Hisense turns appliances into AI companions as ¥224.4bn group races beyond the smart-home remote control

Hisense is using IFA 2026 to push its smart-home strategy beyond connected appliances and toward what it calls an AI Companion, a software-led household system intended to sense conditions, understand user intent, coordinate multiple devices and execute tasks with less direct input. The AI Companion Suite, powered by ConnectLife and supported by the new V AIOS architecture, spans refrigerators, ovens, wine cabinets, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, air conditioners and household energy management. Hisense is also working with Amazon to connect selected air conditioners with Alexa+ through the new Smart Home AI Toolkit, creating a route for conversational commands to be translated into device actions. The ambition matters because Hisense generated CNY224.4 billion of group revenue in 2025, with overseas revenue reaching CNY110.7 billion, or 49.3% of the total, giving it a global installed base through which connected services could potentially scale. The challenge is that Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are simultaneously moving from device-by-device intelligence toward contextual, agent-like home orchestration, meaning Hisense must prove that its ecosystem does more than produce convincing demonstrations inside an IFA booth.

The kitchen provides Hisense’s clearest example of how the architecture is supposed to work. Its AI Companion Refrigerator can identify stored ingredients and use personal preferences to recommend meals; the selected recipe can then be passed to an AI Companion Oven to support automatic cooking, while a connected wine cabinet recommends pairings and maintains appropriate storage conditions. After eating, the dishwasher is designed to recognize dish conditions and adjust its cleaning program. The important change is therefore not that individual appliances contain AI, which has become common across the industry, but that Hisense wants the appliances to pass context and intent between one another so a household task can progress across several devices.

Why is Hisense trying to move from smart appliances toward an AI system that acts across the entire home?

The first generation of smart-home products largely reproduced remote controls inside smartphone applications. Consumers could turn an appliance on, adjust a thermostat or check a washing cycle remotely, but the user still had to understand the device and initiate each action. Hisense’s AI Companion strategy attempts to reverse that relationship by making the system understand the objective first and then determine which appliances need to respond.

Hisense describes V AIOS around four capabilities: Sense, Think, Communicate and Execute. Sensing allows appliances and connected systems to recognize people, devices and environmental conditions; thinking is intended to interpret context and user intent; communication provides natural interaction between users and devices; and execution allows the system to coordinate products and services to perform the required task. The conceptual shift is from command-based automation toward intent-based orchestration.

That becomes more meaningful when several appliances contribute to the same household activity. Asking what to cook can require understanding refrigerator contents, dietary preferences, cooking equipment and potentially even wine selection. Laundry can require fabric recognition followed by coordinated washing and drying. Home comfort can involve occupancy sensing, temperature management and energy-price optimization rather than a user repeatedly changing air-conditioning settings.

Hisense itself has identified fragmentation as one of the biggest weaknesses of the existing smart-home market. Individual appliances may contain advanced features but frequently operate as isolated products; systems also struggle to understand the different preferences of multiple people living in the same house; and most devices still respond reactively instead of anticipating needs. The AI Companion strategy is designed to attack all three problems, but demonstrating coordinated scenarios is substantially easier than making them reliable across thousands of real households with different routines, network conditions and device combinations.

How does ConnectLife turn a refrigerator, oven and dishwasher into something closer to one household workflow?

ConnectLife provides the practical connected-appliance layer underneath much of the AI Companion Suite. Hisense has been developing the platform as a way to control appliances, monitor household conditions and coordinate energy use, while V AIOS provides the broader intelligence and interaction framework being presented at IFA.

The kitchen scenario illustrates why integration can create more value than adding intelligence separately to every appliance. A refrigerator that recognizes ingredients generates useful information, but the value increases if that information can become a recipe, move into the oven and influence subsequent cooking settings without the user manually translating the recommendation between appliances. A wine cabinet can then add another layer by matching a beverage to the meal.

Laundry follows the same architecture. Hisense says the AI Companion Laundry Suite can recognize clothing characteristics, select appropriate washing and drying programs and automatically adjust the process. If the system works consistently, the benefit is not an additional control screen but removal of the need to choose among numerous wash-cycle combinations for routine loads.

