In cutting-edge industries, AI will still be emphasized as a key keyword in the new year of 2025. Home appliance and IT device manufacturers are upgrading their AI functions and are displaying specialized identities in front of and behind AI, such as ‘AI agent,’ ‘AI home,’ and ‘personalized AI.’

Through CES 2025, LG and Samsung have shown their intention to secure a position in the AI home market, and a clash in the related market is expected in the future.

■ LG's Empathy Intelligence Slogan Targets AI Home Market LG Electronics can collect data based on numerous home appliances, home IoT, air conditioning, and IT devices around the world, and is focusing on developing AI functions that enhance user convenience through this.

LG emphasizes 'empathetic intelligence' as the first part of its AI slogan, while also emphasizing that "AI should be used as a technology that goes beyond understanding users and becomes a technology that cares for them." To this end, LG is developing AI based on multidimensional data collected from LG devices and services around the world.

LG plans to apply AI to everyday spaces, from homes, cars, commercial/manufacturing spaces, to virtual spaces, based on AI home appliances and AIoT. LG's ambitious project to realize this is the AI agent FURON, which was released in the second half of last year.

“Puron has intelligent sensing and multimodal contextual understanding capabilities,” said CEO Cho Joo-wan at CES 2025. “Through our strategic partnership with Microsoft, we will create the future of AI-based spaces.”

AI agents equipped with large language models are expected to have a strong impact in the smart home sector. LG has developed a mobile AI home hub, or home AI robot, through Project Q9. Q9 is an autonomous AI robot that was first unveiled at IFA 2024 in Europe and serves as the brain of the AI home. Equipped with Furon, Q9 is expected to function as a hyper-personalized butler for the user by collecting multimodal sensing and sensing data from various home appliances.

The success of the AI home market is likely to be a point of interest in terms of how active the AI development ecosystem will be in the future. Following the release of the AI robot Q9 SDK, LG Electronics recently opened the LG Smart Solution API developer site to support ThinQ API in the global open smart home community, actively promoting an open ecosystem for implementing AI homes.

■ Samsung's AI robot and home offensive, security emphasis, 'leak' concerns dispelled
Samsung Electronics unveiled its vision for a hyper-personalized, customized 'Home AI' at the CES 2025 Samsung Press Conference on the 6th. Like LG, it applies various multimodal sensing, SmartThings Ambient Sensing, to its products to detect and analyze device usage patterns collected from connected devices, as well as surrounding movements and sounds. Through this, it can provide △summarizing household information, △notifying situations requiring action, and △suggesting device control.

The AI voice recognition 'Bixby' applied to home AI can distinguish the voices of family members, enabling hyper-personalized services and customized suggestions for each individual. In addition, the new TV products applied with 'Samsung Vision AI' are equipped with new functions such as △'Click to Search', which allows you to find information by clicking on the content you are watching, △Real-time translation, and △'Generative Background Screen' that reflects the user's tastes.

Samsung attracted attention at CES 2025 by revealing that it plans to release its home AI robot product 'Bollie', which was previously unveiled at CES 2024, in the first half of this year. First unveiled in 2020, Bollie is a yellow ball-shaped home robot that is expected to be used as an AI home assistant.

It is known that it can recognize the user's voice commands and control the power and operation of home appliances, and that it can perform tasks such as obstacle avoidance and home monitoring through multimodal sensing. As applications develop in the future, it is expected to play a role as an AI agent.

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Han Jong-hee explained the ultimate direction of 'Home AI' by saying, "We pursue a direction where connected devices perform functions appropriate to the situation without having to set them one by one, saving time, saving energy and protecting the environment, and taking care of me, my family, and even my pets."

Meanwhile, Samsung's point of differentiation from LG at this year's CES 2025 was 'AI security'. Samsung emphasized 'Samsung Knox' at the beginning of its presentation and emphasized the importance of protecting sensitive data in home appliances and devices.

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Han Jong-hee said, “Security is the top priority when implementing Home AI,” in order to prevent concerns about personal information leaks or hacking that arise as connections between products increase. He sought to strengthen the stability of personal information protection by storing sensitive personal information in separate hardware security chips or introducing blockchain-based security technology to block external threats.

■ Chinese companies are fiercely pursuing AI home and robots, and experimental products are attracting attention
Among the products that attracted attention at CES 2025 was a robot vacuum cleaner equipped with a robotic arm. Roborock, a leading Chinese robot vacuum cleaner company, attracted the attention of visitors by exhibiting the 'Saros Z70', a vacuum cleaner equipped with the world's first 5-axis foldable robot arm, 'Omni-Grip'.

The robot arm can lift and move items weighing up to 300 grams, such as socks, towels, and sandals, and can detect items during the first cleaning and clean the space while removing light items during the second cleaning stage. The introduction of the new robot arm vacuum cleaner is evaluated as symbolizing Roborock's new possibilities and innovation.

While display companies such as Hisense and TCL showcased new ultra-large TV products and emphasized China’s ultra-large panel technology and high-definition advantages, they did not emphasize AI functions. However, they attracted the attention of visitors by demonstrating the home AI robot ‘Amy’ at their booth.

Chinese companies, which are closely following the leaders in terms of hardware performance, are looking ahead to the AI home market as their next step, and a full-scale competition to dominate AI homes, robots, and AI application app development is expected next year.