Brightsign faced the same challenges in 2025 as many hardware manufacturers. But despite the tariffs that the San-José-based company navigated, Brightsign ended the year on solid footing.
According to CEO Steve Durkee, many deployments were not cancelled but pushed into 2026. “If the projects all come true this year, then when I sit at the next meeting in December, I’ll say it was a great year.” The Q1 pipeline, he says, already looks healthy.
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Pushing AI to the edge
One of the biggest focus areas for Brightsign right now is AI at the edge, enabled by its media players with integrated neural processing units (NPUs).
Durkee believes interest in AI-powered digital signage has moved well beyond experimentation: “We’ve seen lots of interest in almost all our big deployments, and it’s beyond just hypothetical interest,” he says. “We’re talking about real use cases with audience engagement or object detection.”
While many CMS partners are actively adding AI features at the user interface level, Durkee would like to see them make faster progress on those use cases and run the AI workloads where they perform best. “CMS companies have had to run applications like gaze or object detection on the CPU and GPU,” he explains. “Now, when you enable it on the NPU, they become much better.”
Looking ahead, he expects rapid improvement in AI models to also spill over into digital signage.
Built-in as a growth opportunity
Brightsign is also leaning further into its built-in strategy, particularly around System-on-Chip (SoC) partnerships. The company already works with LG, Bluefin, and Moka, and sees this as an important segment it wants to serve effectively.
“The Brightsign value proposition is more than the horsepower inside the purple box,” Steve Durkee says. That value includes continual updates to the BrightsignOS, its Chromium engine and its security profiles, areas Durkee describes as more challenging for traditional SoC platforms to maintain over time.
The trend toward built-in form factors is also reflected in the launch of the XS6, the highest performing Brightsign Built-In solution with an NPU and improved 4K performance. The XS6 caters to customers who like the built-in form factor, but know they need to be ready for AI.
When choosing SoC partners, Brightsign takes a deliberately strategic approach, selecting companies that align with specific markets it wants to serve.
A clear stance on MDEP
Durkee also shared a measured view on Microsoft’s Android-based device ecosystem platform, MDEP. In his view, it reinforces Brightsign’s long-standing argument for purpose-built platforms.
While MDEP aims to address some of Android’s shortcomings in digital signage, Durkee believes structural limitations remain. “The underlying architecture is still based on something built to run all sorts of applications,” he says. “Our purpose-built solution doesn’t have anything else that can run, but digital signage.”
Telling outcome-driven stories at ISE
At ISE 2026, Brightsign’s focus will be less about net-new product launches and more about showing how its technology is used in the real world. The company will demonstrate its latest Series 6 players, built-in cellular connectivity, enhanced security features, and evolving AI models for gaze detection, audience measurement and object recognition.
The booth itself will reflect a shift toward industry-specific storytelling, with vignette-style demos tailored to transportation, corporate, retail and QSR environments. “We want people to start with the outcome they’re trying to achieve,” Durkee says, “and then work backward to the technology that enables it.”
It is a fitting approach to start the year with, given that Brightsign sees AI as an integral part of digital signage’s near future, and its adoption as a decisive factor on whether 2026 can deliver on its promise of becoming a great year.