Samsung’s AI Deals Target Apple’s Smartphone Lead

On a Tuesday evening in late February, a short post on Perplexity AI’s official changelog quietly announced the end of one era and the opening of another. The entry read: “Samsung’s Galaxy S26 is the first smartphone to integrate Perplexity’s APIs at the platform level. Bixby now uses Perplexity for real-time web search and advanced reasoning.” It ran to five bullet points. It was, by the understated conventions of developer documentation, one of the more consequential product announcements of 2026.

That integration — combined with the continued deep presence of Google Gemini across the Galaxy ecosystem and Samsung’s stated ambition to embed Galaxy AI into 800 million devices by December — crystallizes the strategic logic now driving the world’s largest smartphone maker. Samsung’s pursuit of Samsung AI deals is not a marketing exercise. It is a wholesale architectural bet: that the smartphone of the mid-2020s should function less like a single-vendor appliance and more like a fluid, open intelligence platform. The company that once trailed Apple on software coherence is now daring to redefine what smartphone software means.

“With 800 million Galaxy AI devices in its sights, a freshly inked partnership with Perplexity, and a multi-agent Galaxy S26 that hosts three AI engines simultaneously, Samsung is waging the most structurally ambitious challenge to Apple’s premium smartphone dominance in a decade — and betting that plurality, not purity, wins the intelligence era.“

The Scale Play: 800 Million and the Democratisation of AI

In January, Samsung’s new co-CEO T.M. Roh — who assumed the role in November 2025 — gave his first major press interview to Reuters, and he did not reach for nuance. “We will apply AI to all products, all functions, and all services as quickly as possible,” he said. The company had shipped Galaxy AI features to approximately 400 million mobile devices in 2025. The 2026 target is exactly double: 800 million smartphones, tablets, wearables, televisions and home appliances — a footprint that would, at a stroke, make Samsung the single largest distribution channel for consumer-facing generative AI anywhere on earth.

The internal evidence for this ambition is striking. Samsung’s own research shows that Galaxy AI brand awareness among its user base jumped from 30% to 80% in a single year — a pace of consumer adoption that, under normal conditions, takes half a decade. Among the features driving that recognition: real-time translation, generative image editing, voice transcription, and an overhauled search layer that surfaces results without requiring the user to open a browser. The raw numbers carry weight, but the direction matters more. AI is no longer a premium add-on on Samsung devices. It is being embedded as a default environmental layer, present in the background of everyday interactions whether the user invokes it explicitly or not.

Smartphone Market Snapshot — Q4 2025 / 2026 Forecast

That context matters because 2026 is not a comfortable year in which to execute a volume ambition. IDC’s March 2026 market intelligence update revised the global shipment forecast to a decline of nearly 13% year-on-year — the steepest contraction in more than a decade, driven by what the firm’s vice president Francisco Jeronimo called “a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain.” The irony is acute: the same AI infrastructure buildout that Samsung is riding as a strategic tailwind is simultaneously squeezing memory supply, driving up component costs, and threatening to price mid-range Android devices out of reach for consumers in precisely the emerging markets where Samsung’s volume base is concentrated.

T.M. Roh acknowledged as much, telling Reuters that price increases were “inevitable” from the memory squeeze. Yet the long-term logic of the 800 million target may survive the short-term margin pain. Counterpoint Research’s Tarun Pathak noted that while the supply crunch would weigh on shipments, “Apple and Samsung are likely to remain resilient” given their supply-chain scale and premium-market exposure. In a contracting market, the strongest brands capture share. Samsung is making sure its brand is now, explicitly, an AI brand.

The Multi-Model Wager: Gemini, Perplexity, and the Open Ecosystem

The strategic heart of Samsung’s 2026 proposition arrived with the Galaxy S26, unveiled at Galaxy Unpacked on February 25. The device is the world’s first to run three independent, system-level AI agents simultaneously: Google Gemini, Samsung’s revamped Bixby, and now, via a partnership formally announced on February 21, Perplexity — accessible through the wake phrase “Hey Plex” or a long-press of the side button. Each agent has direct, OS-level permissions to interact with native Samsung applications including Notes, Calendar, Gallery, Clock and Reminders.

“Galaxy AI acts as an orchestrator, bringing together different forms of AI into a single, natural, cohesive experience.”

— Won-Joon Choi, President and COO, Samsung Mobile eXperience Business (Samsung Newsroom, February 2026)

The Perplexity integration is qualitatively different from a typical app pre-installation. As Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer, explained to Android Headlines, the Galaxy S26 marks the first time a non-Google entity has received OS-level access on a Samsung device — a structural concession Samsung would not have considered three years ago. Perplexity’s Sonar API now powers Bixby’s search backend; even users who never consciously interact with Perplexity are, in a sense, using it every time they ask Bixby a factual question that requires real-time web reasoning. Perplexity’s own changelog confirmed the integration shipped on February 27.

