Samsung Electronics said on Sept. 30 it held the Samsung AI Forum 2026 at its Seocho office building in Seoul's Seocho district under the theme "The Agentic Shift: From Intelligence to Impact".

The forum, now in its 10th year, mainly covered agentic AI, which carries out tasks by making its own judgments, and physical AI, which operates in the physical world. The event drew 400 attendees, including 100 professors and researchers from domestic AI graduate schools and 300 Samsung Electronics employees working in AI, and was streamed live on YouTube.

The morning session consisted of keynote speeches by big tech experts and scholars. Richard Ho (리처드 호), vice president for hardware at OpenAI, introduced changes that agentic AI, which makes autonomous decisions based on large language models, will bring across companies and industries. David Green (데이비드 그린), AI technology leader for Asia Pacific and Japan at AWS, presented security and governance strategies to implement agentic AI safely and economically in corporate environments.

Ranjay Krishna (란제이 크리슈나), a physical AI researcher and professor at the University of Washington, presented a new paradigm for implementing high-performance robotics AI with small models beyond the reasoning limits of vision-language models. Yoon-hyung Kim (김윤형), a managing director at Samsung Research and an adjunct professor at MIT, introduced innovation measures for a next-generation "Agentic Intelligence" architecture to strengthen agents' capabilities and broaden the scope of applications.

The afternoon session was split into the DX Division's "AI Technology" track and the DS Division's "AX Innovation" track. The AI Technology track covered efficient AI, physical AI and continual learning. The efficient AI session introduced device design principles and optimization techniques, as well as product cases applying on-device AI platforms.

The physical AI session shared world models, AI models that learn how the real world works to predict what happens next and simulate the results of actions in advance, along with the potential and limits of robot-based models and Samsung Electronics' related research results. The continual learning session introduced "Personalizing AI", which learns new information quickly without forgetting prior knowledge, and "Self-Evolving AI", which analyzes user experience and inconveniences after launch to improve performance on its own.

The AX Innovation track presented AI being applied directly to the semiconductor business and AI transformation cases from global partners. Dell Technologies and Anthropic, among others, shared approaches for applying reliable AI agents to work and methods and examples for building an enterprise AI factory. The DS Division's AX/PI Center introduced design and manufacturing innovation cases applying AI across semiconductor work and presented directions for AI-based work innovation to address on-site tasks.

In a welcome speech, Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and CEO Young-hyun Jun (전영현) said, "Agentic AI will bring fundamental changes to the way we work and to organizational culture beyond simple technological innovation." He added, "Together with global AI leaders, we will explore the direction we should take and push ahead with practical AI technology innovation."