Samsung's European CEO Details AI Strategy: Focus on Everyday Value

In an AI market full of spectacle and hype, Samsung says it's trying to blend in. Simon Sung, the CEO of Samsung Electronics Europe, told Business Insider that its AI strategy is "about AI that is genuinely useful and unobtrusive," whether that's a smart home responding autonomously or appliances coordinating daily routines in the background. "The focus is firmly on everyday value rather than novelty," he said in an interview over email. Samsung has developed its own large language models, called Samsung Gauss, but does not offer them directly as a stand-alone consumer product like OpenAI does with ChatGPT. Instead, its consumer-facing efforts center on the Galaxy AI assistant, which is built into the company's smartphones and uses a mix of its in-house AI and tech developed by partners such as Google. Like Google's assistant on its Pixel smartphones, Galaxy AI can perform tasks like live translation and transcription. "The shift is from AI as a feature you turn on to AI as a companion that works alongside you," said Sung. Within the South Korean conglomerate, Samsung Electronics is the company responsible for consumer technology, including its Galaxy smartphones, TVs, and home appliances. It's also a producer of memory chips used in PCs and data centers. In earnings guidance shared earlier this month, the company said it expects profits to triple in the final quarter of 2025 amid a surge in demand for memory chips to power AI models. In early January, Samsung showcased TVs, kitchen appliances, and washing machines at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that featured sensors and voice recognition. "The goal is to make technology feel less like a collection of gadgets, and more like a coherent, responsive environment that adapts to real life," Sung said. Internally, Sung said Samsung Electronics provides training and encourages information exchanges between product, design, engineering, and marketing teams "so that AI fluency grows across the organization rather than within isolated groups." "Because we're building AI into TVs, appliances, mobile devices, and connected services simultaneously, employees naturally think about intelligence as a shared layer across the entire experience, not as a stand-alone feature," he said.