking about, we want to talk about that in the AI session that we’ll do with you. But. The vendor also was wise enough to put in a graphics processor port, and they call that the oculunk port, which allows you to connect external GPUs. So they have, must have a vision that we’re going to get real serious about running AI off of these noses. But the AI they were running without that external support was still pretty bloody impressed.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:23
And I will say that the legal you know, you need to talk to your lawyer friends about using AI, because there have been some things, some interpretations and rulings come out that said that they can’t use AI. That’s not it, that’s not on premises and in their control.
Randy Johnston 15:39
So we want you be aware, and we will talk more about that in the AI session, because their cameras and their AI and Snapdragon AI,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:47
those are like doing facial recognition and crazy things. Those are all big deals.
Randy Johnston 15:51
But the other little piece that they introduced was their desktop charger, and the thing can do 300 watts and it can run all sorts of different connectors, USB, CS and A’s, and it will balance the load of charging. And it was very impressive little charge.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:12
And I will tell you that I’ve been using a I’ve been using it about a 400 watt gallium nitride charger for a while, and it’s great. I can run my laptop off of it and charge my phone and charge a tablet and do all that at the same time. Now it doesn’t remember. Just for perspective, if you’re wondering, Am I going to blow up my fuses? A 400 watt charger is about a quarter of what you pull when you do a 18 watt hair dryer, it’s a little less than a quarter of that. So you know, realistically, it’s still a lot of juice, but it’s, it’s really quite different, you know, because when the iPad chargers came out, that’s a 10 watt charger. Okay, so we’re talking about 30 times that.
Randy Johnston 16:50
Yeah, pretty amazing. Well, we’ll talk more about the AI capabilities. And I probably should have pulled this comment in on AI too, because when we were talking about Qualcomm earlier, they have their very interesting dragon wing, AI premises based appliance that, yes, have custom work done on Yes. And I’m thinking about accounting firms and accounting confidential information, and you want to run it locally, and there are partners that will customize those appliances. So, you know, I’m looking at that saying this very interesting. But we intentionally came back here to the Venetian today because we were invited by a couple of representatives from Amazon, and those guys were very well. We met him at the TCL,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:36
and we were at the TCL booth, looking at TCL touch and note taking tablet device. And that tablet device is, was just, is just a beast. It’s called the note AI, text paper, txt paper. And it has a, has an E Ink display. Now it, you know, the E Ink display only uses, you know, this thing is, was a color display. It was a little more muted than a traditional display, but it was very high resolution, 120 hertz. So 120 frames per second, 2240 by 1440, 11 and a half inch thing, 8192 pressure levels. So it’s, you know, it’s much better than an iPad, and the screen kind of has the friction that you’re used to getting with a piece of paper and a pen. So there’s that in there. It has runs Android under the hood, eight gigs of RAM, 256, gigs of storage. It will also do PDF markup. It will connect up to OneDrive and Google. It also will there’s a version of Outlook that runs on it, so you can have you can connect up with a native Outlook client or other Android apps. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 18:41
So the next paper we talked about last year in your sessions, and that was released about March, and we recommended throughout the year, but this new generation, next paper is faster, and the handwriting on it was really superb. Brian tried to give you the specs there, but if you are using remarkable tablets which do not have the security profile that we want, or you’re using iPads which are heavy and expensive. This device is just a winner. You know, the prior version you could routinely get for around $200
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:15
and this one comes in in the mid five hundreds. But remember, this is a color device instead of a black and white, yeah. And so that’s a difference there it, but it’s a, you know, it was impressive enough that the Amazon people were looking at it to figure out what they needed to do with their color Kindle that they should, yeah.
