Making Investments in AI: Samsung’s Hina Dixit
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Today, we're airing an episode produced by our friends at the Modern CTO Podcast, who were kind enough to have me on recently as a guest. We talked about the rise of generative AI, what it means to be successful with technology, and some considerations for leaders to think about as they shepherd technology implementation efforts. Find the Modern CTO Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

How does one technology leader approach AI investments? Find out her five criteria on today's episode. I'm Hina Dixit from Samsung Next, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI. Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College.

I'm also the AI and business strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

And I'm Sherven Kodubande, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

On today's episode, we have Hina Dixit, an investor at Samsung Next. Hina, thanks for joining us. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here with you. Most of our listeners are likely familiar with Samsung, giant South Korean multinational, lots of consumer electronics.

But people may be less familiar with Samsung Next. So let's start there. Can you describe what Samsung Next is and what your role is? Yeah, absolutely. Samsung Next is the private equity or venture capital arm of Samsung.

We tend to be stage agnostic, but at the same time, we have six focus areas where we invest. AI is one of them. We also invest in fintech, blockchain and infrastructure, media tech as well, along with health tech.

Along with these six focus areas, we tend to make more and more learned investments about the ever-changing dynamic world as well. So if you or anyone has a cool idea, please feel free to reach out. I should have prepared more and had a few pitches ready so that I could have put you on the spot here while we were recording and get you on record there. So what exactly do you do, though? If there is any deal which is associated with AI, I tend to lead that deal and make

also work on the investment strategy for Samsung Next. When you head out to these startup demos, to these pitch and expos, you will see like thousands of startups. Now, how do you ensure that you're focused on the right areas which matter to Samsung? It should also propel innovation further, not just like furthering the innovation, it should be also usable.

So that's why having a paradigm will help you make those sound decisions where you can actually prioritize certain areas ahead of time than compared to other investors and understand which of the current technologies will be booming, say, a few years from now. And accordingly, you tend to segment and understand that, OK, these are my top priority areas.

At the same time, I'm very, very passionate about mentoring entrepreneurs, mentoring fellow people in tech. I come from a tech background, so I can always understand the hiccups people face when they are moving from individual contributor roles or like your management roles in these big techs and moving forward to a startup entrepreneurial journey. I love connecting with them and helping them out.

That's really wonderful, Hina. So I want to talk about both things you said, both the mentoring, but also I want to go back to how you pick an investment, right? I mean, obviously where you're sitting, you are looking at thousands of opportunities probably, right? And so you mentioned there is some guiding principles in terms of how you prioritize where to focus and what fits strategically with Samsung. But tell us more about how you prioritize

pick an investment once you've already gone through that filter that, okay, it's the right thing for the company. We want to do it. Now you're actually evaluating an AI company. Tell us how you pick. What are the factors you consider?

I tend to focus on very important factors for me personally. Every investor out there has a very different way of investing. Some people are very intuition driven and I have seen such investors make really great decisions. Some people are very theory driven and some people tend to like take it as they go. I am a mix of all of them. I tend to make these sound learned decision where I'm very comfortable and I know the space very well.

One thing that is always very important for me is the team.

Is there like a right product team fit here? Are these individuals capable of building these great products that they are promising? I think that is an essential parameter for me. And then moving on to the problem itself. Is this pain point really like valid in few years? The pain point has to be there. The next thing is the technical innovation. Now that is important because that serves as a moat for you.

or mode for these entrepreneurs, right? Otherwise, any big tech can just go in and create what they have created. We want to have a solid mode around these products that they are building and some sort of novelty. And then moving from technical innovation in the mode, obviously there has to be a decent market size.

You might be building an awesome product, right? But at the same time, the market sizing is very small. It becomes really hard to scale that kind of product. Even if it's not monetizable, it should be solving a very solid pain point. Plus the impact of that particular solution has to be global. And that's another factor for me where I tend to make like, you know, my own decision that, okay, this is something which is going to change everything that we do today.

Tell us more about the team, because technology is one aspect. But how do you suss out both the capability of the team itself and then how well the team works with each other? I mean, a lot of startups have team issues, right? Yeah. How do you look into that? Sure. I think it's a very deep question, and I think it comes from my days at Apple.

Apple has a very startup-like culture in some of their organizations. And here I'm speaking about their culture because there were so many learnings from them. When I started, there was a very open culture where people would come on the weekends to support and mentor you and help you. They wouldn't even ask for any kind of credit. They would help you move forward. And they would help you move forward.

And at the same time, they will not just stop there. They will empower you. They will connect you with the right connections across the organization. I kind of felt that it is very difficult for people to be that selfless and just focus on making the product great. But I think that's what the spirit of Apple is.

And I tend to see similar spirit in founders if I know that they're very, very product-driven or they're very, very goal-driven in terms of team. Then I tend to get that sense, okay, these guys will support each other. You've got extensive experience in this area. You mentioned Apple a couple of times. Tell us a bit about how you got to where you are now from where you started. I come from a very humble family background. So while my dad would work very hard

I would, you know, help them out with our family business, which was a small public call office or a PCO where people go and used to make, you know, telephone calls. So I used to sit there and I used to make those calls for people, handle the customers and enable them to make these phone calls. And that was a very good learning point for me because I learned how to talk to people. From being a very introverted child, I became very public facing, right?

Right there and there that, okay, like these are my customers. They are top priority. I need to serve them, help them. And that's where like, I think some of these qualities that I'm by or these passions that I have that I love helping people. I love solving conflicts probably arise.

I did my high school from Kanpur, which is Mercy Memorial School. And after my high school, I went to a women's college because my parents were a bit conservative yet. I was the first girl in the entire family of my dad's side who went outside of the city in order to get education. It was immensely fun. It was very safe and secure environment. Obviously, it was very competitive. Women tend to be very competitive. And at the same time, I made progress.

trade trends there. And I learned so much from my classmates at that time. We used to trade on these various ideas and we used to like create these Java server pages based applications, web applications for like online cuisine, test banks, writing educational articles. I used to remember even buying a Starbucks coffee that time used to be very, very far off thought because it was so expensive for me. And then I used to work multiple jobs at the same time.

And then I was placed at Symantec six months ahead of graduation. So that took some pressure off of me. And Symantec was a great starting point for me. I was in their data loss prevention team. I learned significantly from all the mentors there. I still share a great relationship with all of them. And then Apple happened and the rest is history. One thing that's fascinating is you were saying that I was thinking about how you tied your

exposure to customer service through that very early call office job. You know, at the same time, much of what we're talking about with artificial intelligence, that strikes me as the kind of job that would be suspect or likely to be replaced. And I have to wonder, how does the next Enid Dixit come along without that experience if we don't have those introductory customer service oriented jobs to learn those skills?

Yeah, I get the question. This has been a grave thought and a lot of people are coming forward and discussing, but I think AI is not going to replace people. AI is going to empower people and that's the thought process I come from because just because phones became relevant, it didn't mean that our mails are not relevant anymore. We still order like Amazon packages and we still get our bills in the mail and whatnot. And

That's how I think we will be able to push mankind, right? That's how we keep on pushing each and every newer mile towards the ultimate goal of humankind future, right? Moving to the ultimate goal there, I think nobody should...

blindly trust that, okay, AI is going to replace their job, but they should be able to learn about AI. And that's one of the things where I've been focusing on finding these really cool technologies which can like help people ramp up on AI. Like why do people need to write any single piece of code in order to use AI? Why can't this be as simple as

looking at an Excel sheet. Why can't this be as accessible user interface, which is very easily programmable just by any business users out there? So finding that kind of interface between AI and the current users, that is a very critical piece where I think investors should focus on. Because ultimate goal here is to normalize the usage of AI and make that publicly available and at the same time accessible as well.

I think this is a very, very good point. That vision you painted is actually quite appealing. It used to be the human element of AI was around making the technology better, faster, cheaper, or write the next generation algorithm, which of course we still do. But that's going to be more and more in the

R&D and innovation zone, I think, as you were saying, the usage of AI will go from humans' role as programmers and writers of code to more

Working at that interface of having these building blocks and connecting those building blocks that AI provides to solve existing problems. But more importantly, as you're saying, thinking about what else can we do with this? How do you innovate now that you have all this at your fingertips?

Yeah, I kind of think the same way because anybody like, you know, think of Excel, like anybody can just jump in to Excel and make applications out of it. I know there are a bunch of cool apps coming around the productivity right now, which are backed by AI. Share with us a bit on your view on the coolest areas of technology today.

that you're looking at right now? What piques your interest these days with everything that's going on with cyber and Web3 and quantum computing and everything else? Can you share specific investments or areas you're looking at? Sure. We are focused a lot on infrastructure pieces of Web3. And at the same time, we are also focusing a lot on AI aspect of Web3.

