Today's Unpacked event celebrated a new era for the hottest tech on smartphones

Today’s Samsung Unpacked event was huge because it showed off the next step for AI. Samsung spent plenty of time discussing Galaxy AI and called the Galaxy S26 series the first “Agentic AI” smartphones. This means that they are proactive, performing tasks for you in the background. It also means that we are leaving the Generative AI period which covered 2024-2025, and we are moving into the Agentic AI era. Agentic AI seems to be the next big thing in Artificial Intelligence and this is something that Samsung and Google are both moving toward at full speed.

The Agentic AI era is here and Samsung put the exclamation mark on this change today

Generative AI has a primary goal of creating content whether it is text or an image. With generative AI, you ask and AI answers. The generative AI ecosystem is limited to one app at a time. Agentic AI’s primary goal is finishing tasks. Instead of waiting for you to ask something before delivering an answer, Agentic AI watches what is happening and then suggests the actions to take. The latter uses multiple apps to get its task done.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra in manufacturer’s color options. | Image by Samsung

Agentic AI is proactive, autonomous, and is designed to handle tasks that you want AI to complete on your behalf. As an example, suppose you ask Perplexity AI (by saying, “Hey Plex”) to research a vacation for you. It will leave a summary about your proposed vacation in Samsung Notes, and ask Bixby to place the flight information in Samsung Calendar all without switching apps. All you have to do is approve the final result.

Samsung and Google are well ahead of Apple for the moment

What we saw with today’s Unpacked event is that Samsung and Google are leading the way when it comes to AI on smartphones. Apple is still using AI to push email and website summaries and what I consider to be a useless feature like the Image Playground. One aspect of Agentic AI is that to be autonomous, AI needs to know what is on your display so that it can be proactive. Apple will get there, possibly later this year in iOS 27 when Personal Siri is expected to finally be ready.

But what we saw today is that Samsung and Google are the leaders in smartphone AI, and they seem to be ready to take the hottest tech today to its next stage. While there are people I speak with who really don’t use AI at all, this is going to change once Agentic AI makes it incredibly easy to get things done.