Name: Where Is the Tipping Point for AI?
Uploaded: 2025-05-26T23:15:44.000Z
Duration: 20 min 38 s
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Adverbs of manner

We have 20 minutes exactly to try and understand from a tech perspective, a tech investor perspective, what AI means.

And I'm still amazed at how many big chief executives that I speak to that say, I know AI.

Adverbs of degree

I have many AI people that help me, but I don't fully understand the impact this has on me, my staff, and my company in the next five years.

Is it difficult to have a hard conviction on where AI goes in the next five years?

Well, first of all, the way I see AI is being able to process an intense amount of data information to be able to direct it towards a very specific question or solution that you're searching for.

And obviously, so many advances have been made in recent times just because we've gotten to the point where our computing power has reached the point where we can crunch loads and data and be able to give you responses in a timely manner.

But all of you, if you've seen ChatGBT, there's certain things that you can obviously get an instantaneous answer.

There's some things that even that model is still having to figure out how to get your answer and compute.

And obviously, high intensive sort of computational needs like graphics, video, et cetera, takes more.

So even advances today like Google's VO3 is an amazing advance in terms of how we're moving so fast in all dimensions of AI.

And Henry, just so that everybody knows, basically Phoenix Holdings focuses on technology, financial services, sports, and media.

So do you invest in AI or do you also use it to make the best investment decisions?

So we're in a unique situation because we're in an emerging market in Vietnam.

And obviously, we're trying to keep up with all the sort of major technological trends that are obviously transforming the world.

Vietnam itself is just a fast emerging economy.

But at the same time, it sees an opportunity in AI in terms of being able to leapfrog into the next generation of technologies.

OK, so Chris, basically you're the chief executive signal fire.

And this is a venture capital firm. $1 billion is what you raise of fresh capital to back AI companies.

So we are the first venture firm actually built on an AI platform.

So I founded the firm about 13 years ago.

And from day one, we've been actually practitioners of using AI.

So we actually track more data on startups than anyone in the world and use that to track about 650 million people, process where people are spending on different applications, and then use that to target what may be the best opportunities.

Is it difficult, again, to have conviction on one thing?

Because there's so much and there's so many players.

So we've been more concerned about the infrastructure layer, that it's rapidly commoditizing, and that the pricing has been dropping by orders of magnitude each year.

So it's a tough time to be at the infrastructure layer, but a very interesting time to be at the application layer, where so much data is sitting in silos with inside every type of organization on the planet, where AI can bring that into a pool that can then, over time, be used to take more action.

And so we see the land grab around aggregating that data and the concept of data gravity and data network effects as a sort of core investment thesis.

So Mia, how do you use AI first at Multiply?

So basically for the investments that you look at and the companies that you buy.

And also, after we invest, we move them to our operation alarm, in which we start integrating them into our platform in the sectors that we operate in.

At the investment stage, for the last maybe few years, we've been doing legal, financial, technical due diligence, as we should.

But we've recently included AI and cybersecurity that falls under technical due diligence, because it's important for us when we invest in a company to know that this company is optimizing its output and the way it operates.

Once the investment is done and moves to our operating group, we use AI across several touch points.

First of all, at the board level, we've recently introduced MAI, which is an AI board observer that enhances decision-making, executive decision-making, at the level of the board, and also brings more transparency and compliance to the shareholders.

We've also integrated multiple AI tools across our financial, legal, recruitment departments.

And we've seen a lot of efficiency come out of that.

At this level, we've counted efficiency in terms of man hour, and we've seen 140,000 man hours saved at this level.

But more importantly, so that's for the shared services at the board level, and more importantly, across each vertical, it has become more and more interesting and easier for us to use AI tools in order to really create, extract value and create good savings.

In our media vertical, for example, we have four companies.

Now they talk to each other, now they sell each other's  So, with this new inventory, and also with this AI integration, hyper-targeting the client when we really use the data that we have, anonymize it, and use it to hyper-target clients in media, we've created tangible 17% uplift on the EBITDA of this particular vertical.

Also, we have adjunct AI's, we have initiatives that empower and actually ask, demand employees to start learning how to better integrate AI tools in their operations.

