The smart home went big. DREO is betting on going deep.

September 8, 2026 at 9:00 AM ET / 9:00 AM Berlin Time Google, Amazon and Samsung are pushing the home beyond voice commands and routines. But people don't live in a digital world, and the home is not a chatbot. At IFA 2026,DREO put that problem at the center of a Dream Stage conversation with the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and Polar on how to make home intelligence impactful and accessible to people without becoming another source of noise. The smart home has spent years becoming connected. It has not yet become particularly good at knowing what matters. Matter 1.6, released in June by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, is a useful marker of where the industry is heading. The latest release is less about adding more device categories than making devices easier to set up, share information and respond to user preferences and context. The connected home is becoming better at working as a system. The harder question is what that intelligence is worth to the person living there. The largest technology companies are already moving toward homes that can sense more, anticipate more and act with less instruction. The shift is no longer about whether a refrigerator or heater can be controlled from a phone. It is about whether technology can make a useful decision before someone has to ask. For DREO, that creates an opening in a part of the home it has been working on for years. The company has built its business around air comfort across fans, heaters, humidifiers and air purifiers, while steadily adding more precise motor control, environmental sensing and ways to respond to the conditions around a product. That is a narrower starting point than trying to understand the entire home, but it gives DREO a problem it can work on from multiple directions at once. The smart home has a value problem The industry has accumulated plenty of evidence that more smart features do not automatically create more value. A 2025 Harvard Business Review analysis noted that the smart-home products market could reach $537 billion by 2030, yet roughly three out of four smart-product projects still fail to deliver their expected value. Its research also found that consumers respond differently to autonomous products depending on what they are actually trying to get from them. For some, convenience matters most. For others, the point is saving time or improving a specific outcome. 'Smart' on its own is no longer a sufficient reason to buy. McKinsey's annual global white-goods survey points in the same direction. Across more than 9,000 consumers in Europe, Japan and the United States, affordability and ease of use ranked among the strongest purchase considerations, followed by brand trust. Durability and efficiency also mattered far more than many of the connected features the industry has spent years promoting. In McKinsey's assessment, connectivity has been more of a technology push than a consumer pull, with value-adding use cases still needing to prove themselves. That puts pressure on the next generation of home technology to solve a more practical problem. A connected device can tell you what it is doing. A useful system needs to understand whether what it is doing is actually helping. Comfort makes the distinction obvious. A room does not have one fixed temperature. Humidity changes how that temperature feels. Airflow changes how quickly heat and coolness are distributed. Occupancy changes what is needed. Noise matters when someone is sleeping. The same setting can work well in one room and poorly in another. A person does not experience those variables separately. They experience the result. This is also where the wider reaction to AI becomes relevant. During this year's US graduation season, several university speakers who talked about AI and the future were met with boos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a similar response at the University of Arizona. Reuters reported that younger people were becoming increasingly anxious about the effect of AI on their life with positive impacts. The interesting part was not that students had suddenly become anti-technology. They were already using the technology. The discomfort came from a different place. A system becoming more capable does not automatically mean that people feel better about giving it more responsibility. The same principle applies to the home. Consumers are unlikely to value a system because it can make more decisions. They will value it when those decisions solve a problem they already have, fit naturally into their routines and do not leave them with another system to supervise. That is where the idea of a more proactive home becomes useful rather than just fashionable. The difficult part is what happens after the model Once the home can gather more information and software can reason across it, the obvious temptation is to treat the model as the centre of the experience. But a physical environment is not a text prompt. A model can understand a request to make a bedroom more comfortable. It does not automatically know how quickly a particular heater can change the temperature of that room, how airflow from a fan will distribute the heat, how much power the combination will consume or when further adjustment will stop helping. Those relationships have to come from somewhere, and that is where DREO's earlier work becomes relevant. The company has spent years developing the physical systems behind the products it sells. BLDC motors give its fans more precise control over airflow. Environmental sensing provides more information about what is happening around the device. Its TurboPoly Fan 707S, for example, uses millimeter-wave radar to track a person's position and adjust airflow toward them rather than treating the