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IFA 2026: Looking beyond the smart home with Haier

From AI-powered appliances to humanoid robots, Haier is using IFA 2026 to showcase its vision of the "intelligent home". Euronews spoke to Haier Europe CEO Neil Tunstall about what comes after the smart home — and how soon some of these ideas could become reality.

READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2026/09/05/ifa-2026-looking-beyond-the-smart-home-with-haier

Euronews Next is a future-focused news section covering global innovation, science and technology with a European perspective. Our dedicated team of journalists aims to educate and inspire today’s leaders by providing them with analysis and insights into the people and organisations shaping our future

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00:08The smart home has been something we've been talking about for a while, but every year the
00:12technology moves on. The ability to create new possibilities and to create an ecosystem moves
00:17on and we're really excited to bring a lot of new innovations to markets here in IFA 2026,
00:22because we're really moving the bar forward on how smart is the smart home.
00:39I think we are talking less about products, much more about experiences. We're talking less about consumers trying to think
00:47about things and the products and the system itself thinking, making life much, much smarter.
00:52Also from the point of view of sustainability, from the point of view of results that you can create. It's
00:57about appliances have always been something that
00:59helped you since appliances were created. But now it's about them working together with intelligence.
01:13I think in the area of cooking, the possibility for the product to see what's inside, to make sure it's
01:19done to the right way, to take out the variation of people being not so confident in putting something in
01:25the oven and hoping it's cooked.
01:26The product now will do that for you. And that hopefully means then that we can actually enjoy eating much
01:31more at home.
01:38The biggest one for our industry is actually use because we are electrical products. So we use a lot of
01:42electricity and water.
01:43So really making sure that we are optimizing the sustainable footprint of what we do in the use cases, that's
01:49super, super important.
01:51And that smart products can use direct sunlight, solar, batteries, inverters in a smart way, which can allow us to
01:59reduce massively our carbon impact on the planet.
02:03And that's going to be super important.
02:08We want things to be as human centric as possible. And of course, we can make a robot look like
02:13anything.
02:13But if it looks more human, I don't mean some kind of android. I'm not talking about science fiction.
02:18But there are basic tasks that robotics can do. Already, robot vacuum cleaners, robots cutting the grass.
02:23And some of the basic things that we need to do ourselves, the robots will be able to do it
02:28for us together with AI.
02:29So not in a scary way, not in something which is really strange.
02:32We're not trying to replace the human, but the human can actually enjoy the work that is done by robotics
02:38in the future, making our lives easier.
02:40When it responds to you, and empowers you.
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