If there’s one thing I learned from Berlin’s 2025 IFA consumer tech show, it’s that AI has taken over marketing, too. Even with my smart home focus, it was difficult to find a new product or announcement that didn’t have “AI” somewhere in its promotion. That’s a problem for the average tech enjoyer, because it’s no longer clear what AI means, if it’s actually AI in the modern sense (which some would argue isn’t even true AI at all), or if it adds anything worth having.
Read more: Promptware Threatens to Take Over AI and Smart Homes: Here’s How to Protect Yourself
When is AI actually AI?
When I say artificial intelligence was everywhere at IFA, I mean it. The buzzword showed up in SwitchBot’s fuzzy bear robots and prompt-based wall decorations as well as Roborock’s smart mapping robot lawn mowers and Hisense’s refrigerator guides for recipes. Samsung brought all three of its AI brands to IFA, with Bespoke AI for appliances, Vision AI for home entertainment and Galaxy AI for its phones. And you better believe that voice assistants are now called “AI voice assistants” whenever possible.
But when so many companies slap on that AI label, it starts losing meaning. How many of these new devices actually have the modern definition of AI? I mean the common generative AIs, typically powered by LLMs, that we see every day in the form of Google Gemini and ChatGPT, which can summarize information and “talk” to us in conversational ways. Many do have some generative capabilities, but calling them AI in the same vein as fully fledged chatbots is a stretch at best.
Other uses of AI make it clear it’s a branding term, something that marketing needs to have these days. It’s disappointing and confusing when there are no standard AI features to be found in an AI-branded product. For example, when Samsung says its Bespoke AI can save energy used by its washing machines, it appears to refer to algorithms and sensors that control washing cycles, something that would never be called “AI” a few short years ago.
Moves like this can cheapen the term and distract from products that really do have built-in artificial intelligence — when everything’s AI, nothing is. Or at least people start to feel that way, which is a marketing problem companies have only begun to face.
On the other hand, props to lighting company Lepro, which came to IFA ready to explain that its voice assistant really was created using an LLM trained on design concepts to help pick the right colors associated with a variety of activities. Details like these make it easier to see if the AI is really there and what it’s doing (that’s also helpful to me as a reviewer).
When is AI worth having?
The surge of AI branding creates another dilemma: Is AI actually worth it in the smart home? Are these AI-labeled features worth their often-higher prices? That’s a trickier question. In some cases, absolutely — especially if you want AIs trained to recognize certain faces or scan your video clips for you.
In other scenarios, AI doesn’t add much at all. Hisense made a great effort to add AI to all of its IFA announcements. But certain examples fell flat, like the AI voice assistant in its U8 S Pro Air Conditioner, which seems like just a voice assistant and not even an advanced one. It’s limited to only 18 voice commands. The advertised AI Cooking Agent and AI Laundry Agent in its kitchen tech look completely unnecessary, butting into daily tasks we already know how to do or can find more teachable guides with a quick Google or question to a smart display.
Even the innovative AI-prompt E Ink picture frame from SwitchBot’s, which I can’t wait to try, has a certain “Why do I need this?” quality to it. Many of the latest AI pushes suffer from tjos. We only have so much room in our homes and lives for new smart tech: AI works best when it’s saving us time and headaches, not creating more for us to manage.
This is the part where I toot my own horn, and all of us testers here at CNET. We don’t expect the typical tech buyer to have the time or energy to scout out all these details or quiz voice assistants with every command. That’s why we review devices, phones, apps and chatbots: To see which are worth it, which make life better, which have privacy issues, which hallucinate too much and all those other grimy details. When so many products are called AI this or AI that, you need experts to pan for the gold. And IFA 2025 has brought me a whole new list of tech to sift.
If you want related home security thoughts, check out what I like about home security AI and see if it could help you out, too.
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