room as static. DREO has also spent years refining airflow systems and the control mechanisms that determine how those systems behave. These are not AI features in themselves. That is precisely why they matter. When intelligence is asked to change the physical world, the quality of the underlying hardware and the company's understanding of that hardware become part of the problem. A model can suggest more airflow. It cannot manufacture the airflow. It can recommend less heating. It still needs to understand how the heater behaves at different outputs. DREO's Air Intelligence is being built around that relationship. Environmental conditions, user preferences, outside information and device capabilities can be considered together before an action is carried out. Physical comfort models such as PMV and PPD give the system an established way to reason about thermal comfort, while device knowledge sets the boundaries for what can actually happen. The distinction is important because it moves AI away from the role of an interface and closer to the role of a control system. The goal is not for a model to sound convincing. The goal is for the resulting action to work. DREO's internal development is already testing that premise. Through shadow replay, the company can run the same environmental conditions against different decision strategies and compare the results. In one internal simulation, its strategy showed approximately 28% lower energy consumption than a constant-mode baseline and approximately 25% lower than an eco-mode baseline while producing better thermal-comfort outcomes. Those numbers are based on internal simulation rather than independent field testing, but the more important shift is in what the company is trying to measure. The system is judged by the outcome of a decision, not by whether the decision happened to involve AI. That distinction may become increasingly important as models themselves become easier to access. General-purpose intelligence is likely to improve across the industry. The harder thing to reproduce is the accumulated knowledge of how a particular physical environment behaves, how devices affect one another and which actions consistently produce better results. That is the part of DREO's history that becomes strategically relevant now. Going deep before going broad There is an obvious reason the largest technology companies are pursuing the whole home. Their products already sit across phones, screens, appliances, services and software, giving them enormous reach and a natural way to connect different forms of context. DREO does not need to reproduce that model to have a meaningful place in the market. Its opportunity is to start with a narrower problem and solve it more deeply. Air is particularly suited to this because the boundaries between product categories disappear as soon as a person enters the room. Heating affects airflow. Airflow affects perceived temperature. Humidity changes comfort. Purification depends on circulation. The consumer does not experience four devices. They experience an environment. That focus is also what makes DREO's approach more accessible. A consumer does not have to rebuild the entire home around one system before an air-related intelligence feature can be useful. A fan or heater already has an obvious job. The intelligence can improve that job first and become more capable as additional information and compatible devices become available. The IFA conversation with the Connectivity Standards Alliance and Polar reflects the same change from another angle. Matter is making it easier for devices to be set up, understood and managed across different systems. Polar is taking personal context beyond the wearable, with 25 science-based algorithms covering sleep, activity, performance, recovery and wellness available to partners through its Polar platform. The point is not that a wearable should control a heater, or that Matter somehow makes a home intelligent. The point is that more of the information needed for a useful decision is becoming available at the same time. The person can be better understood. The devices can be better understood. The environment can be better observed. The remaining challenge is deciding what matters at a particular moment and turning that decision into something useful. That is the larger opportunity behind DREO's move from Air Comfort toward Air Intelligence. The company says it now serves more than 30 million users and holds leading positions in tower fans and heaters across several major Amazon markets. Its 2026 IFA program brings that existing product base together with a more ambitious view of how air can be managed. The vision is still deliberately narrower than the universal home promised by the biggest platforms. That may be a strength rather than a limitation. If the smart home is going to become proactive, it does not have to become responsible for everything at once. It has to become good enough at something that people want to let it do more. For DREO, that something is the environment people are already living in. A more intelligent home may ultimately be less visible than the one the industry imagined a decade ago. It may involve fewer prompts, fewer routines and fewer moments when a person needs to decide which device should do what. The consumer may never think about the system's reasoning at all. They may simply notice that the room feels right. That is a much higher bar than connected appliances. It is also a clearer measure of whether home intelligence has created real value. The smart home started by connecting products. The next stage will have to prove that those connections can improve everyday life. DREO is choosing to prove it one environment at a time. Discover what's next for intelligent home comfort with DREO at IFA 2026. Explore the IFA experience LINK.