Samsung Looks for AI Allies to Compete With Apple

TM Roh, the Korean tech giant’s consumer device chief and co-CEO, told the Financial Times on Sunday (March 8) that the company was “open to strategic co-operation” with more AI groups such as OpenAI. 

Samsung has also recently added the Perplexity AI search engine to its mobile operating system, the report added.

Roh said Samsung’s research shows consumers are employing a range of AI services rather than depending on a single platform. He said a wider variety of choices could help Samsung’s Galaxy devices differentiate themselves in a market where Apple has yet to begin offering many of the AI features it announced last year.

“We got into the preparation earlier than others, [and] that is how we have taken and maintained leadership in mobile AI,” he said.

The report added that Samsung has already embedded Google’s Gemini models into its devices, and recently introduced a voice assistant that can reserve a taxi without users having to touch a button.

“Consumers are not bound to one AI platform, they are utilizing multiple AI models,” Roh said, “We are open to all solutions … choice, I believe, is how Galaxy AI appeals to consumers.”

FT noted that Samsung’s efforts come amid a projected downturn in global shipments of smartphones. Counterpoint Research forecast this decline late last month, saying it was being driven by AI-related demand for memory chips and would last “well into 2027.”

Samsung’s AI efforts come at a time when most adults in the U.S. have now tried consumer AI tools for help with everyday tasks, as shown in the PYMNTS Intelligence report “AI Becomes a Daily Habit: The Consumer Shift From Trying Tools to Living With Them.”

“That means the conversation has now shifted to which AI models they’ll keep using,” the report said. “Some tools are becoming go-to utilities, opened by default the way people once pointed their mouse cursor to a search bar. For a growing number of users, AI is replacing search engines as their first stop for getting things done.”

The research shows that consumer AI usage has crossed the “try it” stage, with adoption reaching 54% of adults in January, up five points from the previous month. Mainstream users, or those who use AI for a smaller number of mostly low-complexity tasks and to complement their typical search methods, now make up a little more than one in three consumers. 

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