Samsung just brought in one of academia’s most respected AI minds, and the goal isn’t a smarter chatbot. According to SamMobile, the company has hired Juan Carlos Niebles, a Stanford University AI scholar and former Salesforce research director, to lead its North America AI Center. His focus? Getting AI into physical products like humanoid robots, smart glasses, and manufacturing equipment.
Niebles comes with serious credentials. He previously directed AI research at Salesforce and co-led the Stanford-Toyota AI research center. He has over 100 published papers covering computer vision, multimodal AI, and robotics. Samsung appointed him at the executive vice president level, which tells you exactly how seriously the company is taking this. This isn’t a symbolic hire.
He steps into the role previously held by Murat Akbacak, who founded the North America AI Center in 2024 after a stint leading Apple’s Siri team. Niebles is expected to use his academic and industry connections to build large-scale partnerships across North America, so Samsung clearly wants someone who can open doors, not just run a lab.
The bigger story here is what Samsung is actually betting on. The company is steering away from software-based AI assistants, and if you’ve used Bixby lately, you’ll understand why that’s probably the right call. Instead, Samsung wants AI that lives inside physical things:
- Humanoid robots
- Manufacturing and industrial operations
- Earbuds, smartwatches, and smart glasses
- Extended reality headsets
- Connected home appliances like refrigerators
To back that up, Samsung also set up a dedicated Robotics Business Team in South Korea, led by Chief Technology Officer Yoon Jang-hyun, reporting directly to Co-CEO TM Roh. That’s a straight line to the top of the company.
On the partnership side, Samsung is going deeper with Nvidia, moving beyond just supplying high-bandwidth memory chips, and tightening its work with Google to get Gemini running across its product lineup. So this isn’t just an internal restructuring story. Samsung is building an ecosystem around physical AI, and it’s pulling in the right people and partners to make it real. Whether it actually delivers is another question, but the foundation looks more serious than anything the company has tried before.