Samsung Just Put Added Gemini on Every Phone. What Does This Mean for CSPs?

Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked on July 22 is yet another example of the widening drift. Gemini now runs as an agent across more than 40 apps on the device itself, working in the background and surfacing results as notifications. For Samsung, it’s not a one-off feature launch, but rather a pattern of market positioning and customer ownership device OEMs are pushing. CSPs still haven’t lost their edge here; it’s just a matter of recognizing the potential to take partial ownership in the on-device experience stakes.

Agentic AI a Market Positioning

An always-on assistant is now part of how Samsung and Apple want their brand to feel, not just how their phones function. That choice raises the baseline for everyone across all technology and provider industries. Customers who get anticipatory, proactive help from their phone start expecting the same thing from every brand they deal with: their bank, their airline, their provider. The stats show how clearly consumers are ready for the agentic era:

• 70% of customers have favorable views of brands who engage them proactively

• 74% of consumers now expect 24/7 support as standard

• 88% expect faster responses than a year ago

• 74% of customers get frustrated when their experience isn’t personalized

CSPs are not immune from this expectation, either. To match the agentic wave and position themselves as AI-native, CSPs deployed their own agents in call centers, in apps, web portals and retail. These agents have proven valuable and demonstrated their ROI thus far, but in limited capacity. 

This is largely due to their reactive posture. At the same time, the market is moving the baseline to proactive engagement. A customer who gets anticipated service from their phone, then has to open an app and describe a problem to their provider, notices the difference. And it affects customer churn probabilities. According to Forrester research, executing proactive customer outreach based on predictive analytics reduces customer churn by up to 25 percent.

That’s not to suggest reactive service has no place, but rather it no longer suffices on its own to differentiate in a saturated market. What CSPs need with their AI agents, as OEMs are doing, is a different approach with customers.

From Reactive to Offensive: What Winning Agents Look Like

The adaption isn't necessarily about sharpening the existing reactive strategy. It's flipping the CSP's AI agent strategy from in a dual defensive and offensive, acting before the customer has to ask. In practice, that means three things:

• Predicting device and connectivity or technical issues before the customer notices them.

• Proactively checking in on how the overall experience is going, rather than waiting for a support ticket.

• Personalizing plan changes and value-added offers, insurance, accessories, media bundles, at the moment they're actually relevant to that customer.

In the context of the customer’s overall communications experience and competition for it, the OEM has an advantage with the experience on the hardware. However, it doesn’t have the holistic view of the customer’s experience. OEMs can be proactive about device performance or upsell based on mobile shopping behavior, but CSPs can go beyond just the device itself. Network information is still an essential factor in understanding customer disposition, which is where CSPs have an advantage.

Piecing together the device, network and CRM information allows the CSP to offer the aforementioned triad of services and products that make customers think harder about leaving over a lower price elsewhere. It also allows them to not cede ground to the OEMs customer care advances on the device.

As the standard has shifted from answering when asked to acting before asked, CSPs’ AI agent strategies need to move with it, or the provider keeps losing the moments that build trust to whoever gets there first, which may sometimes be the OEM. See how MCE helps CSPs turn device signals into proactive engagement, care and upsell.