On this episode of the Six Five On The Road, host Patrick Moorhead is joined by Samsung Electronics B2B America SVP & GM Brad Haczynski, for a conversation on Samsung B2B’s latest innovations revealed at Samsung Unpacked.
Their discussion covers:
- Brad Haczynski’s role within Samsung and his perspectives on the latest Samsung Unpacked announcements.
- The significance of Samsung’s sixth generation of foldable devices and their appeal to the business sector.
- Key business-oriented features of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 and how they cater to the needs of professionals.
- Samsung’s approach to integrating AI into mobile devices and the benefits for business users.
- The evolving role of wearable technology in the business ecosystem and what Samsung’s latest wearables offer to corporate users.
Learn more at Samsung Electronics B2B America.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is on the road here in New York City. We just got out of the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Satellite Event here in New York City and it was awesome, and you can imagine the talk of the show was about AI. We saw some incredible new mobile devices that got brought out, two new foldables, some pretty compelling watches from a health standpoint, and the first Samsung Ring. I’m excited to use all of these, but it is my pleasure to talk B2B with Brad from Samsung. Brad, how you doing, buddy?
Brad Haczynski: Well. How are you?
Patrick Moorhead: Good to see you. Pretty awesome event. It was funny, I usually go to the big event. This year it was in Paris. I went to the one last year in, actually, Korea and it was pretty awesome, but I have to tell you, this one in New York City was fun as well.
Brad Haczynski: Awesome. Well, we appreciate you being there. It’s an important event for us as we do these launch cadences twice a year to make sure that we’re consistently innovating around the year, and we think that’s really important.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it was so much fun. And I also got a Fold myself, a Fold 6, which I’m pretty psyched about. So hey, let’s dive in. Talked about … I said you run B2B but what does that mean at Samsung?
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, so I’m responsible for all the revenue and operations for the mobile B2B business. As many folks know or may not know, we have a pretty large portfolio, from PCs, phones, tablets, and the wearable devices such as watches and buds, which are actually becoming more prominent in B2B. So basically responsible for driving the revenue across all businesses in the United States from SMB all the way up to large enterprise.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it is incredible how mobile devices and technologies have really transformed the workplace. I remember when I first started work we had a shared PC between two of us and we would swivel this thing around, and we had a dot matrix printer. And then, the mobility wave hit and that was all about mobile PCs, which weren’t exactly that mobile. And then, that moved to thin and light, and then that moved to large smartphones and now foldables. I know it’s changed the way that I’ve worked and the data says that it’s changed the way that everybody else is working too, it’s pretty exciting. So I give a little bit of a preview generically on what was announced. Can you talk overall, what did you announce?
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, so we announced our six generation foldable devices. So, first and foremost, our flagship phones, which are the, here we have the new Flip 6 phone. This is a phenomenal phone, pretty significant upgrades on battery life and camera, et cetera, and really, really cool device. And then, we launched what to me is more prominent in the B2B space would be the fold, and so the fold is a great device. We continue to make improvements. We talked a lot about display, battery life, thin and light form factor, and there’s just so many things you can do with a device like this. On top of that, we talked a lot about, of course, as you eloquently stated, Galaxy AI and our partnership with Google and Gemini was kind of weaved in throughout all of that, really addressing the nascent but powerful capabilities of AI and how it can enrich a person or business’ ability to be productive.
And then, we launched the new, here’s the Watch 7. We have a new ultra version of the watch, which is phenomenal, and of course we launched the Galaxy Ring, which we teased. If you remember when you and I were in the last unpacked in San Jose, we teased it out and it drew a lot of questions and speculation but we’ve finally now launched and talked a lot about how health and wellness, and we can talk a little bit about how that impacts B2B. But health and wellness moving front and center with what Samsung does with Samsung Health, with how your phone, the ring, and the watch, interact, and free of charge, it’s not a service fee.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s a big deal, especially when some of these other ring providers, a subscription can be over $100 per year, which might not sound like a lot, but it is. I’ve recently gotten into health. I mean, I’m kind of embarrassed to say recently but in the last year I’ve really been hardcore on getting fit and the benefits that can bring to my own productivity and my energy and my durability is just great. Not to mention, hopefully keeping me out of the hospital, which is very important to businesses. So flagship announced … Actually, you had a lot of flagship announcements here but you brought us your Sixth Edition, your sixth version of foldables, which by the way is funny when some competitors haven’t even brought up their first, but maybe we’ll leave that for a different conversation.
