Samsung has spent the last 18 months pitching its phones as AI phones. Not just smartphones with extra bells and whistles, but a fundamentally smarter, more proactive generation of devices. The launch of Galaxy AI last year was a full-on rebrand—an attempt to signal that the S24, and now the S25, were not just newer, but different. And to be fair, the tools are impressive. Live Translate. Writing Assist. Transcript summarizers. Object removers. Browsing assistants that can read pages for you. Generative wallpapers. Drawing suggestions. Audio erasers. It’s a deep bench. But here’s the thing: a third of Galaxy S25 owners aren’t using any of it.
Samsung, to its credit, admitted this in a press release this week. The headline number was that “70% of Galaxy S25 users engage with AI features.” Buried inside that: 30% are not. Which means millions of people are holding Samsung’s most advanced phones to date—and just using them like, well, regular phones.
What’s happening here?
It’s not that the features are bad. They’re often good. Genuinely helpful in some cases. The issue might be… people don’t know they’re there? Or they forget.
Or they tried them once, found the UX clunky, and never went back. Samsung didn’t say why that 30% isn’t engaging, and honestly, it probably doesn’t know. There are no detailed breakdowns. No demographic slices. Just a quiet stat hanging out in a paragraph that was mostly there to promote other milestones.
A timeline of ambition
The same release recapped Samsung’s AI journey so far:
- The Galaxy S24 kicked things off in early 2024, branding itself as the “first AI Phone.”
- The Z6 and Z7 foldables followed, folding Galaxy AI into their flexible designs.
- 20 new languages were added.
- Circle to Search became a headline feature.
- Brief and Photo Assist saw surges in engagement.
- Galaxy AI tools now reach 200+ million devices, with a goal of hitting 400 million by the end of the year.
It’s a lot of momentum. And clearly, Samsung wants Galaxy AI everywhere—across phones, tablets, and the upcoming tri-fold. Their first XR headset will support it, too. But none of that matters if users don’t feel compelled to use the features they already have.
Familiar tools still rule
Despite all the innovation, the most used AI feature—by far—is still Circle to Search. More than half of users use it. It’s visual, obvious, and you can explain it in a sentence. That makes it sticky. Meanwhile, Photo Assist usage has apparently doubled since the S24, and Now Brief—which auto-generates short updates from long content—is now used by a third of users. So people are using some tools. Just not most of them.
And that’s the catch. It’s not a usability problem, per se. It’s a habit problem. People already know how to Google something manually, or translate in WeChat, or crop their photos. Convincing them to change the way they do those things isn’t just a UI challenge—it’s a psychological one.
The friction Samsung doesn’t talk about
There’s also the trust issue. “AI” still makes people nervous. What’s being sent to the cloud? What’s being stored locally? What happens when you circle a face and ask for help editing it out? Samsung has been vague. The privacy message is usually “on-device whenever possible,” but the details vary per feature. And honestly, who has time to read the footnotes in the Galaxy AI settings menu? It’s hard to build habit when people aren’t sure what the tools are actually doing.
Where Samsung goes from here
Hitting the 400 million device target is aggressive. Realistically, it’s achievable only through volume—not usage. That means putting Galaxy AI everywhere: on mid-range phones, tablets, foldables, wearables, and now this upcoming tri-fold and XR headset. But saturation isn’t success. Not unless users engage.
So don’t be surprised if you start seeing Galaxy AI features pushed more aggressively in upcoming updates—pop-ups, guided tours, maybe even gamified engagement reminders. If Samsung wants users to use AI daily, it’s going to have to remind them that it’s there. More than once.
And maybe make it… less complicated. Less buried. More like Circle to Search. Just draw a circle, get a result, and move on. No explanation needed.
