Why Samsung's Experience Chief Wants You to Stop Thinking About Galaxy AI

At a roundtable in London this month, a day after Samsung showed off its new foldables, its watches and a pair of smart glasses coming later this year, the most interesting line of the afternoon was about something Samsung would rather you did not think about. Jay Kim, who heads the Customer Experience Office in Samsung's mobile business, was explaining how the company picks which AI features to build. Then he said something that goes against two years of his own company's ads. "We don't need our consumers to understand whether this benefit is coming from AI," he said. "They just need to understand that what they want to get done, we just make sure that they get it done." Put simply, Samsung does not care if you know the AI is there. It only cares that the job gets done.

That is a strange thing to hear from Samsung right now. Because just a few months ago, at CES in January, Samsung's co-CEO TM Roh told Reuters that the company would "apply AI to all products, all functions, and all services as quickly as possible." He put a number on it too, a plan to double Galaxy AI from about 400 million devices last year to 800 million this year.

By Samsung's own count, awareness of the Galaxy AI brand had shot up from around 30 percent to 80 percent in a single year. This is a company that named the tech after its biggest brand, printed it on the box, and built full launches around it. And here was the man in charge of how the phones actually feel to use, sitting in a room full of Indian journalists, saying the smartest thing to do with all that AI is to make you stop noticing it.

The Invisible Feature

Kim's point is simple once you strip out the polish. A feature that keeps shouting for your attention has already made you work a little, and most people would rather just get the result. "We're not really focusing on AI per se," he said. "We're focusing on what consumers want and how can we get that task done without friction." JB Park, who runs Samsung's Southwest Asia business, said the same thing in plainer words. "Consumer don't have to know about the functioning of AI," Park said, "and that's why we call it Agentic AI." The whole idea of agentic AI, in Kim's words, is "letting the consumer spend less time on getting things done."

The examples they gave show what this looks like in real life. Park talked about a call feature, built at Samsung's Noida and Bengaluru research centres, that senses when you are in a noisy place and turns on noise cancellation by itself. As he put it, the phone "detects and switches on the mode without the person to have to manually change the setting." There is also a new tool on the latest Fold that keeps its eye on the person you have picked, your kid at a school function, say, and re-frames the video on its own to hold them in the centre. Earlier, Park said, "we had to rely on professionals to do these kinds of a job." Neither feature asks you to think about AI. That is the whole point.

An Answer to Two Years of AI noise

To see why a senior Samsung leader would talk down the very thing his marketing team keeps pushing, look at how tired that pitch has started to sound in the markets that heard it first. For two years now, every launch has been a shouting match, Galaxy AI against Apple Intelligence against a long list of spec-sheet claims. And the research from the West says buyers have started to switch off.

The analyst firm Recon Analytics said the industry is basically selling AI to people who just want a phone that works, and that things like performance and battery still decide most purchases while the AI talk goes over people's heads. A CNET survey found that about half of American phone owners would not pay anything extra for AI features, and that number had gone up, not down, over the year. In the same survey, only 11 percent said AI was the reason they upgraded their phone.

So in the richer markets, the tech is being pushed much harder than people are actually asking for it. Seen against that, Kim's refusal to keep waving the AI flag looks less like modesty and more like a man reading the room correctly.

Why India is the Exception that Proves Him Right

India is where this gets interesting, because on paper we look like the one big market that breaks the pattern. A CyberMedia Research study this year, covering more than 2,000 users aged 18 to 35 across eight cities, found that 68 percent of Indian buyers now rate AI features as important, and that AI actually came in ahead of design, price and battery life as a reason to buy, with Gen Z even keener than millennials. If AI marketing is tired somewhere, it is clearly not tired here.

But read the fine print and the story changes. What Indian buyers say they really want is not the AI label, it is a phone they can trust. In the same study, 82 percent said clear and honest data practices would make them more confident, and most believed that keeping the AI on the device itself makes the phone both faster and safer. CMR called this a shift from hardware specs to what it named "experiential trust," which is really Kim's point said in survey language. Now add the number Park shared in that same London room.

In India, he said, "the usage of AI by consumers is higher than global average," and features like Photo Assist, Creative Studio and Audio Eraser "are used nearly twice as often as the global average." Put the two together and the picture is clear. The market where AI most obviously helps sell a phone is also the market that most rewards AI that simply works, quietly, without making a show of itself.

The Catch

Samsung runs this tech at two levels, the full Galaxy AI with real on-device power on its flagships, and a lighter, more cloud-dependent version it calls Awesome Intelligence on its cheaper phones. When the AI is hidden by design, a buyer at the lower end finds it harder to know what he is really getting for his money.

Even so, if you take the survey numbers at face value, Kim has a fair point. The evidence from the tired markets and the eager one points the same way. People stay loyal to a phone that quietly does what they need, far more than to a phone that keeps reminding them how clever it is. And the real test is still to come. It will land on the glasses and wearables Kim says he has personally chased for years.

"I personally have been looking at XR industry for more than 10 years," he told the room, describing devices with no screen big enough for a glowing AI badge and no patience for a menu you have to open first. On those, the AI either understands what you are looking at and helps you then and there, or it quietly fails. There, making the AI disappear stops being a choice Samsung gets to make, it becomes the only way the thing can work at all.