Pretty interesting and easy to understand the benefits to a consumer audience but let’s talk about B2B. When you’re looking at CIOs and IT departments, then the end users, what are some of these benefits that they’re seeing from this technology, the foldables, in specific?
Brad Haczynski: I think the biggest benefit … So one thing we always talk about as the baseline for everything with regards to what we do at B2B, and you and I talked about it in our last interview, is that the Knox Security Platform is the bedrock of everything.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Brad Haczynski: Not only do you have the chip up security at a platform level that protects your most precious data, biometrics, passwords, et cetera, we also talked about the whole suite of Knox capabilities as a mobile device manager and lots of capabilities that we can provide to enterprises. So that’s sort of the bedrock, but the foldable itself then starts to bring in … So security is something they care about but then productivity. And so, what we are seeing is that there are a lot of folks who work day-to-day in large companies, such as myself, who are on the road all the time. You’re in cars, you’re in Ubers, and sometimes you just don’t have the time to take out your PC and tether it to your phone or whatever.
So the form factor is pretty incredible because, one is, if you’re on the go one of the improvements they actually made is when the device is closed the Fold 6 versus the Fold 5 is actually a little bit of a wider display. So when you’re on the go and you’re texting, et cetera, you have a nice, bright, good display, it fits in your pocket, it’s really slim, but when you open it up is where the magic happens. And so, what we see is a lot of customers who … And you can target certain audiences, but if you’re a business user and you’re doing 80% of your disposition of emails or you’re looking at PowerPoints or Word documents, this device makes a massive difference in your ability to be productive at work so we’re seeing a lot of interest really on that productivity side.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s interesting. You even add that add pen capability to that, the ability to amplify, that capability really comes true. I’ve found with my Fold the ability to actually edit a PowerPoint presentation in a car without having to pull my laptop out. It has been a huge benefit. I mean, we have three minutes before the presentation starts, it’s online and you need to make those final final changes, that has really come in handy. And this might sound wild, who had ever thought of being able to do a spreadsheet on it as well?
Brad Haczynski: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a huge difference. Even on the S24 Ultra, which I carry one of those as well, it’s a phenomenal device but you’re at the smaller screen size. And here, I think the beauty of what we’ve done here for businesses is we’ve worked to do application optimization for the foldable devices with Microsoft for Office and then other applications, which we could probably talk about later, but that just, again, make it a different experience for the business on the go.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And the other thing is multi-windowing.
Brad Haczynski: Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: Right?
Brad Haczynski: Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: I mean, I can do multiple windows on all my Galaxy phones but I find even more utility when I have a larger screen where I can literally have three or four windows looking at things at the same time. So let’s say I got feedback on that PowerPoint presentation in maybe a teams chat, or something on the left-hand side and I can be editing it on the right. I’ve really found that helpful. Another one even is, hey, when I’m trying to do a research report, doing some searches on the internet on the left-hand rail and a web browser on the right-hand side in a Word document, so it really is inspiring and AI adds this additional layer of superpowers to it. When we saw Samsung invest a lot of time and we’re at the second generation of Galaxy AI, what are some of the B2B applications that AI to superpower the experience?