The air-conditioning and energy products extend orchestration beyond individual household chores. Hisense says its AI Companion Air Conditioner can detect indoor conditions and user presence and adapt airflow as people move through a room. Its AI Companion Energy System uses variables including weather and time-of-use electricity pricing to help determine when household energy should be consumed, creating the possibility of optimizing comfort and cost together rather than managing them as unrelated systems.

Energy may ultimately provide one of the easiest ways to demonstrate measurable value from smart-home AI. A dinner recommendation is convenient but subjective, while reduced electricity consumption or lower bills can be quantified. The more Hisense can connect appliances, HVAC, storage and energy tariffs into one optimization layer, the easier it becomes to show that the ecosystem produces an economic benefit rather than simply additional automation.

Why does Hisense’s Alexa+ partnership matter if the company already has ConnectLife and V AIOS?

The Alexa+ integration acknowledges a practical reality of the smart-home market: few consumers build homes entirely around one manufacturer. Even a household using Hisense televisions and air conditioning may own appliances, speakers, lighting and security products from several other brands. A proprietary system that works beautifully only inside one vendor’s catalogue can therefore become less useful as the home becomes more complex.

Hisense says it is working with Amazon to become one of the first home-appliance brands using Amazon’s Smart Home AI Toolkit for Alexa+. Selected Hisense air conditioners are expected to become controllable through Alexa+ in the coming months, allowing users to describe what they want in natural language while Alexa+ determines the settings and sends the appropriate action to the device.

The timing requires qualification. Amazon introduced the Smart Home AI Toolkit in developer preview in July 2026, meaning the broader ecosystem is still relatively new. Hisense’s September announcement therefore represents an announced integration path rather than evidence that the complete AI Companion ecosystem is already available through Alexa+ across all product categories.

Strategically, however, supporting a third-party agent could make Hisense hardware more attractive to customers who do not want ConnectLife to become their only control layer. The company can compete through the intelligence inside appliances while allowing Amazon’s assistant to become another interface. That is a different strategy from trying to own every layer between the consumer and the appliance.

The commercial tension is who ultimately controls the customer relationship. If Alexa+ becomes the primary interface, consumers may interact less frequently with Hisense software even while using Hisense hardware. If V AIOS and ConnectLife become compelling enough to manage the broader home themselves, Hisense retains greater control over personalization, services and future cross-selling. Supporting both provides flexibility but leaves that strategic ownership question unresolved.

How different is Hisense’s AI Companion strategy from Samsung SmartThings and LG ThinQ at IFA 2026?

Hisense is not alone in describing the smart home as a companion. Samsung entered 2026 promoting its Bespoke AI appliances as Home Companions connected through SmartThings, with cameras, screens, sensors and voice technologies intended to help devices understand and proactively respond to users. Its IFA presentation similarly centers on a “Companion to AI Living” concept spanning televisions, mobile devices and home appliances.

LG Electronics is moving in almost exactly the same direction. Its IFA 2026 AI Home uses contextual intelligence to understand schedules, routines, appliance usage and environmental conditions, while a new ThinQ Claw conversational agent can interpret user intent, coordinate devices and connect with services such as calendars. LG’s Homey platform, acquired through Athom in 2024, gives it another interoperability layer across third-party smart-home products.

The competitive landscape therefore reveals an important shift. Artificial intelligence is becoming less useful as a product-level differentiator because nearly every major appliance manufacturer can describe a refrigerator that recognizes food or a washing machine that chooses a cycle. The next battleground is orchestration: whose platform understands context across the greatest number of devices and can turn that understanding into useful actions with the least user intervention.

Hisense’s opportunity comes from breadth. The group operates across televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioning, kitchen appliances, energy systems and several other technology categories. That gives it enough hardware touchpoints to create meaningful cross-device scenarios without relying entirely on third-party products.

Its disadvantage is that Samsung and LG already have extensive software ecosystems and large installed bases of connected products. LG is explicitly promoting cross-brand interoperability through Homey, while Samsung has spent years building SmartThings across mobile devices, televisions and appliances. Hisense therefore needs ConnectLife and V AIOS to compete on software reliability and interoperability, not simply on appliance specifications.

