Glance and Samsung formed a partnership to turn the living room screen into a personalized, AI-powered shopping destination — an agentic commerce experience rolling out across millions of Samsung smart TVs in the United States. Built on Glance’s proprietary AI platform and running on Samsung’s Tizen OS, it lets viewers create personalized shopping feeds and virtual wardrobes and browse fashion, accessories, and lifestyle products through voice and remote.
“Every one of us sits in front of the television getting inspired but not being able to act on it,” said Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi and Glance. His assessment of the incumbent: “The Home Shopping Network is very primitive and not very efficient.” Glance’s agent instead uses context to surface products — though one piece of friction survives. “Making a payment from a TV is hard,” Tewari said. Completing a transaction still requires a phone.
Samsung is giving the agent real estate. It ships on all Samsung smart TV models from 2020 onward through the Home Screen’s “For You” and “Apps” tabs — what Dan Glassman, senior director and head of new business development for Samsung Electronics, calls “the front porch of Samsung TVs,” with Glance placed across merchandising rows and editorial units. “We’re talking about the biggest screen in the living room where you’re able to have a natural language conversation,” Glassman said, describing “an area of commerce that hasn’t really been cracked yet.”
Cracked being the operative history: Warner Cable’s QUBE tried two-way interactive television in the late 1970s and never made it off the launch pad. TV commerce has a long record of not quite working.
Forrester’s Sucharita Kodali sees differentiation this time, plus a data play. “There isn’t anything like it and they seem to have this big distribution with Samsung,” she said, noting the experience sits midstream rather than interrupting shows. The distribution should generate learning across markets and audiences. “They can’t be all things to all people, but if they can discover how they can be some things to some people, that’s hopefully the goal here.”
Read more at Forbes.