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, so that’s a great question and I think, first of all, when we launched Galaxy AI we launched it with the S24 earlier this year, and then we did a backwards compatibility software drop to save the Fold 5. So even the old Fold 5, last generation version, does have a Galaxy AI but the innovation they did with the Fold 6 was, how do you take the Galaxy AI capabilities and bring it to the next level on a multiple multi-screen type device that’s foldable? So what you saw and unpacked today is one of the great … There’s a lot of things that you can do. Obviously, there is note assist, there is live translation, et cetera, but even with note assist, if you do that or if you record a meeting and you want to have it recorded and a transcript spit out on an S24, you will only see the screen of the recording.
Once you move to the foldable with the ability to what we call flex mode is now you have it open and you could be taking notes. You saw it today, the example, taking notes while recording a meeting, and then have a time lapse of where your notes were in the meeting and then people speaking in the meeting. And then, the AI will do a translation of the meeting and then even a summary of the meeting. I mean, just think about … You spent a long time in corporate world, I spent 21 years at Intel and a year now here at Samsung, how many meetings, and many minutes, and meeting notes, and pass downs do I have to do?
Just that capability alone has been wonderful. And then, of course we talk a lot about the business travelers and being on the road and in the world and the flexible device where you could be doing live translate and the other person sees the screen by having that flex mode capability on live translation, et cetera. And whether you’re running a small meeting in business and you’re having lots of different diverse … Like, you think about here we’re in New York City.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Brad Haczynski: One of the most diverse cities on the planet. How many languages is spoken in New York City?
Patrick Moorhead: That’s crazy. You just walk down the street and you hear a lot.
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, exactly. So I think a lot of the … How do you benefit and build upon the Galaxy AI story for business productivity? And of course our team, as you know and I shared with you earlier, we’re building out a lot of these use cases, like what does that look like? And then, how do you use it with flex mode and get that differentiation?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I have to tell you, one of the interesting things I find too is that a lot of these AI capabilities are done on the device. You can go to the cloud and get some of these done but it has to warm the CISOs heart and IT’s heart that if you want to do a lot of these functions that you talked about, you can do that right on the device. You do not have to connect or share this information in the cloud.
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, and that’s actually a really important point, I’m glad you brought this up, Pat. One of the lessons learned when we launched the S24 Ultra Galaxy AI was immediately Enterprise customers were asking us, hold on. I don’t allow anybody to call to a public call to a chat GPT. I don’t allow access to the internet, depends if it’s a regulated industry like banking or healthcare, so the first thing we had to start to do is address those issues. And, again, in our conversation a few months ago I said it’s very nascent, and what we started to do is build upon that. So we very clearly can articulate to the customers, here are all the capabilities that are on device.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes.
Brad Haczynski: Right? Then you want to add in Knox controls for capabilities on the device. And then, we basically have the ability then you can go in, and they showed this at Unpack today, that you can actually go in there and you can actually toggle, the user themselves can toggle off to get rid of cloud access and only have on-device based AI. We can have Enterprise customers set policy for that, like the Knox Services Portal, et cetera, from an MDM, et cetera. And that’s the kind of stuff that I think is going to become very, very important, giving that level of control, peace of mind or security to the large Enterprise users because there is a lot of concerns around any data or IP linkage out to public clouds.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, kudos to Samsung for recognizing this need, and literally it was the first thing I did on my S24 was go in and see if you could toggle between that and, sure enough, it’s right there, it’s one switch. Obviously, in Enterprise managed environments they would do it through policy but it was great to see that even an end user, maybe a small business who doesn’t operate on policy, can toggle that switch as well, it’s good stuff.
Brad Haczynski: And there’s also one more thing too. You can not only toggle what’s on device versus what goes to the cloud, you can also set privacy settings as into what data is being collected through Galaxy AI, and then what you will allow to, again, not be released so, again, privacy and security. Security on the more enterprise side but I think people are getting really … While AI is a beautiful technology, there is a how do I make sure I fundamentally protect my privacy, which is good.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s good. Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, you’re your second generation of smartphone AI and your biggest competitor, there’s not even a fixed date on when that’s coming out or what countries are going to be supported. It’s going to be interesting. The analyst in me finds this interesting to watch but, anyways, benefits to Samsung customers. So I want to shift gears here. It’s been a great conversation, Brad, I really appreciate the time here. I want to talk about wearables. We talked a little bit about this intersection between wearables and B2B, but can you do the double click on it? What does it mean? What’s the value? Why should Enterprise IT or organizations invest in Samsung wearables?
