As IFA Berlin opens its doors this week, one unavoidable question emerges: can giant home appliances companies actually make AI “do the chores” like humans do inside a house the way we want it to?

The numbers suggest the industry is betting yes, at scale.

MarketsandMarkets pegs the global smart home market at roughly $230.76 billion this year, on a path toward $450.20 billion by 2032; Europe alone is forecast to grow from about $24.74 billion to $36.12 billion by 2030. What’s changing is what “smart” is expected to mean in the industry.

A recent IEEE global survey found that 96% of technologists expect agentic AI — systems that can act on a task with only light human oversight — to keep accelerating through 2026 , with more than half predicting it will take over everyday household scheduling within the year.

Put those data points together and a pattern emerges: a smart home is shifting from control to coordination — from apps that let you flip switches remotely to systems that decide, on their own, what needs doing. That shift changes which player gets to win.

The Unglamorous Advantage

The assumption for years was that AI-native companies would eat the physical world the way software ate media — fast, from the outside, with incumbents playing catch-up. Haier, a Chinese company that’s grown into one of world’s largest home-appliance makers, suggests something more counterintuitive is happening instead.

Haier Smart Home closed 2025 with roughly €38 billion in global revenue, a footprint across some 200 markets, and more than a billion families as customers — the profile of an appliance company. But CEO Europe Neil Tunstall argues the next phase isn’t about selling more of anything. “It is about creating greater value around them and earning people’s trust over time,” he says.

That reframing points to what actually makes AI hard to deploy in a home: not the model, but everything underneath it — sensors that survive a decade of laundry cycles, embedded computing that costs pennies at scale, supply chains and service networks, and an accumulated knowledge of how people actually use a dishwasher at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. An AI-native challenger has to build all of that from nothing. Haier already has it; it just has to teach it to think.

Tunstall calls this a three-layer bet: intelligence in the product, intelligence across the ecosystem, and AI running through the value chain, from R&D to customer care. Haier plans to put roughly €13 billion behind it over five years — an unglamorous kind of investment, but likely the more durable one.

Intelligence You Stop Noticing

Consider the company’s Vision 15 washing machine, which uses an internal camera and nine sensors to read the load: fabric type, balance, water temperature, foam, whether something has gotten tangled. It then adjusts detergent, drum motion and cycle settings on its own.

“The value is not the camera or the algorithm in itself,” Tunstall says. It’s better fabric care, more precise use of water and detergent, and fewer errors. AI becomes meaningful, he adds, when the technology “almost disappears” into everyday experience.

That’s a useful corrective to a decade of smart-home marketing built on the opposite instinct — more dashboards, more notifications, more apps demanding attention. Tunstall’s version of intelligence is the one you stop noticing, because it stopped generating decisions for you to make.

Orchestration Is the New Connectivity

The harder problem now isn’t getting appliances online — everyone solved that years ago. It’s getting them to cooperate without dumping the coordination work back onto the consumer. Haier’s answer is hOn, a platform linking Haier, Candy and Hoover devices that has grown to more than 12 million active users in Europe, up roughly 40% year over year.

Energy management is the clearest test case. Rather than asking a household to babysit every appliance’s power draw, an intelligent system can quietly time washing, cooling and other loads against real-time energy availability and household priorities. “The benefit is not simply remote control,” Tunstall notes, “but more intelligent and sustainable use of energy without adding complexity to people’s lives.” The win isn’t a new screen to check — it’s one less thing to think about.

It’s also why robotics has started showing up next to washing machines and fridges at trade shows that used to be about neither. Haier is already fielding humanoid and cleaning robots, companion robots and an exoskeleton for physical assistance. Tunstall’s framing is simple: AI lets a system interpret its environment; robotics lets that intelligence act inside it.

That framing — AI as something that has to move into hardware to matter — shows up in the investment data, too. MarketsandMarkets sizes the narrower “physical AI” segment at $1.5 billion this year, growing near 47% annually toward $15.24 billion by 2032; Barclays’ “ AI Gets Physical ” research pegs today’s humanoid-robot market at $2 to $3 billion, with room to reach $40 billion within a decade. None of that is happening inside appliance categories yet, at least not at scale — but it’s the same wave Haier is riding at the product level. Software is learning to move; hardware is learning to think.

More Creation, More Possibilities — and a Champion’s Stage

This vision also reflects Haier’s broader “More Creation, More Possibilities” manifesto: using innovation to make everyday life simpler, more efficient and to create more possibilities for people. At IFA 2026 the company is staging that idea under the banner “Home of Intelligent Possibilities,” showing how connected appliances can sense conditions, understand context, learn habits and adapt — turning the home from a collection of devices into a coordinated system that works quietly in the background.

The same ambition is extending beyond the living room. From the 2027/2028 season through the 2030/2031 season, Haier will become a Global Partner of the UEFA Champions League, marking the next major step in its global sports strategy and its “Play with the Number Ones” platform. The partnership connects the pursuit of excellence on the pitch with the brand’s focus on performance, innovation and better everyday experiences — a high-visibility way to bring the spirit of champions closer to consumers’ daily lives.

The Real Test Nobody’s Passed Yet

None of this guarantees anything. Smart-home companies have a long history of promising simplicity and delivering the opposite. Tunstall draws his own line between an ecosystem that’s merely convenient — one interface for many products — and one that’s genuinely transformative, which “understands context, coordinates resources and acts appropriately, while keeping the user in control.” The boundary has to hold in both directions, he insists: “The intelligent home should increase human control and autonomy, not reduce them.”

The industry hasn’t settled which model wins. But between the market data and Tunstall’s own account of where Haier is putting its money, one thing is hard to ignore: the next generation of dominant technology companies may not resemble AI companies at all. Some may still look exactly like appliance makers — the ones who figured out how to give their hardware a brain, and then had the discipline to hide it.