Why does Hisense’s CNY224.4 billion scale make the AI strategy more commercially important than another IFA concept?

Hisense Group generated CNY224.4 billion of revenue during 2025 and said overseas revenue reached CNY110.7 billion, increasing 11% and representing 49.3% of group sales. The company operates in more than 180 countries and owns or operates brands including Hisense, Toshiba TV, Gorenje, ASKO, Kelon and Ronshen.

That global footprint gives Hisense a distribution advantage when deploying connected technologies. An AI platform does not need to create an entirely new hardware customer base if it can be introduced through televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners and other appliances consumers were already going to purchase. Every additional compatible product can increase the number of devices inside the ConnectLife ecosystem.

Hisense also has a strong position in premium large-screen displays. The company says Omdia data show it held 55.1% of global television shipments in the 100-inch-and-larger category during the first half of 2026. In 2025, Hisense also accounted for more than 70% of global Laser TV shipments.

Televisions could become particularly important as smart-home interfaces because they are already large screens positioned centrally inside living spaces. V AIOS is described as the next evolution of VIDAA OS, creating a potential link between Hisense’s established television software footprint and its expanding home-appliance ecosystem.

The commercial prize is therefore bigger than increasing appliance margins through AI features. A connected household can potentially increase brand retention because replacing one device with a competing product becomes less attractive when several existing appliances already work together. That ecosystem effect has helped technology companies create powerful switching costs in mobile and computing markets, although the smart-home industry has so far struggled to reproduce it consistently.

Why do Hisense’s latest listed-company results show both opportunity and pressure behind the AI-home strategy?

Hisense Group itself is not listed as a single public company, but several major operating businesses are separately traded, providing useful financial context. Hisense Visual Technology Co., Ltd. (Shanghai Stock Exchange: 600060), which covers smart displays and related businesses, reported first-half 2026 sales of CNY28.24 billion, up about 3.7% from CNY27.23 billion a year earlier. Net income increased approximately 13.2% to CNY1.20 billion.

Hisense Home Appliances Group Co., Ltd. (Shenzhen Stock Exchange: 000921; Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 00921) had a more difficult first half. Revenue declined 5.2% to CNY46.77 billion and attributable net profit fell 20.2% to CNY1.66 billion. Profit excluding non-recurring items declined 26.7% to CNY1.33 billion.

Those contrasting results make the AI Companion strategy particularly relevant to appliances. Hisense does not merely need more connected features; it needs technology capable of strengthening premium positioning, improving customer retention or creating services that support better economics in a competitive appliance market. Software that fails to affect purchasing behavior or operating efficiency would have limited financial impact regardless of how sophisticated an IFA demonstration appears.

Market sentiment around the listed affiliates was constructive heading into the weekend, although it cannot be attributed specifically to the September 6 AI Companion release. Hisense Visual Technology closed September 4 at CNY28.60, about 2.8% above its August 28 close and 4.8% above August 4. It traded close to its CNY29.18 52-week high, versus a low of CNY20.56.

Hisense Home Appliances closed at CNY27.88 in Shenzhen on September 4, gaining 2.6% that session. The shares were approximately 5.2% higher than August 28 and around 4% above their August 4 close, while remaining below a 52-week high of CNY31.80. Because the detailed AI Companion announcement came on Sunday, September 6, neither listed company has yet had a normal trading session in which investors could respond specifically to the latest disclosure.

Could privacy, interoperability and false automation become the hidden barriers to an AI-controlled home?

The more useful an AI companion becomes, the more context it needs. A refrigerator recognizing ingredients, an air conditioner detecting occupants and an energy system learning household routines all involve different kinds of information about what is happening inside a home. Personalized recommendations require the system to distinguish preferences rather than treating every person identically.

That creates a design challenge beyond traditional appliance engineering. Consumers need to understand what information is being collected, where processing occurs and which services or devices can access it. Hisense’s current IFA announcement emphasizes functionality rather than detailed privacy architecture, meaning those implementation questions will become more important as commercial deployments broaden.

