IFA Berlin: Samsung consumer electronics VP Jeremy Senior on AI and machines making decisions for us

AI has spread into your kitchen, your lounge room and even your bedroom. But what are the devices which claim to use the technology actually doing?

Samsung Australia's vice-president of consumer electronics Jeremy Senior. Picture: Ken Leanfore

Appliances are already beginning to speak among themselves in the home and even sending orders to suppliers when products they use such as detergent are low.

In a little more than 12 months such skills will be the norm for all Samsung products, with Wi-Fi connectivity a minimum requirement for devices released from 2024.

While the devices can communicate with each other, they will not be making all the decisions for consumers – unless demand begins to shift that way, says Jeremy Senior, Samsung’s Australian head of consumer electronics.

“We know through research that there are certain behaviours that consumers don’t want to outsource to technology,” he tells The Australian.

“As technology becomes more and more prevalent in food preparation and cooking, we know that there’s a line where the hands-on process of cooking is still so important and that consumers don’t want to lose that.”

Samsung's press conference at IFA in Berlin last week.

Users apparently feel similar when it comes to laundry: they are not happy with the process of washing clothes but seemingly enjoy folding, Senior says.

The buzzword in the consumer technology industry is AI, and that was clear at the world’s largest tech trade show in Berlin this week.

Asked what it really means when an appliance is said to use AI, Senior says it’s sometimes as simple as a device changing its function, based on some preset conditions.

Most devices aren’t actively making an assessment of a person or the functions in their home; rather they are changing their output to match their environment, he says, alluding to TVs which automatically adjust their brightness.

The AI flag was being waved across nearly 30 halls in Berlin to attract suppliers and consumers.

At a lower level, the technology is being used on washing machine dials to put popular cycles at the top of the list.

While appliance interoperability with smart home applications is growing, many users are yet to fully utilise it.

“I think the challenge is that consumers have more connected appliances in their home than they know but they don’t yet know how to take advantage of that technology,” Senior says.

While the ability to set routines which read the weather, play music and mute notifications has existed for some time, the next big push for home appliances is in preset conditions.

Air monitors are being used to turn on airconditioners when a home reaches a certain temperature, while purifiers and rangehoods are turning on automatically when a user begins cooking, Senior says.

Energy companies are excited by the space, and in the not so distant future might even offer discounted rates in exchange for some control of energy monitoring devices, Senior says.

“Energy companies have always wanted to get to this point where they can minimise the load on them when they know they’re going to blackout,” he says.

Both technology and energy companies are already looking at ways to make use of homes with solar panels but no storage battery. “Product technology and product software technology in this space can be really meaningful to consumers,” he says.

Joseph Lam travelled to Berlin as a guest of Samsung.

Samsung's press conference at IFA in Berlin on Thursday, August 31, 2023.

Originally published as IFA Berlin: Samsung consumer electronics VP Jeremy Senior on AI and machines making decisions for us