Could I ask each of you actually what AI Utopia looks like?

Again, like in four or five years, I mean, the advancement is so fast.

We don't really know, and we have valuations of DeepSeek, we don't really know where the best innovators come from, or what sticks.

We know OpenAI is now looking at possibly doing hardware.

I mean, do you need to have a blueprint of where you think we're in five years to be a good investor?

Look, just to give some perspective, five years, in terms of AI, we were just talking backstage, ChatGPT just came out about two and a half years ago.

But to all of us, at least I think to many of us who use it, it feels like it's been out forever.

It's become an incredibly useful tool on a personal level, but as Samia said, and as Chris has referred to, what's happening already is a lot of functional work that, frankly, is quite consistent and mechanical, is being, AI is being able to sort of bring efficiency to that.

Now, the Utopia is obviously this next level of how does all of this recursive sort of development and learning that AI is able to do, it starts to create what I'll call, well, we're calling it generative AI, but really becoming creative, right?

I think that's the Utopia that we're all working towards, and as we get there, I think the sort of horizons open up even larger.

I wanna actually ask Chris about valuations and whether some of the AI is overhyped, but before we get to that, I'm gonna put the audience to work.

There's a poll for you, you can also ask questions if you want to our great panelists, but the poll is basically, have you used an AI model in the past six months at work?

So it can either be personally, whether you used it, or whether within your team or the company have used it.

So we'll get that to settle down in a second.

And Chris, I mean, I guess this goes to the question of what do you say to the naysayers who say the technology, A, is overhyped, but also there's just unrealistic valuations out there for startups?

I would say on an absolute basis, as an industry, the potential is unbounded.

At the micro level of individual companies, there are many, if not the vast majority, are way overhyped.

So I think we underestimate the potential impact of AI in the medium to long term, because it's hard to wrap our brains around how pervasive and fast it will impact us.

But the hope of some of these companies achieving that, it'll be very difficult, and it will take longer in a lot of these areas than people hope.

But does it change everything, or are there specific sectors that will be disrupted 10 times more?

I think the areas that I'm most excited about are in the office of the CFO, back office, administrative compliance, distribution, all sorts of layers where there's just a lot of painful bureaucracy and process and paperwork.

And reducing that to free people up to do higher order activities would be my utopia in this.

Remove the drudgery of your job and allow you to do the reasons that you took the job in the first place.

But I think it'll take a number of years to get there, and the challenge will actually be less technological, I think, than restructuring companies and workflows and jobs and that transformation that has to happen in organizations to unlock it.

Simit, do you see anything being overhyped?

Again, it's interesting how you use it, because it is for the tasks that doesn't make you dream when you start a new job.

Actually, I'm training the team to start asking themselves before we recruit anybody, is that a task that can be done by AI?

For the time being, this applies to very junior tasks.

On the hyper-evaluation, and it doesn't bother me, I'm not investing in AI companies, I'm investing in solutions, tools, and applications which will enable my team to produce better results, enable our machines to produce better results, and really create more value to our shareholders, which is what I'm here to do.

If you look at how Multiplier's portfolio is constructed, and if you look at several macroeconomic factors happening within an inflationary macro environment, we have a lot of supply chain disruptions, and that costs money on the way we do business.

And in my mind, the only way to really get over this cost and still deliver profitability and double-digit growth to our shareholders is by embracing AI and augmenting the way we do work.

And we've been doing that at multiple levels, as I said.

How do you, so back to the poll, how do you use, do you use AI models personally?

Oh yeah, I started using it before Davos this year.

My team, it was a model that our tech team developed in-house and of course, at Davos, you meet a lot of people.

And this agent, we named it Cora, and it was on WhatsApp.

And let's say you introduced me to a Mr. Joe from an ex-company.

In a second, I would WhatsApp Cora, ask her, give me the bio, and I'll have a glimpse, short summary of the person I'm meeting in order to know how to direct the conversation.

Today, as a board, as I told you, we have the board observer, but also I have my own virtual board.

We've contracted a company called Aleria, a very successful AI company in Abu Dhabi.

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