Brad Haczynski: So there are several things that we see occurring in the industry now. We don’t do a ton of volume on wearables today, however, the world is changing pretty rapidly. If you think about the car industry where the car insurance, like a State Farm, now they want to put the little thing in your car that’s actually measuring how you’re driving, et cetera. We all know the healthcare industry is going to go down a similar path, which is why should you tax healthy people the burden for the folks who aren’t healthy? So I think there’s a lot of interest from insurance companies and large enterprises, insurance companies on, “Hey, how do I keep premiums down? Are there ways that I could potentially hand out?”
We’ve talked to companies about deploying wearables as a way to monitor your health. Again, it’s an opt-in. You got privacy, et cetera, and HIPAA and all that, but to say, “Hey, I’m going to show you that I’m working out.” So if you look at from an insurance policy and insurance provider standpoint, there’s that. Then in enterprises, more and more companies are becoming more cognizant of mental and physical wellbeing and health of their employees, and they work in turn with insurance companies, so we’re starting to see these use cases build. And then, there’s other use cases in other verticals. We have a pilot with a large manufacturer who is using it for manufacturing technicians on the floor and using some pretty cool software that says, “Hey, make sure you take a break, you’ve been on the floor for a while.” It can monitor your hydration and these kinds of things.
And then, in retail stores, instead of somebody carrying down a phone or a tablet, which we are very grateful for that, now you’re seeing some retailers turn to wearables, for instance, to call somebody to the front of the store to assist the customer or to go somewhere else. The use cases are just beginning and, of course, with the Wear OS that was talked about today, we have with Knox Manage the ability to actually manage wearables in Knox.
Patrick Moorhead: Amazing.
Brad Haczynski: Which is a big deal.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s funny, as analysts we kind of pretend that we know everything but I didn’t know that part. And that’s super important, particularly when it’s going to be part of your Enterprise data estate and you’re dealing with healthcare data. Brad, I really appreciate your time here. I’m going to give you the last words. Anything we didn’t cover or any points you want to reinforce, maybe about the overall Samsung B2B value proposition to enterprises?
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, I think … The thing I think is really important is no one in this industry has a more robust portfolio. When you look at what we can provide the market, Samsung is the only company that has the AIPC with our Galaxy Book 4. We have our Ruggedized and our Flagship Series Tablets. We have the wearables, the watches, the buds, and we have a multitude of devices, from A Series to Flagship, and then all wrapped around that security underpinning of Knox, and every customer is different. So it goes down to, what is the use case, what is the outcome you’re looking for? But we have a solution regardless of what that worker use type looks like, what that use case looks like. We have something that will work, and we have a great level of innovation.
I just think our story’s not out there enough. You and I keep talking about this. Samsung should have a much larger presence in the business world, in the US market. Our innovation is, I believe, unmatched, our capabilities, and we pivot very quickly to customer data to make sure that, again, with AI, make sure we’re putting the right governance and controls in place to give that peace of mind on how customers are going to manage their devices in an environment.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s a great way to end the conversation, Brad. And yes, when it comes to Samsung B2B I like to look at the value proposition you’re delivering versus people’s understanding and awareness of it, and there’s a mismatch right now. You’re delivering a lot more than people out there, and I hope getting the message out here on The Six Five to that Enterprise audience can spread the wealth and knowledge of what you’re doing here, so thanks for coming on the show.
Brad Haczynski: Yeah, thanks for having me, I appreciate it, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Absolutely.
Brad Haczynski: Take care.
Patrick Moorhead: This is Pat Moorhead and Brad Haczynski signing off here from New York City at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Event. It was a great event. It’s a great conversation. Tune into all of the content that we have discussed on Samsung and Unpacked, and take care.
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