Randy Johnston 19:36
So I wanted to call out that particular infrastructure device, if you would, because that really brings us then over to Amazon. The reason we came back to the nation today because the Kindle guys had invited us over, and then we wandered through the rest of the Amazon display, which was worth our time. It was, you know, and it turns out they had their arrow wireless gateways there. And.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:00
There is a new Eero Power over Ethernet gateway that looks more small business grade. You know, it looks like something that you would actually use in a small business, as opposed to something consumer that you tried, that you made work in business. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 20:15
So Euro has been one of the devices we’ve recommended in home offices. And there are certain types of security things that we worry about, but that was a pretty good thing. Also their Amazon ring cameras, and
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:29
they have the new ring elite cameras that do 90, 120 180 270 even 360 degrees off of those. And they’re much beefier. I actually read online that they now have one of those 360 degree cameras like you have deployed at a lot of malls to reduce the at least capture the crime that takes place. So there are a lot of really impressive things there. One thing that we saw that was kind of disappointing to us was that the Amazon sidewalk their Wi Fi sharing thing that’s in the Amazon Echo, it is still, you still have to opt out of it. Okay, sweet, we we were wondering to ourselves, you know, did they find that they kill that off because it’s such a security hole for businesses, but they have not, and so you have to opt out of that. And that’s another reason why we think that you should be running all your Internet of Things devices on their own separate network that is completely segregated from anything confidential. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 21:28
But one other thing that was, I’m going to say a little bit of a surprise to me, but not horribly big surprise Amazon, Leo, yes, because I didn’t realize that they had receivers that they were promoting. And let me see if I can get the names right, Nano, pro and Ultra, yes.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 21:48
And they these things are the they’re called composite antennas. And so instead of being made up of one single antenna, this is made up of hundreds of various micro antennas that all work together, almost like bees work together as one, as a single object, single organism, even though there are, you know, 1000s of lives doing that. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 22:11
So as it turns out, you know, we’ve been fans of low Earth orbit satellites, and I use Starlink for quite some time. They’re in their fourth generation now, on that product, but this evolution is their project, cup yard, and they right now, I think they have about 180 satellites out of about 3000 that they hand.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:29
Yeah, yeah. Bezos has not had the luck that or the skill that Musk has had in getting his stuff. Musk has 9300 to 9500 satellites right now, and Bezos has 180 now, 180 still pretty impressive. It’s a lot. 180 more things in low Earth orbit than I’ve ever put there. But at the same time, it’s It takes hundreds, if not 1000s of satellites to cover the entire Earth. And that’s what we want you to understand, is this is going here quickly. Now, the composite antenna that they have, their Leo antenna, is actually, they say, is the best antenna ever, and it can, it can theoretically receive speeds up to one gig down and send upward to space up to 400 400 megs up. So up to one gig down, 400 megs up, which is pretty impressive, because your Starlink, you know, went, Yeah, you went 100 down and 25 up, is that? Right? That’s about it, yeah, and so, and that’s more akin to a traditional entry level cable connection that you have at home, but it’s still amazing when you’re working with places where you don’t have reliable connections. Yeah?
Randy Johnston 23:35
So we wanted to spend a little time on these business infrastructure things, because if you’re in 26 your computers are changing. Processing power is headed out to the edge in your phones and in your computers.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:50
But it’s heading to the edge for privacy reasons, and not because it can’t be done in the cloud, but it but it’s for privacy, security
Randy Johnston 23:58
and speed to a degree. Yes, one other thing that was promoted but not broadly visible, was Wi Fi. Eight aces had units. TP Link claimed to have units, but I could not locate them in their faith. And the people there said the others assigned. But that’s about all we got out of it. But we know that wireless is going to continue to evolve, plus 6p will continue to evolve this year. And if I’m right on that call, we’ll just have a single chip doing six, sorry, six in our units, which will give us Wi Fi, seven, cellular, Bluetooth, all in a single chip. That’s why that six is so important in my mind, because it’s really well, we’re going from cellular, you know, five to cellular six.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 24:44
Yeah, it’s an interesting time. Now. There’s a whole lot less risk taking in here. It’s clear that the tariffs did have an impact on and the trade wars that have been going on have had a negative impact on some of the investments and things like that. That having been said, we have to remember that. But there was still a up through November of, you know, up through, I guess, November of 2004 we had all that uncertainty around the election. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And then once the election happened, we still didn’t know what was going to happen. So last year, when we were here, President Biden was still in office, and President Trump had said he was going to do some things, but we hadn’t seen what he was going to be able to do, and so there were still huge uncertainty hanging over things. Now we now have different uncertainty. So it’s, you know, again, I don’t mean to weigh in on politics here, but it’s a it’s this, you know, whenever we, whenever we try to adjust the barriers of trade, we it has a negative impact in the short term on the economy, on the technologies in particular. In fact, the supply chains in particular,
Randy Johnston 25:47
and the AI memory consumption right now is affecting the price of memory chips, and they’re headed out. So again, we’ll try to monitor those things and talk to you about them in future podcasts. But we wanted to give you an idea of what was happening with the infrastructure from CES and we’ll talk to you again in another accounting Technology Lab very soon. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:09
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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