LAS VEGAS (AURN News) — Malcolm Marzett walked into the Consumer Electronics Show last week and immediately noticed something familiar: He was one of the only Black faces in the room.
Named after Malcolm X, Marzett carries that legacy with him through the convention halls of CES 2026, where 148,000 people gathered to see the latest gadgets and innovations in Las Vegas.
“I love it. You get to break new ground,” said Marzett, who is an executive at a Phoenix tech company that focuses on fixing broken hiring practices. But he quickly added: “However, being really focused about that, the representation matters.”
He’s got the numbers memorized. Black Americans are 13% of the country but just 7% of tech workers. Want to talk about executives like him? That drops to 4%.
Marzett came to Vegas to check out the latest tech demos, but he’s thinking bigger picture. He talks about building what he calls a “farm system” — basically getting young Black entrepreneurs into pitch competitions and mentorship programs early, so they’re ready when they hit the big leagues.
“It’s not like it’s not there,” he told AURN News, gesturing around the packed convention center. “We just need to galvanize each other.”
This isn’t just about fairness. Marzett brings up AI’s well-documented problems recognizing Black faces, the kind of bias that shows up when tech teams lack diversity. These aren’t abstract problems — they’re playing out in real products being demonstrated at CES.
“The internet’s built with inherent bias. It wasn’t created with us in mind,” he explained, bringing up how the internet started as a military project.
“When they don’t have a case study to engineer that prompt, then they’re going to make it up or hallucinate.”
His fix sounds simple enough: Get more Black people building the tech, not just using it. Let them speak up. Change the culture. Stop thinking every talented Black kid should be an athlete and start thinking they could run a tech company.
“By the time they’re at 21, we start to have a crop of individuals that are chemists that can compress gases for semiconductor microchips,” Marzett said, painting his vision for the future.
He knows it won’t happen overnight. It’ll take Black tech founders hitting it big and putting money back into their communities. But walking through CES, surrounded by the latest innovations and the people building them, Marzett sounds hopeful.
“A lot of the people around here are really receptive,” he said. “It’s all zeros and ones anyway.”
Click play to listen to the AURN News report from Jamie Jackson:
