Stroll as much as a Samsung Galaxy S26 and it appears to be like acquainted — similar glass slab, similar digital camera bump, similar basic form you will have seen for years. However energy it on, and one thing is totally different. The cellphone is watching, pondering, and in some instances, performing in your behalf earlier than you’ve even unlocked it.
That’s the pitch Samsung made at its Galaxy S26 launch in San Francisco final month. The world’s largest smartphone maker isn’t simply including AI as a function — it’s rebuilding the cellphone round it.
For almost 20 years, the smartphone has been a portal to apps. You faucet, you open, you navigate. Samsung thinks that period is ending.
“Among the functions like Netflix and Spotify, present content material, and customers use these apps for leisure functions. I feel such apps will stay round. Nevertheless, another apps, like if you wish to do sure duties, if you happen to have a look at it for sure sophisticated duties, it’s essential to open an app and duplicate or get some info and duplicate that. Among the reminder apps and job organisation apps – these apps might disappear as a result of your agent can keep in mind all the knowledge that you simply already offered. This agent can discover your calendar, your recordsdata, your notes, after which it will get the fitting info on behalf of those apps,” mentioned Received-Joon Choi, Chief Working Officer of Samsung’s MX Enterprise and the chief overseeing its cellular R&D.
The concept isn’t that apps vanish fully — it’s that you simply cease seeing them. Content material apps and gaming platforms stick round, however they function beneath the floor, hidden behind a brand new layer of voice and visible interplay powered by AI. You inform the cellphone what you need. The cellphone figures out the remaining.
“When individuals use AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, it’s extra such as you ask a query, and the agent solutions. However within the agentic AI period, it’s extra such as you inform the AI what you wish to do, and the AI figures it out. It does the pondering, the planning, after which the execution. So from pondering to planning to execution, with out your intervention, the AI ought to be capable of full the duty,” Choi defined.
Received-Joon Choi, Chief Working Officer of Samsung’s MX Enterprise, at Unpacked in San Francisco. (Picture credit score: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Specific)
What agentic AI appears to be like like in practise
On the launch occasion, Google previewed how this works with on a regular basis duties. An AI agent can now store for groceries — pulling your preferences, accessing an app like Instacart through API, and finishing the acquisition together with your saved cost particulars. No app-opening required. No tapping by way of checkout screens.
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The Galaxy S26 takes this additional by embedding brokers on the system stage. Earlier variations of Google’s Gemini assistant might solely work together with Samsung’s personal native apps. Now, it might probably attain into third-party companies and deal with multi-step duties within the background — reserving a journey from the lock display, for instance, with out ever launching Uber.
Samsung is looking this “agentic AI,” and it’s why the corporate is intentionally not branding the S26 as an “AI cellphone.” The excellence issues to them: earlier AI telephones enhanced what you had been already doing; this one goals to do issues for you.
Three AI engines, one machine
To drag this off, Samsung has constructed an unusually advanced AI stack. The Galaxy S26 runs three separate AI methods concurrently: Google’s Gemini handles agentic duties like bookings and orders; Perplexity powers web-based queries; and a revamped Bixby, now pushed by a extra succesful in-house language mannequin, serves because the on-device assistant.
This strategy units Samsung other than Apple, which nonetheless treats cellular apps because the core cellphone expertise and makes use of AI as an enhancement layer relatively than a substitute for it.
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Choi acknowledges that Samsung’s multi-agent wager comes with complexity — and that Google, the associate powering a lot of it, can also be its greatest competitor within the AI area. Nonetheless, the corporate is urgent forward.
“Relating to AI, we’ve got been working with Google for a very long time to create one thing referred to as an AI working system. We name it AI OS as a result of we combine a number of the AI features and engines on the OS stage, in order that we are able to present these new agent experiences to utility companies,” he mentioned.
The Galaxy S26 sequence offers an improved consumer expertise with Galaxy AI, which simplifies actions and duties based mostly on context. (Picture: The Indian Specific/ Anuj Bhatia)
{Hardware} has hit the wall
The trustworthy backdrop to all of this AI ambition is that smartphone {hardware} has largely plateaued. The S26 will get an upgraded processor, a brand new privateness display expertise that hides delicate info on-screen (although solely on the high-end Extremely mannequin), and AI-enhanced digital camera options. However the sensors themselves are unchanged, the design is sort of an identical to final yr’s, and there’s nothing right here that can shock somebody who’s been following smartphones for a number of years.
Ben Wooden, Chief Analyst and CMO at market analysis agency CCS Perception, put it plainly: “At face worth, the Galaxy S26 Sequence gadgets differ little from their predecessors launched simply over a yr in the past. The corporate faces the identical challenges as all producers when launching new flagship smartphones. In a mature product class, the year-on-year updates are largely incremental, making it arduous to face out from the group, regardless of all of the hype round new AI capabilities, improved digital camera efficiency, a greater processor, barely sooner charging and extra.”
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Wooden notes that Samsung is attempting to deal with this “{hardware} peak,” however the deeper query is whether or not customers truly worth the AI sufficient to care.
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Zoom out, and Choi sees AI as one thing essentially totally different from the expertise shifts that got here earlier than it.
“I feel AI is unavoidable. It’s going to occur. It’s occurring. It’s totally different from earlier revolutions within the sense that, for instance, the web was extra of an enabling community, solely revolutionising features of connectivity. Cellular solely modified the best way individuals use gadgets and entry cellular experiences. However the AI revolution is totally different,” he mentioned.
That’s a sweeping declare — one the business has heard earlier than about applied sciences that turned out to be extra incremental than transformative. Choi isn’t oblivious to the skepticism.
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“I feel there could be some changes alongside the best way, however on the macro stage, we nonetheless want to speculate, carry assets, and conduct loads of analysis. I nonetheless suppose it’s nonetheless the start — it’s not performed but,” he mentioned.
AI has been the massive give attention to the Samsung Galaxy S26 sequence. (Picture credit score: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Specific)
Will smartphones even exist in 10 years?
With good glasses and wearables more and more within the dialog, the smartphone’s long-term future is a good query. Choi’s reply is measured.
“We imagine there can be a brand new sort of machine, however it received’t change the smartphone — it would complement it,” he mentioned. Interplay will turn out to be extra pure, extra voice-centric, and extra AI-driven. However screens, he argues, aren’t going anyplace — visuals nonetheless want a floor to dwell on.
Samsung is hedging its bets anyway. The corporate is creating two variations of good glasses: one with a display and one with out.
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For now, although, the wager is on the cellphone you’re already carrying — reimagined as one thing that does extra and asks much less.