• Samsung’s Galaxy AI has evolved to enable multimodal, personalized AI Agents in One UI 7, enabling users to engage more naturally across apps and services.
• Integration between Samsung, Google and third-party apps is critical.
• The Galaxy S25 series features 12GB of RAM to enable new Galaxy AI features, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC.

Samsung has launched its latest flagship smartphone range, the Galaxy S25 series, the second generation of S-series devices with Galaxy AI at the core. A lot has changed and evolved since Samsung made GenAI the key differentiator in the Galaxy S24 series in 2024. In 2025, Samsung is focusing on enabling AI agents as part of the user experience, evolving how users interact with their smartphones, apps and services and other devices in their ecosystem of Smart Things.

Agentic AI at the Forefront

With the launch of the Galaxy S25 series, Samsung has focused on a fundamental change in the smartphone user experience, driven by Agentic AI integrated into Samsung’s One UI 7 interface. Last year, Samsung emphasized enabling GenAI capabilities and features in its latest flagship smartphones. This year, Samsung, in close collaboration with Google, is taking it one step further. Users will now be able to interact more fluently with their smartphones and the apps on the outside of the silo of each app or service.

The latest updates to “Circle to Search” and Galaxy AI include contextual capabilities to existing features, driven by Samsung’s Personal Data Engine platform. By learning personal preferences, AI agents can deliver responses to the initial query and also suggest follow-up actions. For example, Circle to Search now recognizes phone numbers or URLs and suggests calling the circled number or visiting the highlighted website – in one step, instead of multiple.

Natural language interactions can enable the user to move through menu trees with ease and without necessarily knowing where the navigation would need to lead in the first place. Instead of finding the right sub-setting to change the font size on the handset, a user can now just tell the phone to do so.

Personalized Experience

Samsung’s Personal Data Engine is at the core of the company’s effort to personalize AI capabilities. With this platform, Samsung can analyze on-device data, create personalized experiences and display them in the Now Brief and Now Bar. These two features can give personalized daily summaries in the morning, or surface activity from the day in the evening from first-party Samsung and Google apps.

Hardware Upgrades

Samsung has prioritized the camera hardware and software while also emphasizing improvements on performance, display technology and cooling to enable a better gaming experience. The new Galaxy S25 Ultra’s ultra-wide lens has been upgraded to 50MP – from 12MP in last year’s iteration – enabling more detailed landscape shots and macro photography. Across the series, 10-bit HDR recording is enabled out of the box to improve image quality in all lighting scenarios. For professional image tuning, Samsung has included Virtual Aperture in the Expert RAW application and Galaxy Log for color grading in videos.

For content creators, Audio Eraser allows users to remove, and adjust, various background noises individually. This allows users to tune the audio streams of their videos better, making voices clearer while suppressing surrounding noise, or to focus on a specific sound to set the mood for the video. This is also possible on videos not shot on the Galaxy S25 device.

Initial Impressions

By adding contextual awareness capabilities to Galaxy AI and by developing the Personal Data Engine platform, Samsung is taking the next step in driving GenAI deeper into the user experience. Breaking out of the app silo and enabling cross-app functionality gives Samsung a path to deliver on the promise of AI as an enabler of new mobile experiences and driver of new apps and services. Showcasing follow-up steps lets users do more with the initial queries they might have had.

With Personal Data Engine, Samsung can deliver truly personalized experiences for each user as part of the One UI 7 user interface. This platform will enable users to discover more ways in which the phone, and the apps it hosts, can be useful to them. However, the true impact of the latest announcements will lie in how Samsung can engage developers and service providers to integrate with Galaxy AI, to enable users to interact with apps through the interface instead of the app itself. At launch, first-party Samsung applications and Google apps will be supported, along with Spotify and WhatsApp. Even more complicated will be the integration of apps with highly sensitive content, like banking or medical services. Both subsets of apps should be prime targets for further integration because it could lower the barrier to greater engagement with some of these critical apps for users who might otherwise shy away from using them.

Accessing medical information via conversational agents could be a great benefit for users who are intimidated by app menus, or who might have visual impairments. Data privacy and security will be a critical part of these interactions, so Samsung is relying on its Knox brand to secure personal data. Users are likely to take time to get on board with such far-reaching applications – not to mention, the regulatory requirements a bank or medical institution needs to comply with.

The launch of the Galaxy S25 series showed that observers should not focus on year-on-year hardware comparisons. Improvements to the processor, display, camera and other hardware specs remain critical when viewed through the lens of a potential buyer who is upgrading a two or three, or even four-year old device. From this perspective, the upgrades to key components are much more significant.

The S25 Ultra, in particular, manages to squeeze a larger screen into a footprint smaller than previous generations. While the S Pen appears to be less of a focus for Samsung, it is still available for power users looking for a compact digital notepad. Samsung rightly focused on the evolution of Galaxy AI in year two of the platform. With the new features, the company, along with its key partner Google, presented a forward move for GenAI on smartphones, particularly in Western markets, where Chinese OEMs play a less pronounced role in the development of AI.

Moving to an agentic AI implementation is not a new strategy, but Samsung has shown how it intends to implement contextual features, which aim to integrate intent, on its handsets. Importantly, the company is laying the groundwork to bridge the gap between devices across all form factors which will lead to new ways for users to engage with their ecosystem of connected devices and services going forward.

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