So can we use these decentralized systems in order to make compute efficient? That's a question that we are trying to discover answer right now. We are also trying to dive in deeper on the health tech side where we want to digitize the normal health paradigm and we want to empower users out there, give them more proper feedback, maybe in their diet, maybe connect them with the right agents or right doctors or nurses. The focus is on empowering the humans,

That's where I think we are trying to focus on. And then obviously there is media tech aspect, which is the metaverse. We are trying to understand how easy would it be to convert any image into a 3D asset and place it in the metaverse. And then how do we make this metaverse accessible just like real world? It seems surreal, but at the same time, there's so much hard work and research for each and every aspect of these.

We are also focusing a lot on the fintech perspective and trying to empower these LATAM countries, finding a way how they can build a very sustainable and safe credit scoring systems in Asia. And for example, India, East Asia and LATAM countries. So building a lot of infrastructure around fintech in LATAM countries and Asian countries is another thing that we are focusing on.

Yeah, I think that infrastructure is particularly interesting because that is an area where artificial intelligence can make a difference when you can get some scale through an infrastructure. It's one of those situations that it seems like it opens up new possibilities when the economics change, when things that were no longer possible become possible. Are there other things that you're working on that are next in the portfolio? What are we going to see from Samsung next, next?

We are moving into robotics as well. I did invest in one of the companies called Integral AI and they are trying to use these large AI models or foundation models into training their robots. But at the same time, robotics is another area where we want to focus on the consumer robotics aspect. So any cool startups out there building these cool consumer robots, please feel free to reach out to us and we'll be happy to jump in and help out.

Tina, we've got a segment where we ask you a series of questions, and these are supposed to be rapid fire. Just give us the first thing that comes to your mind. Okay. You've got a past career that's over a decade of being involved in these technologies. What's your proudest AI moment? What's the thing in this portfolio that you're proudest of that involves AI?

I think I'll have to say stability AI, because before that, there were a lot of research communities around. But at the same time, there was no way that somebody could go and commercialize those research works. And I really value Imad's work there, that he recognized this problem and he got these research facilities together in order to start commercializing and build more solid consumer end products.

We've been very positive about artificial intelligence today, but is there anything that worries you about AI? I think one thing that worries me is that we have seen a recent burst of these large language models-based apps, and that does include ChatGPT. I love their work, but at the same time, there are other pain points.

And then obviously there are copyright issues that we need to solve. There are security issues. So those are some of the other areas where we are trying to focus on and trying to understand how those pain points can be resolved. What's your favorite activity that does not involve technology? It's basically gardening in my house. I just find that very therapeutic. And secondly, I love playing with my dog, Jimmy. He's absolutely adorable. What did you want to be when you grew up?

I have always wanted to be a startup founder. I was eight when I manifested that, hey, like I would be a founder. I would be building great products and I would be helping out other people. So ever since I was eight, I'm chasing that dream. What's your greatest wish for artificial intelligence in the future? What are you hoping we can gain from this?

My biggest wish for AI would be enabling common sense in some way, because these large AI models, they do have some AI capabilities when they can be put together in conjunction. So we know from the recent like PAMI research paper that Google published that, OK, there is a way of analyzing.

having these multiple multi-models work together in order to create more sensible information and reliable information out there for users to believe in. And they basically used it to train their robots. So that's one application, but a lot can come forward from that particular research work that Google published.

including chain of thought prompting as well. How do you use these several models to work together in order to perform better in real world and unstructured environment?

So that would be very cool to see. Okay, yeah, that seems so exciting to me too, because we originally had the generative AI adversarial models where, yes, we learned how to play chess really quickly or we learned through a game, but the universe that has expanded from the idea that we can have bazillions of these models working kind of with and against each other, I mean, that seems very natural to us.

Well, the way that we as humans or current biology works, there seems like there's a lot of potential for that. Yeah, yeah. Well, Dina, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. I think that there's lots, actually, particularly from your background that is inspiring to people. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thanks for listening. On our next episode, Sherva and I speak with Elizabeth Ann Watkins, research scientist at Intel Labs.

Please join us. Thanks for listening to Me, Myself, and AI. We believe, like you, that the conversation about AI implementation doesn't start and stop with this podcast. That's why we've created a group on LinkedIn specifically for listeners like you. It's called AI for Leaders. And if you join us, you can chat with show creators and hosts, ask your own questions, share your insights,

and gain access to valuable resources about AI implementation from MIT SMR and BCG, you can access it by visiting mitsmr.com forward slash AI for Leaders. We'll put that link in the show notes and we hope to see you there.