Allison Stransky, chief marketing officer at Samsung Electronics Americas, shared in a video interview for CMO Insider how the brand is trying to help consumers embrace AI-connected homes, the inspiring inventions coming out of its student competition, and how her favorite AI device doesn’t have a screen.
Following is an edited transcript and video of the interview.
Artificial intelligence is a concept that we are talking about in everything that we do. At Samsung, AI currently exists in all of our categories, across almost all of our products. While AI has come into the consumer lexicon recently, we’ve been innovating in AI for over a decade.
We’re trying now to help consumers understand that AI is a tool, and that the reason we’re putting it on all of our products is because it’s going to help make your life better.
This year, we started a campaign called “Smart Things meets AI Home,” and what we’re communicating is that our connectivity app, Smart Things, helps you create the concept of your own personalized, individualized AI home. The campaign included multiple lines of business and products, rather than talking about one product like your smartphone or your TV.
The storyline was about how all of this works together to create benefits that are above and beyond the features of any individual product.
Because when your washer and dryer can get you of the house faster, or your TV can become the source of the best all-encompassing home entertainment experience, we believe that’s when you see the benefits of AI as the thing that is going to make your life better and different.
Fostering student innovation and loyalty
One of the most special things we do is the Samsung “Solve for Tomorrow” program, a STEM competition for students in sixth through 12th grade. The only ask is that you use STEM to solve a problem in your community.
That’s the whole brief. Because it’s so intentionally vague, the things that these students come up with are absolutely incredible. Over the last couple of years, our winners have been using AI, machine learning, and robotics to solve problems in their communities.
What we’ve been most impressed by is the incredible amount of empathy that goes into all of these solutions.
Last year, there was a team that created an oral cancer screening app — an easier way to see if that problem in your mouth is a simple canker sore, or something much worse.
There was a team that recognized a doctor shortage and created an AI bandage. It could help treat patients faster by actually reading the health of the wound for them.
Finally, there was an all-girls team that recognized that if you are a hearing-impaired athlete, you have a different set of challenges on the field. The team created a sensory headgear piece that not only keeps your hearing aids in, but helps you track what’s going on on the field in a much more helpful way.
We are super impressed by these kids, but we’re also really hoping to start an early relationship with them. We believe that by giving them a platform and a microphone for their incredible ideas, not only will we give them a chance to give back to their communities, but we expect that they’ll love Samsung as well.
So when the time comes that they are in the market for their own phone, TV, or refrigerator, they will remember the great experiences they had with us.
AI at home
I love my Galaxy ring because it tracks my movement, what I do, my sleeping habits, and then makes recommendations. What’s been fascinating to me is that you forget that it’s on — it is completely seamless in your life, and you have these learnings.
The most valuable lessons I learned from my ring has been that my stress level is at its highest not in the boardroom, but when we have lost my daughter’s favorite stuffed animal. You see a serious stress spike.
Knowing that this is just going on, providing these quiet benefits, I love what AI and my Samsung products can do for me.
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