If your top priority is keeping appliance data off the cloud, Samsung's stated strategy gives you the stronger claim: its Bespoke AI line uses on-device machine learning to personalize appliance behavior without sending data to the cloud. If you'd rather have contextual, adaptive intelligence across a wider connected experience, LG's ThinQ platform is built around exactly that idea—but its own terms leave cloud upload as the default path for most models. Here is how the two ecosystems actually differ, based on what each company has announced and what their policies say.
Introduction: The Smart Home AI Landscape
Both Korean appliance giants are racing to put AI at the center of the home, and both now frame their appliances as platforms rather than standalone machines. Samsung launched its "SmartThings Meets AI Home" campaign ahead of IFA 2025, presenting a vision in which its AI Home "understands users and adapts to their needs" while connecting both Samsung and third-party devices. LG counters with what it calls "Affectionate Intelligence"—AI that detects your surroundings and, in LG's own marketing language, "understands your behavior and emotions."
The competitive pressure is real. Reporting by Ahn Byeol in The Chosun Daily notes that appliance makers fear ceding the gateway to integrated home management to AI or mobile platform providers—OpenAI is developing AI-focused consumer devices expected to include smart home control, and Apple is reportedly preparing a screen-based smart home hub. That fear is pushing both Samsung and LG to open their ecosystems faster than they might otherwise.
Samsung's SmartThings and Bespoke AI: A Vertically Integrated Approach
Samsung's strategy leans on a structural advantage: it manufactures both the appliances and the ecosystem they run on. According to Samsung's own announcement, its Bespoke AI appliances use on-device machine learning trained on location-specific data sets to adapt to regional variations in how people cook, wash, and store food. The company positions this local processing explicitly as a privacy benefit—one it says has "become increasingly important to consumers."
SmartThings is the connective tissue. Samsung describes it as the layer that lets its appliances communicate with each other and with third-party devices to build automated home routines. The vertical integration means Samsung controls the whole chain—chip, appliance, app, and platform—which is precisely what makes its end-to-end privacy and personalization claims coherent as a strategy rather than a collection of features.
