Two days before CES 2026 officially opened, Samsung held its traditional The First Look press event in Las Vegas on January 4 and laid out its AI thesis for the year: “Your Companion to AI Living.” Rather than selling one all-powerful assistant, Samsung split the concept into three Companions — Entertainment, Home, and Care — mapped onto its three product empires: TVs and audio, appliances and SmartThings, and health. The show floor followed the same structure, with three matching exhibition zones.
The significance is not any single device. It is the positioning: for the first time, Samsung is treating “AI companion” as an organizing principle that runs across the entire product line. SmartThings passed 430 million users in December 2025, and hundreds of millions of TVs and appliances are already installed in homes. That installed base is what lets Samsung pitch AI not as a feature upgrade but as the household’s point of entry. Yahoo Tech’s coverage the same evening made the same call, framing the event around AI woven through the ecosystem rather than any individual product.
Three Companions: Entertainment, Home, Care
Each zone had an owner and a lead use case. Entertainment Companion belongs to the Visual Display business and centers on picture and sound. Home Companion belongs to the digital appliance division, threading SmartThings, the Family Hub refrigerator, laundry, and cleaning devices into one data flow. Care Companion is run by the digital health team and covers proactive care and safety. The clean division of labor means every scenario gets a concrete AI job, instead of one keynote stuffed with dozens of disconnected demos.
Screens as the Interface: Vision AI Companion and a 130-Inch Micro RGB
The Visual Display segment, led by division president SW Yong, put the Vision AI Companion (VAC) front and center. A dedicated button on the remote summons it, and in 2026 it ships across the entire TV lineup — Micro LED, Micro RGB, OLED, Neo QLED, Mini LED, down to UHD. The flagship is a 130-inch Micro RGB TV paired with the Micro RGB AI Engine Pro, pushing AI picture processing onto an even bigger panel.
Two experiential features stand out. AI Soccer Mode Pro overlays player information and camera angles on live broadcasts in real time, while AI Sound Controller Pro automatically balances audio levels. Around them sit the portable Movingstyle screen, Music Studio 5 and 7 WiFi speakers designed with the Bouroullec studio, the first HDR10+ ADVANCED content, and Eclipsa Audio support across the 2026 range. The industry signal here is blunt: the TV is becoming the largest and most durable AI interface in the home — always on, no wearables required, shared by the whole family.
The Home Data Layer: SmartThings, Gemini, and Appliances
The Home Companion segment, led by digital appliance EVP Cheolgi Kim, is about the data flow. The Family Hub refrigerator’s AI Vision now runs on Google Gemini models: it recognizes what is inside the fridge, turns cooking videos into recipes (Video to Recipe), gamifies meal prep with “What’s for Today?”, and produces a weekly FoodNote report. The Bespoke AI Laundry Combo and garment-care devices plug into the same scheduling layer.
On the cleaning side, the Bespoke AI Jet Bot Steam Ultra moves to a Qualcomm Dragonwing processor, gaining the ability to recognize liquid spills, monitor pets, and run a more natural Bixby. What ties it together is SmartThings: 430 million users multiplied by food inventory, usage habits, and energy data is the moat Samsung owns regardless of whose model sits underneath. The model can be someone else’s; the behavioral data is not.
From Selling Hardware to Selling Risk and Health Outcomes
Care Companion is where the business model shifts the most. VP of digital health Praveen Raja presented proactive care built on connecting wearable signals to healthcare systems through the Xealth platform, plus research into early dementia detection from wearable data. The security foundation is Knox and Knox Matrix, and Samsung said it runs red-team exercises against its own AI models — in the home, privacy and safety are adoption prerequisites, not bonus points.
The more interesting detail is insurance. Samsung is expanding its partnership with HSB (Hartford Steam Boiler) after a 2025 US pilot, aiming to convert appliances’ early-warning capability into lower premiums. That moves revenue from one-time hardware sales toward recurring services built on reduced risk and better health outcomes.
What Developers and Product Teams Should Watch
Three things. First, entry points are fragmenting: VAC, Bixby, and SmartThings are each their own interface, and cross-device context sharing remains wide open — teams building home robots or multi-device experiences should study how these surfaces share state. Second, the model strategy is deliberately hybrid: Samsung picked Gemini for the refrigerator and Qualcomm silicon for edge vision, which tells you device makers will match models to devices one by one rather than betting everything on one camp. Third, the CES narrative is shifting from chatbots to physical and home settings — the same week, NVIDIA’s keynote declared the era of physical AI, while Samsung pushed AI into the living room and kitchen. Put together, that is the full picture of where AI lands in 2026.
Sources
- Samsung Presents ‘Your Companion to AI Living’ at The First Look During CES 2026 — Samsung Newsroom
- Samsung Outlines AI Vision at The First Look 2026 Press Conference — Samsung Global Newsroom
- Samsung’s CES 2026 presentation promises AI across its ecosystem — Yahoo Tech
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.