Samsung has just unveiled its new high-end: the new Galaxy S26 family is here and arrives with a conservative proposal but at two speeds where the Ultra model is the one that comes out the best. And it also brings more artificial intelligence than ever. Leaving aside the long list of functions that were already in Galaxy AIthose that have improved and new features such as ‘Now Nudge’ or Agentic AI, the big surprise It’s a confirmation: Perplexity lands as a full-fledged assistant alongside what already existed, Bixby from home and Gemini of Android.
Full integration. Perplexity comes to compete head-to-head with the home assistant and Google assistant as long as it is integrated at the operating system level. What does this mean? That you can invoke it to use it in system apps such as Notes or Reminder, but also with some third-party applications. It is not a downloaded app: it operates on the device’s framework layer.
And as such, you can invoke it via ‘Hey, Plex’ (without Aitana’s boyfriend appearing) or from the side button. This point is more than a simple detail: it is using the hardware as a distribution lever: whoever controls the hardware controls how the user accesses it. A reminder: Google paid a million to Apple to be the search engine on iOS.
Context: Samsung’s pending issue. Few mobile manufacturers bet as much and as well on AI as the Korean firm. Samsung It is the brand that sells the most mobile phones within the Android ecosystem, but the assistant battle has been lost with Bixby. On the other hand, he has to integrate Gemini by contract.
In short, Samsung cannot control its entire artificial intelligence layer sovereignly and that is a dangerous strategic dependency if you want to be the best.
Samsung’s trump card: being a Swiss army knife. According to an internal Samsung investigationabout 80% of users already use two types of AI agents in their daily lives, so they have turned flexibility into a plus. Since Samsung knows that it cannot go to war with the best language model alone and win, it has opted to become a neutral hub, which allows it to attract advanced users who want to use the best of each house without friction.
As declared Won-Joon Choi, President, COO and Head of R&D Office of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics: “We are committed to building an integrated, open and inclusive AI ecosystem that offers users more choice, flexibility and control to perform complex tasks quickly and easily. Galaxy AI acts as an orchestrator, integrating different forms of AI into a single, natural and cohesive experience.”
Why is it important. Because with this movement Samsung has changed the rules: it declares itself platformnot an assistant. It is a layer that coordinates several agents, leaving behind the “one assistant to rule them all” thing. The Korean firm thus differentiates itself from Apple’s vertical control and closed integration or Google’s tactic of prioritizing Gemini above all and even putting it in the soup.
The movement is most intelligent: it thus neutralizes his weakness (Bixby) to transform it into a virtue. They deliberately decide to open up and let the user choose with whom and for what.
Why Perplexity and not another. Here is an elephant in the room that should be remembered first of all: because the most mainstream AI, ChatGPT, She is already married to Apple. From here, it must be clear that Samsung has chosen the best possible strategic partner for its corporate interests at this time. And there are a few reasons:
- Because it offers a differentiated and complementary value proposition: it is a quality conversational chatbot that cites sources, without advertising and verifiable answers. Its presence is not a redundancy of Gemini, which can be used for productivity and the Google or Bixby ecosystem, for the device.
- A starting point in the most favorable negotiation: Perplexity is a startup that needs alliances for massive distribution against the power of Google and OpenAI, whose valuation exceeds half a billion dollars. This puts Samsung in a position to get better conditions.
- He already had a relationship with the startup, whose AI It is already present on the Korean brand’s TVswhich implies that they are not starting from scratch: their teams already know the respective APIs.
- Its anti-ad positioning. Samsung, which is betting heavily on privacy, has a strong argument here to offer a differential experience compared to Google.
Reduce the Googledependency. With Perplexity, Samsung diversifies its partners without fanfare with Google in a move of corporate geopolitics. The Korean firm has a multi-million dollar deal of distribution with Google and with this twist, their position is more advantageous when negotiating or putting pressure on the Mountain View company: they have Perplexity in the bedroom as a third agent.
Cover | Eva R. de Luis
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