Samsung Electronics has established a dedicated robotics business unit—a move that looks like a routine reorganisation but contains a clear strategic bet on how the company intends to make its money over the next decade. What makes the decision particularly striking is that Roh Tae-moon, Samsung's chief executive for its device business, will personally oversee the new division.
Who is Roh Tae-moon, and why does his involvement matter?
Roh leads Samsung's MX (Mobile eXperience) division, the unit responsible for Galaxy smartphones, tablets, and wearables—in other words, the consumer-facing heart of the company. The fact that he is now taking charge of robotics as well signals something more than mere executive attention. It suggests Samsung intends to extend the MX division's remit into what the industry calls "physical AI."
What is physical AI?
The term, now fashionable in technology circles, refers to artificial intelligence that acts in the physical world rather than merely responding to queries on a screen. Unlike a chatbot, a physical AI system has a body: it can pick up objects, move through space, and assist people with tangible tasks. Robots are its most obvious embodiment.
The concept gained rapid currency after Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, declared that physical AI would be the next great wave of the AI revolution. Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, and start-ups such as Figure AI are all riding this tide.
Why would a smartphone company want to build robots?
The smartphone market has matured. Global penetration is approaching saturation, and unit sales growth has slowed to a crawl. Samsung needs a new engine of growth.
Conveniently, smartphones and robots share a surprising amount of DNA. Sensors, batteries, displays, wireless communications, and software ecosystems are all areas where Samsung already excels. Add AI inference capability and the company can supply both the "brain" and the "senses" of a robot.
The logic resembles the path Apple took from the iPod to the iPhone to the Apple Watch: preserve core competencies while continuously expanding the form factor in which they are expressed.
Why this decision is significant for the MX division specifically
Until now, MX's world was defined by smartphones and wearables—Galaxy phones, Galaxy Buds, Galaxy Watch. Bringing robotics under Roh's authority implies a more ambitious redefinition of the division's identity: a business that uses devices to intervene in people's daily lives, whatever shape those devices take.
If a smartphone is an AI assistant in the palm of your hand, a robot is an AI assistant with legs. The user-experience thinking and the ability to co-design hardware and software that Samsung honed in the smartphone era translate naturally to robotics—or so the company's reasoning goes.
Samsung is not alone
This is an industry-wide race. LG Electronics is also expanding its robotics business. Apple is reported to be developing a home robot. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all eyeing the physical AI market. Robotics, in essence, represents the point at which AI escapes the screen and enters the real world. The competition to build that bridge—and to build it better than anyone else—has only just begun. Samsung's new division is its formal declaration of entry.
What to watch next
Execution is everything. Creating an organisational unit is a very different thing from shipping a competitive product. The robotics market has yet to produce a defining, mass-market device. The critical questions are which category Samsung will target—domestic, industrial, or humanoid robots—and when it will bring its first product to market. Those choices will determine whether the strategy succeeds or fails.
With Roh staking his personal authority on the venture, the rewards of success will be considerable—but so will the consequences of failure. Samsung's vision for the post-smartphone era will gradually come into focus through what it does, or does not, produce in robotics.