Samsung took over a slice of the Wynn in Las Vegas this CES with a pretty simple pitch: your screens, appliances and gadgets aren’t just “smart” anymore — they’re supposed to be companions that quietly do things for you in the background. The First Look 2026 showcase, built around the theme “Your Companion to AI Living,” plays out that idea across three big areas of your life: entertainment, home and personal care, with everything stitched together through SmartThings, Samsung Health and a growing web of on-device AI.​

Walk into the space and you’re not immediately hit with spec sheets or neon gaming rigs, but with an AI Gallery that tries to set a different tone. Famous works like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhône” and Korean classics from the Lee Kun-Hee Collection show up via Samsung’s Art Store, framed as if your TV is less a giant slab of tech and more a living-room canvas that can change character through AI-led curation. It’s a small but telling shift: Samsung is trying to sell the idea that AI is not just about voice commands and recommendations, but about taste, mood and ambience.​

From there, you spill into the Entertainment Companion zone — the loudest part of the show, and clearly where Samsung expects most people to engage. Center stage is the new 130‑inch Micro RGB TV, a CES 2026 Best of Innovation award winner, surrounded by a wall of displays and speakers meant to show how the TV becomes a sort of ambient command center, not just a panel for Netflix. The Vision AI demos hammer that home: you stand in front of the screen, talk to it hands‑free to pull up match predictions, look for recipes or fire up playlists, and the system responds as if you’re talking to a very large, very bright assistant that just happens to be your TV.​

Samsung leans hard into sound this year, too. The Music Studio 5 and 7 Wi‑Fi speakers, designed with French designer Erwan Bouroullec, are pitched as minimalist, furniture‑friendly speakers that disappear into your decor instead of shouting “home theater” from across the room. Then there’s the Sound Tower with lighting tuned for sports nights and parties, plus a Transparent Micro LED setup that reimagines the classic vinyl turntable — album art and audio visualizations appear to float in glass, like a record player from a sci‑fi set. In the gaming corner, the Odyssey 3D 32‑inch monitor and Spatial Signage displays experiment with 3D depth and real‑time avatar animation, blurring the line between digital posters and interactive mirrors.​

If the entertainment area is about “every moment of sight and sound,” the Home Companion zone is about the promise almost every smart home brand loves to make but rarely delivers on: less housework, maybe even “zero housework” someday. Samsung lines up its AI appliances like a connected squad — the Bespoke AI Refrigerator Family Hub 32‑inch, Bespoke AI Laundry Combo washer‑dryer and Bespoke AI Jet Bot Combo robot vacuum — and shows how cameras, screens and voice control synchronize through SmartThings. In practice, that means your fridge recognizes what’s inside using AI Vision, suggests recipes and can nudge the oven, while the washer‑dryer coordinates with an AI AirDresser and robot vacuums to handle laundry and floor cleaning with fewer taps and more automation.​

A North America‑focused kitchen package, shown publicly here for the first time, hints at how Samsung wants to localize that vision for real homes, not just concept booths. The appliances are less about isolated clever tricks and more about routines: automatically turning on extraction or air purifiers when you cook, adjusting cycles based on learned habits, and surfacing prompts right when you’d normally reach for a phone or sticky note. The subtext is clear: if Samsung can make all this work reliably, you’re not managing a dozen apps; you’re just living your life while the system quietly handles the boring stuff.​

The Care Companion zone zooms in on health, safety and personal wellbeing, and this is where Samsung’s mobile ambitions show up most clearly. The new Galaxy Z TriFold, the company’s flagship foldable for 2026, is positioned as a kind of pocket control room — a device that can unfold into tablet mode for dashboards, coaching and content while still folding down to regular phone size. On paper, that hardware is serious: a 10‑inch main display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a secondary 6.5‑inch screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, 16GB RAM, up to 1TB storage and a 5,600 mAh battery, plus a 200‑megapixel main camera and IP48 protection. It’s clearly built to be a long‑session, multitasking machine rather than a novelty foldable.​

In the demos, the TriFold acts as the central remote for your AI‑powered environment. Samsung Health extends beyond step counts and heart rates, tying into air conditioners, air purifiers, lighting and sensors to optimize sleep conditions automatically — think cooler room, cleaner air and dimmed lights when the system knows you’re winding down. The company is also pushing deeper into brain health training and cognitive monitoring, using data from wearables and connected devices to flag potential issues early, and layering in exercise and sleep coaching plus recipe suggestions based on what your AI fridge knows you have in stock.​

There’s a softer side to Care Companion as well, with features you can imagine quietly reassuring a lot of households. A Pet Care system uses sensors and cameras to monitor companion animals and spot changes that might indicate health problems, while SmartThings Safe and other Home Care features are designed to alert family members or even request emergency assistance in critical situations. It’s the kind of tech that, if implemented well, becomes invisible until the day something goes wrong — and then suddenly feels indispensable.​

What ties all of this together is the ecosystem story, and that’s where Samsung is clearly betting big. Executives describe AI not as a bolt‑on feature but as a philosophy that guides product design and how devices talk to each other — TVs as entertainment companions, appliances as home companions, phones and wearables as health and care companions. Visitors quoted at the show zeroed in on that, too: creators like Maxence Fleury pointed out how “everything is connected” and how visible the ecosystem’s expansion feels when you walk through the exhibition, while BBC’s Lucy Hedges praised how naturally AI blends into everyday scenarios instead of screaming for attention.​

Of course, it’s still a CES showcase, and that means a lot of what’s on display is best‑case thinking. AI that seamlessly coordinates your fridge, washer, foldable phone, sound system and pet monitor depends on robust connectivity, thoughtful privacy controls and a willingness to buy pretty deeply into one brand’s universe. But The First Look 2026 makes Samsung’s ambitions very clear: it wants to move past “smart” as a buzzword and into a world where your devices feel less like a pile of separate gadgets and more like a set of familiar companions quietly working in concert around you.