[Part II] ‘Haven't bought into the idea that AI is a threat to humanity’: Ex-SoftBank Group President Alok Sama

Alok Sama, who fronted SoftBank Group’s $32 billion acquisition of British chipmaker Arm Holdings—now a top AI stock—says that the “big technology trends” of the future have mostly eluded him. “I didn’t see the Ubers of the world coming,” he says, “but it happened”. Hence, the all-pervasive conversation around Artificial Intelligence (AI) today doesn’t “really” excite him as much as his peers.

Nonetheless, as the quintessential ‘man in finance’, having spent several decades in the upper echelons of global tech investing when he served as the President and CFO of SoftBank Group International, Sama has witnessed the “seductive, addictive, and occasionally destructive power of financial engineering”.

It was almost always eventful, but eventually exhausting, making him want to quit the ‘money trap’—a journey chronicled in his recent book ‘The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble’ published by Pan Macmillan.

In Part I of this CapTable Conversation, the 62-year-old spoke about his (private) jet-setting years with SoftBank’s visionary CEO Masayoshi Son, his early days as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, India’s bustling IPO market, the desi entrepreneur DNA, SoftBank’s hits and misses, the ugly smear campaign that took a toll on his private life, and more.

In Part II of this interview, Sama shares his views on AI—which is tipped to define global tech movements in 2025—India’s place on the world’s AI curve, why he’s yet to buy into Elon Musk’s “multi-planetary” vision, whether Tesla can join India’s EV party, and why Silicon Valley’s infrastructure is really hard to replicate elsewhere.

But before that, he also reflects on his ‘failed’ attempts at merging two of India’s biggest startups when he was front and centre of SoftBank’s investments in the country.