Samsung appointed Murat Akbacak, a former Apple leader in conversational and contextual AI, to head its North America AI Center after combining research teams in Toronto and Mountain View, California. The change was reported in June 2024; Samsung’s research site continues to list Akbacak in the role. It is an AI-research leadership move, not an announcement of a new Samsung assistant or product.
What Samsung changed
In June 2024, Samsung combined its AI research teams in Toronto and Mountain View into a single North America AI Center and named Akbacak its leader. Bloomberg reported that Samsung’s research arm described the consolidation as a way to centralize the teams and improve operations and efficiency. Samsung and Apple did not publicly comment at the time, according to Bloomberg.
The reorganization concerns those two research teams. Samsung’s broader North American AI research listings also include Montreal, Cambridge and New York, but the reported merger does not establish that those locations joined the new center. Nor did the report say that the Toronto or Mountain View offices would close or move.
Who is Murat Akbacak?
Samsung’s official biography lists Akbacak as a senior vice president of Samsung Electronics, Head of North America AI Center and Head of AIC-MV, the company’s Mountain View AI Center. It says he joined Samsung in 2024 and led Apple’s Conversational & Contextual AI work from 2015 to 2023. Before Apple, he worked at Microsoft and Stanford Research Institute; Samsung also lists a Stanford consulting professorship. His stated research interests include conversational AI, human-machine interaction, digital assistants and multimodal AI. See Samsung’s biography.
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Calling him simply “the former head of Siri” overstates what the available record establishes. His Apple role focused on conversational and contextual AI, and Bloomberg described him as having worked on Siri strategy; neither source says he ran all of Siri or Apple’s entire AI organization.
Why his background is relevant to Samsung
Conversational AI is about more than generating a reply: an assistant must interpret what a person means, use relevant context, and respond appropriately across different kinds of input. Contextual AI aims to make those interactions more useful by taking circumstances and user intent into account. Akbacak’s experience in these areas is therefore relevant to Samsung’s research ambitions, although the appointment announcement did not assign him a particular product roadmap.
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Samsung Research identifies deep learning, language AI, on-device AI, generative AI, computer vision and multimodal machine learning among its AI research areas. Its language-AI work includes natural-language understanding and generation, transformer-based systems, common-sense and knowledge augmentation, and large language models. The company’s overview is available on its AI research page.
That work could matter to several parts of Samsung’s device ecosystem, but there is no confirmed announcement that Akbacak directly owns Bixby, Galaxy AI, SmartThings, Samsung’s semiconductor strategy or every AI project in the region. His digital-assistant experience makes Bixby a natural point of comparison, not a documented assignment.
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Galaxy AI and hybrid processing
Samsung introduced Galaxy AI with the Galaxy S24 series and described plans to bring AI capabilities across its wider Galaxy ecosystem. Its materials have also described a hybrid approach that combines on-device and cloud processing. That is relevant because some tasks may benefit from local processing while others may rely on cloud resources; the hiring announcement does not specify which products or capabilities the North America AI Center will deliver. Samsung’s explanation of its approach appears in its hybrid AI overview.
Multimodal and cross-device possibilities
Multimodal systems can work with more than one kind of input or information. This research area, alongside Samsung’s range of phones, TVs, appliances and wearables, provides a broader strategic setting for the center’s work. It does not amount to a promise of a particular SmartThings integration, feature or launch date.
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Why the appointment drew attention
The move came during a period of intense competition over AI experiences. Apple was announcing Apple Intelligence and a more context-aware Siri; Google had advantages across Android, Gemini, search and cloud services; Microsoft was expanding workplace AI; and OpenAI had made general-purpose conversational AI familiar to many consumers. Bloomberg placed Samsung’s internal announcement around the time of Apple’s AI announcements.
That timing makes the appointment notable, but it does not prove Samsung hired Akbacak in response to a single Apple announcement, or that the company was losing ground. The confirmed facts show a regional research reorganization and a leader whose expertise aligns with conversational and contextual AI—not a stated competitive mandate.
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What the appointment does not establish
The public information does not specify the center’s budget, headcount, reporting structure, office plans, or the products Akbacak will oversee. It also does not announce a Bixby replacement, a new chatbot, a specific Galaxy feature, a plan to end reliance on Google or other partners, or measurable business results from the hire.
Centralizing teams may make coordination easier, but no public performance figures establish that it has done so. Samsung’s emphasis on on-device and privacy-conscious AI also does not mean every feature will run locally or that the privacy challenges of personalization have been eliminated.
Akbacak’s current listed role
Samsung’s research page currently identifies Akbacak as Head of North America AI Center and Head of AIC-MV. That provides official confirmation of his listed position, while the original report dates the reorganization and appointment to June 2024. The available sources do not establish a newer announcement or a measurable product outcome.
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