The philosophical departure from Silicon Valley orthodoxy is deliberate. Where Apple and Google construct closed, vertically integrated intelligence stacks — one vendor, one model, tightly controlled — Samsung is building what its COO describes as an “open and inclusive integrated AI ecosystem.” Its own internal research, cited at the Unpacked event, found that nearly eight in ten Galaxy users now rely on more than two types of AI agents. The multi-model strategy is, in this light, a direct reflection of observable consumer behaviour, not merely a technology preference. Whether it coheres as a seamless experience in practice remains the central execution question of 2026.

The technical foundation underpinning these ambitions is the Exynos 2600, built on Samsung’s 2nm gate-all-around process. Its neural processing unit reportedly runs on-device AI tasks more than twice as fast as its predecessor, enabling the “mixture of experts” model architecture that allows computationally heavy reasoning tasks to run locally without cloud latency. This matters for a specific class of user — in enterprise environments, in regions with unreliable connectivity, in cases where privacy-conscious consumers want their data to remain on-device. Samsung’s framing of its “Personal Data Engine” as a local, privacy-preserving learning layer is a direct response to Apple’s long-standing advantage on privacy messaging.

Apple’s Position: Market Leader, but AI Plays Catch-Up

Apple enters 2026 from a position of considerable market strength and uncomfortable strategic awkwardness. Counterpoint Research’s full-year 2025 data placed Apple as the world’s number-one smartphone vendor, with a 20% global share and the highest growth rate among the top five brands at 10% year-on-year. IDC similarly flagged a record 247 million units shipped, with Apple’s premium positioning insulating it from the mid-range pressures hammering Chinese Android manufacturers.

But in AI, the company that built its reputation on seamlessly integrated software finds itself, for the first time in a decade, in the awkward position of acknowledging that a partner can build better models than it can. On January 12, Apple and Google jointly announced a multi-year agreement worth a reported $1 billion annually, under which Google’s Gemini models and cloud infrastructure will power the next generation of Apple Foundation Models — the engine behind a long-delayed Siri overhaul. Apple had originally promised the revamped Siri for autumn 2024. Then spring 2025. Then late 2025. The partnership represents a candid, if corporate, admission that the internal timeline was broken.

As of early March, reports from Bloomberg and Mark Gurman suggest the Gemini-powered Siri features face further internal delays, with the most capable upgrade now expected in iOS 27 — potentially September 2026 at the earliest. Apple has told press the rollout remains on schedule for 2026, but the picture remains, as T3 described it, “slightly confusing.” In the meantime, Samsung has shipped three active AI agents on a flagship device and is expanding the feature set to older Galaxy models through software updates. The temporal gap between Samsung’s deployed capabilities and Apple’s promised ones is, at this moment, measurable in months at minimum.

There is also a notable structural paradox here. Samsung is both Apple’s fiercest smartphone competitor and, through its semiconductor division, one of Apple’s most critical supply-chain dependencies. Apple sources memory components — DRAM and NAND — from Samsung Semiconductor. The same global HBM shortage that is pressuring Samsung’s smartphone margins is simultaneously complicating Apple’s own component costs and forcing the company to delay the base iPhone model to early 2027, a scheduling shift IDC expects to pull iOS shipments down 4.2% next year. Both companies are, in this sense, victims of the same AI infrastructure gold rush — the insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory from data centres crowding out the supply available for consumer devices.

The Korean Industrial Dimension

Analysts who track Samsung through a purely product-market lens often underestimate the degree to which its AI strategy is also a Korean industrial policy story. The shift toward on-device AI inference workloads — running models locally rather than routing queries to cloud servers — creates a “virtuous hardware loop,” as Samsung’s own briefing materials describe it: more on-device AI demands faster NPUs, which demands better memory, which directly benefits Samsung Semiconductor’s HBM4 ramp.

Samsung’s record profits of KRW 20.1 trillion (approximately $15 billion) in 2025 were powered as much by the chip division as by mobile, and the strategic logic connecting the two divisions is tightening. When Samsung ships an AI-intensive Galaxy S26 with Perplexity, Gemini and a local inference engine, it is simultaneously creating demand for the very memory products its semiconductor division makes. This vertical integration, rarely visible to the average consumer, is one of the more durable competitive advantages the company holds over Apple — which no longer manufactures memory — and over pure-play software companies entering the agentic AI era without a hardware base.

