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Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool / Getty Images

X owner Elon Musk shared a deepfake video spoofing a campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris. It appears to violate the platform’s own policies against synthetic and manipulated media.
The video Musk shared on Friday alters a recent campaign video Harris released, one that makes it sound like the presidential candidate said things she didn’t. The manipulated clip has Harris saying things like she is “the ultimate diversity hire” and that she “had four years under the tutelage of the ultimate deep state puppet, a wonderful mentor, Joe Biden.” The original account that had posted the video labeled it, “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY,” a disclaimer that might prevent it from violating X’s policies. But this context did not appear in Musk’s repost. Instead, Musk’s post simply showed the video, adding his own commentary: “This is amazing,” with a laughing emoji.
It’s just the latest example of how AI-altered media could play a role in this election cycle and how the law has not fully caught up to deal with it. Earlier this year, for example, a robocall that used AI to mimic President Joe Biden’s voice urged New Hampshire voters to stay home during the primary. And election officials are training for how AI could get in the way on Election Day or in the lead-up to it, while rules around AI disclosures in ads remain in development or pending votes.
This has left platforms like X responsible for coming up with their own rules around misinformation. Under X’s policies, “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm” is not allowed on the platform. X says it first evaluates if the content has been “significantly and deceptively altered, manipulated, or fabricated,” which it says includes “overdubbed audio” that’s been added or edited “that fundamentally changes the understanding, meaning, or context of the media.” Next, it considers the context, like whether it’s being presented as reality. And last, it determines if the content could lead to “widespread confusion on public issues, impact public safety, or cause serious harm.” X says that satire doesn’t violate the policy as long as it doesn’t “cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.” Even a lenient reading of these policies would suggest that Musk’s post violated these rules.
The post is also the latest fire that X CEO Linda Yaccarino may be tasked with squashing after her boss’s actions. X did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment on Musk’s post.
Musk’s post is already getting pushback from the left. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) wrote on Threads that if Musk’s post remains without context, X and Musk “will not only be violating X’s own rules, they’ll be unleashing an entire election season of fake AI voice and image-altered content with no limits, regardless of party.” Klobuchar has introduced legislation to require disclaimers on political ads substantially altered or generated with AI.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) also called out Musk’s post, writing on X that “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” adding that he’d be “signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.”
Musk responded to that post with a link to the original post of the digitally altered video that includes the parody label: “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America.”

Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool / Getty Images

X owner Elon Musk shared a deepfake video spoofing a campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris. It appears to violate the platform’s own policies against synthetic and manipulated media.

The video Musk shared on Friday alters a recent campaign video Harris released, one that makes it sound like the presidential candidate said things she didn’t. The manipulated clip has Harris saying things like she is “the ultimate diversity hire” and that she “had four years under the tutelage of the ultimate deep state puppet, a wonderful mentor, Joe Biden.” The original account that had posted the video labeled it, “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY,” a disclaimer that might prevent it from violating X’s policies. But this context did not appear in Musk’s repost. Instead, Musk’s post simply showed the video, adding his own commentary: “This is amazing,” with a laughing emoji.

It’s just the latest example of how AI-altered media could play a role in this election cycle and how the law has not fully caught up to deal with it. Earlier this year, for example, a robocall that used AI to mimic President Joe Biden’s voice urged New Hampshire voters to stay home during the primary. And election officials are training for how AI could get in the way on Election Day or in the lead-up to it, while rules around AI disclosures in ads remain in development or pending votes.

This has left platforms like X responsible for coming up with their own rules around misinformation. Under X’s policies, “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm” is not allowed on the platform. X says it first evaluates if the content has been “significantly and deceptively altered, manipulated, or fabricated,” which it says includes “overdubbed audio” that’s been added or edited “that fundamentally changes the understanding, meaning, or context of the media.” Next, it considers the context, like whether it’s being presented as reality. And last, it determines if the content could lead to “widespread confusion on public issues, impact public safety, or cause serious harm.” X says that satire doesn’t violate the policy as long as it doesn’t “cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.” Even a lenient reading of these policies would suggest that Musk’s post violated these rules.

