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Walk up to a Samsung Galaxy S26 and it looks familiar — same glass slab, same camera bump, same general shape you have seen for years. But power it on, and something is different. The phone is watching, thinking, and in some cases, acting on your behalf before you’ve even unlocked it.
That’s the pitch Samsung made at its Galaxy S26 launch in San Francisco last month. The world’s largest smartphone maker isn’t just adding AI as a feature — it’s rebuilding the phone around it.
For nearly two decades, the smartphone has been a portal to apps. You tap, you open, you navigate. Samsung thinks that era is ending.
“Some of the applications like Netflix and Spotify, provide content, and users use these apps for entertainment purposes. I think such apps will remain around. However, some other apps, like when you want to do certain tasks, if you look at it for certain complicated tasks, you need to open an app and copy or get some information and copy that. Some of the reminder apps and task organisation apps – these apps may disappear because your agent can remember all the information that you already provided. This agent can explore your calendar, your files, your notes, and then it gets the right information on behalf of these apps,” said Won-Joon Choi, Chief Operating Officer of Samsung’s MX Business and the executive overseeing its mobile R&D.
The idea isn’t that apps vanish entirely — it’s that you stop seeing them. Content apps and gaming platforms stick around, but they operate beneath the surface, hidden behind a new layer of voice and visual interaction powered by AI. You tell the phone what you want. The phone figures out the rest.
“When people use AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, it’s more like you ask a question, and the agent answers. But in the agentic AI era, it’s more like you tell the AI what you want to do, and the AI figures it out. It does the thinking, the planning, and then the execution. So from thinking to planning to execution, without your intervention, the AI should be able to complete the task,” Choi explained.
Won-Joon Choi, Chief Operating Officer of Samsung’s MX Business, at Unpacked in San Francisco. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)
What agentic AI looks like in practise
At the launch event, Google previewed how this works with everyday tasks. An AI agent can now shop for groceries — pulling your preferences, accessing an app like Instacart via API, and completing the purchase with your saved payment details. No app-opening required. No tapping through checkout screens.
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The Galaxy S26 takes this further by embedding agents at the system level. Earlier versions of Google’s Gemini assistant could only interact with Samsung’s own native apps. Now, it can reach into third-party services and handle multi-step tasks in the background — booking a ride from the lock screen, for example, without ever launching Uber.
Samsung is calling this “agentic AI,” and it’s why the company is deliberately not branding the S26 as an “AI phone.” The distinction matters to them: previous AI phones enhanced what you were already doing; this one aims to do things for you.
Three AI engines, one device
To pull this off, Samsung has built an unusually complex AI stack. The Galaxy S26 runs three separate AI systems simultaneously: Google’s Gemini handles agentic tasks like bookings and orders; Perplexity powers web-based queries; and a revamped Bixby, now driven by a more capable in-house language model, serves as the on-device assistant.
This approach sets Samsung apart from Apple, which still treats mobile apps as the core phone experience and uses AI as an enhancement layer rather than a replacement for it.
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Choi acknowledges that Samsung’s multi-agent bet comes with complexity — and that Google, the partner powering much of it, is also its biggest competitor in the AI space. Still, the company is pressing ahead.
“When it comes to AI, we have been working with Google for a long time to create something called an AI operating system. We call it AI OS because we integrate some of the AI functions and engines at the OS level, so that we can provide these new agent experiences to application services,” he said.
The Galaxy S26 series provides an improved user experience with Galaxy AI, which simplifies actions and tasks based on context. (Image: TheIndian Express/ Anuj Bhatia)
Hardware has hit the wall
The honest backdrop to all of this AI ambition is that smartphone hardware has largely plateaued. The S26 gets an upgraded processor, a new privacy screen technology that hides sensitive information on-screen (though only on the high-end Ultra model), and AI-enhanced camera features. But the sensors themselves are unchanged, the design is nearly identical to last year’s, and there’s nothing here that will shock someone who’s been following smartphones for a few years.
Ben Wood, Chief Analyst and CMO at market research firm CCS Insight, put it plainly: “At face value, the Galaxy S26 Series devices differ little from their predecessors launched just over a year ago. The company faces the same challenges as all manufacturers when launching new flagship smartphones. In a mature product category, the year-on-year updates are largely incremental, making it hard to stand out from the crowd, despite all the hype around new AI capabilities, improved camera performance, a better processor, slightly faster charging and more.”
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Wood notes that Samsung is trying to address this “hardware peak,” but the deeper question is whether consumers actually value the AI enough to care.
The bigger picture
Zoom out, and Choi sees AI as something fundamentally different from the technology shifts that came before it.
“I think AI is unavoidable. It’s going to happen. It is happening. It’s different from previous revolutions in the sense that, for example, the internet was more of an enabling network, only revolutionising aspects of connectivity. Mobile only changed the way people use devices and access mobile experiences. But the AI revolution is different,” he said.
That’s a sweeping claim — one the industry has heard before about technologies that turned out to be more incremental than transformative. Choi isn’t oblivious to the skepticism.
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“I think there can be some adjustments along the way, but at the macro level, we still need to invest, bring resources, and conduct a lot of research. I still think it’s still the beginning — it’s not done yet,” he said.
AI has been the big focus on the Samsung Galaxy S26 series. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)
Will smartphones even exist in 10 years?
With smart glasses and wearables increasingly in the conversation, the smartphone’s long-term future is a fair question. Choi’s answer is measured.
“We believe there will be a new type of device, but it won’t replace the smartphone — it will complement it,” he said. Interaction will become more natural, more voice-centric, and more AI-driven. But screens, he argues, aren’t going anywhere — visuals still need a surface to live on.
Samsung is hedging its bets anyway. The company is developing two versions of smart glasses: one with a screen and one without.
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For now, though, the bet is on the phone you’re already carrying — reimagined as something that does more and asks less.