The Foldable Frontier and Wearables

Samsung’s AI ambitions extend beyond slab-form smartphones. The company controls roughly two-thirds of the global foldable market as of Q3 2025 and has three new foldable devices — including the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Galaxy Z Flip 8, and a reported third form factor — in carrier testing for a probable July or August 2026 launch. T.M. Roh told Reuters that while foldables have grown more slowly than anticipated, a “very high” repurchase rate within the category suggests deep user loyalty. He expects the segment to go mainstream within two to three years.

The integration of multi-agent Galaxy AI into foldables and wearables is where the platform logic becomes most compelling. A Galaxy Ring or Galaxy Watch user who already trusts Bixby for device control and Perplexity for research is a far stickier ecosystem participant than a consumer who merely uses a single AI feature on a flagship phone. IDC forecasts foldable market growth of 11% in 2027 even as the overall market contracts — the category’s resilience driven by exactly the AI-enhanced productivity use cases Samsung is now building.

Three Scenarios for the Smartphone AI Race

1. Samsung wins the volume war; Apple retains the value war

The most probable near-term outcome. Samsung’s 800 million AI device footprint makes it the dominant consumer AI distribution channel globally, while Apple’s delayed but eventually polished Gemini-Siri experience consolidates its premium lead. The smartphone market bifurcates into a Samsung-led mass-market AI layer and a smaller, higher-margin Apple intelligence tier.

2. The multi-model bet backfires

If the three-agent Galaxy S26 experience fails to cohere — if users find routing between “Hey Bixby,” “Hey Google,” and “Hey Plex” confusing rather than liberating — Samsung’s open-ecosystem pitch collapses into a cautionary tale about complexity. Apple’s eventual single, well-integrated Gemini-Siri upgrade becomes the benchmark against which Samsung’s plurality looks cluttered.

3. The memory crisis reshapes the competitive order

If the HBM shortage persists deep into 2027, smartphone ASPs rise sharply across the board. Chinese OEMs suffer most severely at the low end, Samsung loses volume in emerging markets, and Apple’s premium positioning and supply-chain relationships insulate it from the worst. The AI race becomes secondary to a supply-chain survival story.

The Deeper Competitive Question

There is a version of this story in which Samsung’s pursuit of AI partnerships is framed as a structural weakness — an acknowledgement that the company cannot build frontier models as effectively as Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, and must therefore license them. That framing misses the point. In the intelligence era, the scarcest resource is not the model — it is the hardware in hundreds of millions of consumers’ hands, the default integration that determines which AI a person uses without having to think about it.

Samsung has that hardware. What it has done in 2026, through the Gemini deepening, the Perplexity deal, and the Galaxy S26’s open multi-agent architecture, is monetise that hardware position by becoming indispensable to the AI companies that need consumer distribution. Perplexity, which launched only in 2022, has achieved through a single Samsung pre-install deal what would have required years of organic app-store growth. Google has secured default AI presence on Android devices at a scale that embarrasses any alternative model provider. Both companies are paying Samsung — in capability, in visibility, in strategic value — for access to the audience it has already built.

Apple, by contrast, is now in an unusual position: paying Google approximately $1 billion a year for AI capability on top of the billions it already pays Google for search placement, all while its own intelligence features run behind the delivery schedule its marketing department promised. The irony is not lost on analysts: the company most associated with vertical integration is now the one most exposed to a partner’s model development roadmap.

What the Samsung AI deals ultimately represent is a hypothesis about how the intelligence era will be won. Not through model supremacy alone, but through ecosystem breadth, hardware scale, and the willingness to let the best model for the moment — whatever it is, wherever it comes from — serve the user. Whether consumers validate that hypothesis, or whether they ultimately prefer the coherent simplicity of a single, trusted AI source, will determine the shape of the smartphone market for the remainder of this decade.

For now, Samsung has moved first, moved boldly, and moved at scale. The rest of the industry is watching the Galaxy S26 — three AIs, one device, an open ecosystem — to see if the future it promises is one consumers actually want.

Sources & References

1. Reuters — “Samsung to Double AI Mobile Devices to 800 Million Units,” Jan. 5, 2026
2. Samsung Newsroom — “Galaxy AI Expands Multi-Agent Ecosystem,” Feb. 20, 2026
3. Perplexity AI Changelog — Galaxy S26 Integration, Feb. 27, 2026
4. CNBC — “Apple Picks Google’s Gemini to Power AI-Powered Siri,” Jan. 12, 2026
5. Google/Apple Joint Statement, Jan. 12, 2026
6. IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker — March 2026 Revision
7. Counterpoint Research — Global Smartphone Market Share, Full-Year 2025
8. Android Headlines — “Galaxy S26’s Perplexity AI Integration is Deeper Than You Think,” Feb. 2026
9. TechCrunch — “Google’s Gemini to Power Apple’s AI Features Like Siri,” Jan. 12, 2026
10. T3 — “Gemini-Powered Siri Still on Track for 2026,” Feb./Mar. 2026