Artificial Intelligence in Practice

16Samsung: Automating The Home And Workplace With Artificial Intelligence

Samsung is the world's largest consumer electronics company by revenue, manufacturing and selling 500 million connected devices every year.

In 2018 it announced that within two years, artificial intelligence (AI) will be baked into every single one of them.¹ From the latest phones to fridges, TVs and washing machines, Samsung is betting that the added convenience will drive consumer spending towards their products.

Samsung also make industrial technology, and this year the company unveiled Saram (Korean for “Person”) – an AI-equipped robot that initially will be used for heavy lifting, but could end up performing surgery.

What Problems Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

In our homes, connected devices are increasingly a part of our lives – modern cars, homes, phones and appliances are packed with data capture and sharing capabilities. The applications are endless, from fitness trackers that collect data that we can analyse on our smartphones, to electricity meters that analyse our use of power and tell us where we could cut waste.

The problem is, it's still very early days for much of this technology, and there's a messy tangle of different standards and protocols vying to become our favourite. When we have to rely on a bunch of different apps and interfaces to get at this data, our ability to correlate it and make useful sense of it can be severely hampered by information overload.

At work, ...