The post is also the latest fire that X CEO Linda Yaccarino may be tasked with squashing after her boss’s actions. X did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment on Musk’s post.

Musk’s post is already getting pushback from the left. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) wrote on Threads that if Musk’s post remains without context, X and Musk “will not only be violating X’s own rules, they’ll be unleashing an entire election season of fake AI voice and image-altered content with no limits, regardless of party.” Klobuchar has introduced legislation to require disclaimers on political ads substantially altered or generated with AI.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) also called out Musk’s post, writing on X that “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” adding that he’d be “signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.”

Musk responded to that post with a link to the original post of the digitally altered video that includes the parody label: “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America.”

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Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple’s new AI features for the iPhone may not arrive with the initial rollout of iOS 18 and the expected launch of the iPhone 16 in September, according to a report from Bloomberg. Instead, the company reportedly plans on launching Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 in October as it works to get the rollout right.
Apple took the wraps off its first AI features during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, showing off a new and improved Siri, AI-powered image generation, and an integration with ChatGPT. These features may not be available with a new iPhone 16 purchased at launch, but Apple could roll out the update later to new devices in store with its in-the-box updating machine called Presto.

While Apple doesn’t usually launch the betas for its follow-up software updates ahead of the public release of the initial version, Bloomberg reports that some of these AI features will still arrive with the launch of the iOS 18.1 and iPad 18.1 developer betas as soon as this week.
The early rollout could allow developers to test Apple’s AI features and spot bugs before they arrive for everyone and stretch across other platforms like the Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.
However, not all of the AI features Apple previewed during WWDC will be available within 18.1. We may have to wait until the spring of 2025 to see a Siri that can perform actions within apps and gain onscreen awareness.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple’s new AI features for the iPhone may not arrive with the initial rollout of iOS 18 and the expected launch of the iPhone 16 in September, according to a report from Bloomberg. Instead, the company reportedly plans on launching Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 in October as it works to get the rollout right.

Apple took the wraps off its first AI features during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, showing off a new and improved Siri, AI-powered image generation, and an integration with ChatGPT. These features may not be available with a new iPhone 16 purchased at launch, but Apple could roll out the update later to new devices in store with its in-the-box updating machine called Presto.

While Apple doesn’t usually launch the betas for its follow-up software updates ahead of the public release of the initial version, Bloomberg reports that some of these AI features will still arrive with the launch of the iOS 18.1 and iPad 18.1 developer betas as soon as this week.

The early rollout could allow developers to test Apple’s AI features and spot bugs before they arrive for everyone and stretch across other platforms like the Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

However, not all of the AI features Apple previewed during WWDC will be available within 18.1. We may have to wait until the spring of 2025 to see a Siri that can perform actions within apps and gain onscreen awareness.

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Arc’teryx’s new powered MO/GO pants claim to boost leg strength by up to 40 percent. | Image: Arc’teryx

Strength-boosting exoskeleton suits can help make jobs with physical labor feel less strenuous, but Arc’teryx has partnered with Skip, a spinoff of Google’s X Labs, to bring the technology to leisure time. The powered MO/GO pants feature a lightweight electric motor at the knee that can boost a hiker’s leg strength when going uphill while also absorbing the impact of steps during a descent.
The MO/GO (which is short for mountain goat) pants weigh around seven pounds with the power-boosting module and three-hour rechargeable batteries attached. That module snaps onto the hiker using a pair of carbon fiber braces for each leg hidden beneath a pair of Arc’teryx Gamma hiking pants to make the apparatus easy to get on and off.

Marketed as a mobility device that can help hikers extend their range instead of a medical device that can assist those with mobility issues (you can think of them as an e-bike but for walking), Skip claims the MO/GO pants can make the wearer feel up to 30 pounds lighter. The amount of assistance provided varies in real time by monitoring the wearer’s gait and leg movements to determine when they’re walking or climbing. At any time, the user can choose to increase or decrease the amount of assistance they’re provided with a simple button press.
With the battery integrated into the pants’ waistline and the powered modules hanging off each leg, the MO/GO system isn’t exactly discreet. But the exoskeleton isn’t designed to help anyone cheat their way up a strenuous trail. The goal is to make hiking — and challenging hiking trails — more accessible to those who may not have the necessary endurance.