Incorrect automation can also reduce trust quickly. A washing machine selecting the wrong cycle, an oven misunderstanding a cooking instruction or an air conditioner repeatedly adapting in a way occupants dislike can make an intelligent system feel less convenient than manual controls. Successful companion systems therefore need not only autonomy but easy override, transparent reasoning and the ability to learn when users reject a recommendation.

Interoperability may prove even harder. Hisense can control the behavior of its own devices more tightly, but real households contain third-party lighting, security products, speakers, energy equipment and appliances. Amazon integration helps, while industry standards such as Matter can reduce some device fragmentation, but a truly useful AI home needs consistency across products that were never originally designed as one system.

What will prove that Hisense AI Companion is a real platform rather than another generation of smart-appliance features?

The first proof point is commercial availability across multiple product categories. Hisense has shown integrated kitchen, laundry and climate scenarios at IFA, but consumers need to be able to purchase compatible products in the same markets and activate those workflows without specialized installation or demonstration conditions.

The second is cross-device usage. A refrigerator independently recommending recipes is an AI appliance feature; a refrigerator, oven and dishwasher routinely coordinating around the same household task is evidence of an ecosystem. Hisense has not yet disclosed active-user numbers, ConnectLife cross-device engagement or the percentage of connected households using multi-appliance automations.

Energy savings could provide the clearest quantitative proof. If the AI Companion Energy System can consistently lower electricity costs by shifting consumption around tariffs, weather and household needs, Hisense can demonstrate value in a way that is easier to measure than convenience alone.

Third-party interoperability is another decisive test. The announced Alexa+ connection currently focuses on selected air conditioners and is expected in the coming months. Expansion to additional appliance categories, services and external platforms would indicate that Hisense wants AI Companion to function inside mixed-brand homes rather than only as a closed proprietary environment.

The competition will make that proof increasingly urgent. Samsung is connecting Bespoke AI appliances through SmartThings, while LG is combining ThinQ Claw, ThinQ ON and Homey around its own contextual AI Home. All three companies now describe a future in which the home senses, interprets and acts rather than simply waits for instructions.

Hisense enters that contest with meaningful advantages: CNY224.4 billion of group revenue, almost half of sales generated overseas, leadership in several premium display categories and a broad appliance portfolio capable of supplying many of the devices inside a connected home. IFA 2026 demonstrates that the company has moved beyond asking whether individual appliances need AI. The harder commercial question is whether consumers will trust Hisense software to make several appliances act together often enough that the ecosystem becomes a reason to buy the next Hisense product as well.

What are the key takeaways from Hisense’s AI Companion Suite at IFA 2026?

• Hisense is showcasing an AI Companion Suite at IFA 2026 spanning kitchens, laundry, air conditioning and household energy management.
• The system uses ConnectLife and V AIOS, which Hisense describes around four functions: Sense, Think, Communicate and Execute.
• The AI Companion Refrigerator can identify ingredients and suggest meals, while recipes can be coordinated with connected ovens and other kitchen appliances.
• Hisense’s laundry system can recognize clothing characteristics and automatically select and adjust washing and drying programs.
• The AI Companion Air Conditioner uses environmental and occupancy information, while the Energy System considers factors including weather and time-of-use electricity pricing.
• Hisense is working with Amazon’s Alexa+ Smart Home AI Toolkit, with selected air-conditioner integration expected in the coming months.
• Amazon’s Smart Home AI Toolkit entered developer preview in July 2026, so the announced Alexa+ functionality should be viewed as an emerging integration rather than a fully mature ecosystem.
• Hisense Group generated CNY224.4 billion of revenue in 2025, with overseas revenue of CNY110.7 billion representing 49.3% of the total.
• Hisense Visual Technology reported first-half 2026 profit growth of about 13%, while Hisense Home Appliances reported a 20.2% decline in attributable profit.
• Samsung and LG are pursuing similar contextual AI-home strategies, making real-world interoperability, measurable savings and cross-device usage the most important future tests for Hisense.