Samsung held a press conference ahead of CES 2026, which starts on January 6, but anyone hoping for news on the Galaxy S26 series, the Galaxy TriFold’s US launch, or anything related to a Galaxy Ring 2 will be left feeling disappointed.
Instead, as with many previous CES launch events from the brand, it was mostly about televisions and smart home devices. However, underneath all of them was a foundation of AI, and Samsung made it very clear how much AI we’re going to see over the coming months and years.
TM Roh speaks
The one-hour event opened with Samsung’s CEO and head of device experiences, TM Roh taking the stage to introduce the proceedings. Most will be aware of Samsung’s AI ambitions, and it soon became clear the company has no intention of scaling back, saying:
We will harness the full scale of Samsung to create technologies and experiences that truly matter to people. We will embed AI across every category, and every product, and every service to deliver one seamless unified AI experience.
Various presenters took to the stage to talk about AI in televisions, washing machines, speakers, and other home appliances, with the promise of features like automatically muting commentators during a sports game coming to convince watchers AI is exciting.
At the end of the event, Roh returned with an ominous mission statement, saying:
Every part of Samsung moving in harmony, aligned behind one defining mission, to be your companion to AI living. AI experiences everywhere, for everyone.
Samsung Health and AI
The only mobile-related part of the First Look event centered around Samsung Health, and how AI will play a larger role.
Samsung envisions Health switching from reactive health care to proactive care, which it calls Intelligent Care. Through it, in Samsung Health, personalized health coaching based around sleep, activity, nutrition, and mental health will be possible. It also wants other devices in its ecosystem, including appliances, to use data and contribute to creating this plan.
While it sounds grand, it’s not a dramatic shift from what we’re already seeing in Samsung Health and other fitness and health platforms. Samsung says Intelligent Care will create personalized exercise plans, insights and guidance on improving sleep, and eating a balanced diet.
Where it gets more interesting is how Health may generate personalized recipes and meal plans based on ingredients in your connected fridge, and also base them on metrics like your blood glucose levels.
Samsung also talked about how, in the future, it may be able to monitor for evidence of cognitive change in elderly device owners. It made it clear this wouldn’t be about diagnosis, but awareness. It said the feature will be released in beta form, and only in selected markets.
Wait for Unpacked and MWC
Credit:Â Samsung
CES is rarely a show about mobile, and those waiting for Samsung’s 2026 mobile announcements should look forward to its next Unpacked event, rumored for later in January or into February, and Mobile World Congress in March.
However, the trend of talking more about AI than hardware looks set to continue, with Roh saying it intends to double the amount of mobile devices with Galaxy AI onboard in 2026, taking the number from 400 million to 800 million, in an interview with Reuters.
This, along with its insistence that AI is the future during the CES event, shows why Samsung is more keen than ever to tell us about how its using AI, and that no product or service is safe from its intrusion.