Image: Arc’teryx
A button on the powered leg module allows hikers to adjust the level of assistance they’re provided.

High-end hiking gear rarely comes cheap, but the MO/GO pants are priced for those who are seriously devoted to the pastime. Full retail pricing is expected to be $5,000, but there’s currently an “Early Bird Discount” for those who preorder with a $99 deposit, bringing the price down to $4,500 with an expected ship date of late 2025.
It does take some time to get used to walking with an extra pair of mechanical muscles, according to Fast Company, which spent some time testing the MO/GO pants. For consumers who’d also rather test them first, Skip and Arc’teryx are offering eight-hour rentals of the exoskeleton on select trails in the Western US and Canada for $80.

Arc’teryx’s new powered MO/GO pants claim to boost leg strength by up to 40 percent. | Image: Arc’teryx

Strength-boosting exoskeleton suits can help make jobs with physical labor feel less strenuous, but Arc’teryx has partnered with Skip, a spinoff of Google’s X Labs, to bring the technology to leisure time. The powered MO/GO pants feature a lightweight electric motor at the knee that can boost a hiker’s leg strength when going uphill while also absorbing the impact of steps during a descent.

The MO/GO (which is short for mountain goat) pants weigh around seven pounds with the power-boosting module and three-hour rechargeable batteries attached. That module snaps onto the hiker using a pair of carbon fiber braces for each leg hidden beneath a pair of Arc’teryx Gamma hiking pants to make the apparatus easy to get on and off.

Marketed as a mobility device that can help hikers extend their range instead of a medical device that can assist those with mobility issues (you can think of them as an e-bike but for walking), Skip claims the MO/GO pants can make the wearer feel up to 30 pounds lighter. The amount of assistance provided varies in real time by monitoring the wearer’s gait and leg movements to determine when they’re walking or climbing. At any time, the user can choose to increase or decrease the amount of assistance they’re provided with a simple button press.

With the battery integrated into the pants’ waistline and the powered modules hanging off each leg, the MO/GO system isn’t exactly discreet. But the exoskeleton isn’t designed to help anyone cheat their way up a strenuous trail. The goal is to make hiking — and challenging hiking trails — more accessible to those who may not have the necessary endurance.

Image: Arc’teryx
A button on the powered leg module allows hikers to adjust the level of assistance they’re provided.

High-end hiking gear rarely comes cheap, but the MO/GO pants are priced for those who are seriously devoted to the pastime. Full retail pricing is expected to be $5,000, but there’s currently an “Early Bird Discount” for those who preorder with a $99 deposit, bringing the price down to $4,500 with an expected ship date of late 2025.

It does take some time to get used to walking with an extra pair of mechanical muscles, according to Fast Company, which spent some time testing the MO/GO pants. For consumers who’d also rather test them first, Skip and Arc’teryx are offering eight-hour rentals of the exoskeleton on select trails in the Western US and Canada for $80.

Read More 

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Logitech

The new head of Logitech discusses the company’s return to growth and plans to reduce its carbon footprint by half. Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty new to the role: she joined the company last October, after the former CEO, Bracken Darrell, left.
You might remember Bracken — he was on Decoder back in 2021, basically at the height of the covid-19 pandemic-era boom in home office sales, when Logitech was selling mice, keyboards, and webcams as fast as it could make them.
Obviously, things have changed since then. Logitech, like so many companies that saw huge pandemic booms, very abruptly saw that growth slow down when the world began to normalize. Bracken left Logitech last June to go to the company that owns Vans and Supreme, and Logitech brought on Hanneke, a longtime executive with an extensive background in consumer goods at conglomerates like Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

