Samsung has presented at the CES 2026 its “AI philosophy,” a grandiloquent concept that sums up its strategy: using its 430 million SmartThings users as moat (or ‘defensive moat’) against the invasion of AI in homes.
Why is it important. OpenAI, Google and company remain focused on announcing the most powerful model. There is little to do against them on that side if you haven’t been doing it for years, so Samsung is playing something else that is not about winning the algorithm war, but about controlling where those algorithms live.
SmartThings is not just an app. It is a platform Matter compatible that connects hundreds of millions of devices already in homes around the world. That means Samsung can add AI to products people already use, without asking them to buy anything new or change their habits.
- Others have to convince you to put a smart speaker in the kitchen. Samsung already has your refrigerator, your television, your washing machine and your vacuum cleaner. And everyone talks to each other.
Between the lines. Samsung’s “AI philosophy” seems, above all, a response to Amazon with its Alexa+. Both proposals have things in common: they understand that if AI models tend to commoditize (to be technically equal until they are not easily distinguishable), the value is in who has the speaker in your kitchen, the TV in your living room and the refrigerator that knows what you eat.
Samsung has been building that ecosystem for years and now it is activating it for something else. Implementation makes the difference:
- Family Hubwith AI and Gemini vision, recognizes what you put in and out of the refrigerator, suggests recipes and connects with other appliances. It’s real tracking so that when you ask yourself “what can I make for snack-dinner?”, the system suggests recipes based on what you have, not on an inventory you made by hand three weeks ago.
- Vision AI Companion It recognizes what you’re watching on TV and suggests recipes if food appears on the screen. Then send that recipe to the Family Hub in your refrigerator, which checks what ingredients you have and tells you what you’re missing. If you decide to cook it, send the instructions to the oven so that it is preheated to the exact temperature.
- AI Soccer Mode Pro Automatically adjusts image and sound when it detects that you are watching football. You can turn up the audience volume, turn down the commentators, or balance both. It’s AI applied to something as specific as “I want to enhance the field atmosphere” or “I want to prioritize the narrator’s voice.”
It is perhaps not as attractive an approach as the war of chatbots that are increasingly capable of more, but maybe (just maybe) it will end up being more profitable. And something else: SmartThings as a Matter-compatible standard. That expands the potential ecosystem far beyond Samsung’s own products.
Yes, but. There are two weak points in that strategy:
- Samsung depends on third-party models. Gemini is your main partner, also for the home, for the smart component. If the models run out commoditizingwe will have to compete on price. And in the price war there always appears a Chinese manufacturer willing to go lower.
- privacy. An ecosystem that knows what you eat, what you see, when you sleep or how you move is also an ecosystem that can monetize that data. The last threat It’s called Dreame.
and there is a red flag On that second point: Samsung has announced an agreement with the insurer HSB to give discounts on home insurance in exchange for connecting home appliances to SmartThings. That is, saving some money in exchange for handing over your behavioral data. As what we already saw with health insurance and wearables.
It’s a double-edged sword: if your behavior reduces your premium, it can also increase it. Or directly invalidate coverage.
The bet. If it works, Apple will speed up with Home (previously HomeKit), Google will push with its Nest and Amazon will double down with Alexa+ and Ring. The battle is no longer for the best language model. It’s because more devices in more homes capturing more data.
Samsung has been losing ground in mobile phones for years fruit of Apple’s clamp in premium and Chinese manufacturers in price. Also against LG in some appliances not to mention Chinese baking for the home. But in the sum of connected devices per home, it does not have so many rivals. That is its trump card: converting the fragmentation of its catalog into the advantage of its ecosystem.
The question is whether consumers will give up control of their home in exchange for convenience. The answer determines whether Samsung ends up being the silent winner of the AI era or simply the maker of gadgets that run other people’s intelligence.
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Featured image | Screens even in washing machines and appliances that talk to each other: this is how Samsung imagines the future of the connected home
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