Perplexity Reportedly Planning Device Partnership With Samsung

AI startup Perplexity is reportedly working to integrate its technology with Samsung and Motorola smartphones.

The company is in talks with Samsung about adding its artificial intelligence (AI) assistants to that firm’s devices, and has reached an agreement for a similar collaboration with Motorola, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (April 16), citing sources familiar with the matter.

These sources say the talks with Samsung are in the early stages, while the collaboration with Motorola will be announced this month. Motorola is holding a product event next week in New York City where it intends to discuss the partnership, the report added.

As for the Samsung deal, the sources said it could involve making Perplexity the default AI assistant or preloading Perplexity’s Android app on phones. Samsung, the global smartphone market leader, could also prominently feature the assistant in its app store, the report added.

Bloomberg notes that any deal with Perplexity would be complicated by Samsung’s extensive partnership with Google, the default search engine on Samsung devices and the source of many of its AI features.

At the same time, Samsung has been forming ties with Perplexity for months, investing in the company last year and in talks to make another investment soon, the report adds.

The news comes weeks after T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom announced it was using technology from Perplexity to develop an “AI Phone” that would serve as a “virtual butler,” allowing users to simply talk to the phone to get it to carry out tasks, instead of switching from app to app.

The Perplexity assistant will act as the primary AI interface on the AI Phone, similar to how Siri runs systemwide in iPhones and Gemini is embedded in Google Pixel smartphones.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the use of generative AI (GenAI) in the retail world. Upwards of 90% of retailers surveyed by PYMNTS Intelligence, all generating at least $500 million in yearly revenue, report that they’ve already integrated GenAI into their transaction data workflows.

As the next wave of GenAI adoption gets underway, retailers are facing a stark choice: invest in data empowerment, or risk being left behind by more agile rivals, that report said.

“Retailers that rely heavily on data are leading the charge. Among the top applications of GenAI by these first movers are use cases that range from data privacy and anomaly detection to customer segmentation and forecasting,” PYMNTS wrote. “This wide adoption signals a fundamental industry shift: data, once siloed and underutilized, is now being actively transformed into actionable intelligence.”

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