Hanneke and I talked about the structural changes she’s already making at Logitech and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sounds like some Logitech products, like its smart home doorbells and cameras, are not long for this world.
Hanneke says that people often say “the mouse built this house” inside Logitech, which is a delightful catchphrase I’d never heard before. From there, we talked about how new interface paradigms like voice and AI might upend mice and keyboards and how she’s thinking about the company’s long-term future in a world where traditional PC sales might go down.
Of course, we talked about whether anyone wants their mouse to be anything more than a mouse — Logitech is adding AI features and even AI buttons to some of its products, and I wanted to know if that’s working.
You’ll hear Hanneke talk about a concept called the “forever mouse,” or a mouse you buy once and upgrade over time with new software features — features that, of course, might carry a subscription fee. Subscription mice! It’s a lot.
You’ll also hear Hanneke talk about how she plans to grow the business and hit an ambitious carbon footprint reduction milestone by the end of the decade as well as where she thinks the company needs to go next. There’s a lot in this one.
Okay, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hanneke Faber, you are the new-ish CEO of Logitech. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you so much.
I am really excited to talk to you. You have been on the job as CEO for seven months now?
Seven months. I started on December 1st.
So you’re in. You’re settled. You know where the bathrooms are, which is step one.
Yeah, for sure. Although today’s my first day actually in the office in California. I’ve been in Switzerland so far, so you catch me on day one.
Well, I’m just going to ask you where different things are in that office for the rest of the hour.
[Laughs]
Logitech is a fascinating company. It’s one of those companies that I think is undercover. When we started Decoder, one of our first ideas was that we should talk to more than five CEOs, and Logitech is one of those companies that is just ever-present in the world of technology. It is a partner to the big companies. It’s in everyone’s office. It’s in lots of people’s homes. It’s basically a core fixture of gaming. You play in a lot of spaces.
I talked to your predecessor, Bracken Darrell, in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic in 2021, when everything was a lot different. Sales were skyrocketing, and he changed his strategy a little bit. Bracken recently left. He now runs Supreme and Vans, which was a shift. We’ll talk to him about that. You have a background in consumer goods at Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Why jump to Logitech when the job opened up?
Actually, Bracken came from P&G as well, so that’s not so different. But I’ve been really fortunate throughout my career of working in different industries. I worked mostly in beauty at P&G. I actually worked in tech for four years at Ahold Delhaize. I ran their e-commerce business when it was almost nonexistent. We built a really cool online grocery business. And then, for the last six years, I ran Unilever’s global food business.
So [despite being] different businesses, I think there are some themes that apply to Logitech: a focus on the user and the consumer first; a focus on innovation and product. And then, finally, really global footprints in every job I’ve worked in and a mix of B2B and B2C. All of those things do translate. Of course, this is a new industry and a new company for me, but it’s great to bring a whole bunch of things that I have experience with and learn a few new things as well.

One of the things that’s really interesting to me about Logitech is that people tend to think of its core products — mice, keyboards, headsets, webcams — as commodities, but they’re still technology products. There’s a lot of innovation left in those spaces. Logitech has driven some of that innovation, but then you see other weird things blossom into cultures unto themselves — mechanical keyboards, for example. There are webcam startups again, which is really interesting. That was not a thing that was happening pre-covid.
Do you view the opportunity here as an operational opportunity, as an innovation opportunity, as a “find new categories and make them grow” opportunity? What is your macro view of the situation?
There are three main tailwinds on our core business. The first one is new ways of working, hybrid working. That’s good for our personal workspace business, the traditional mice and keyboards, because everyone needs multiple setups. And obviously it’s good for our video conferencing business. So the new ways of working post-covid are a real tailwind for us.
Second is gaming. Gaming, just as a space, continues to grow, and especially with new demographics. Almost half of gamers are now women, which is amazing. And older people game. It’s no longer just teenage boys. We see the market continue to grow.

Wait, can I ask you one question about older people in that context?
Yeah. Sorry, older than teenage boys?
Sure. Is it that a set of teenage boys who were gamers 15 years ago got older, or is it older people are becoming new gamers?
I think we’re seeing a little bit of both, although it’s probably the first trend that is the biggest one. The teenage boys of 15 years ago are now in their 30s and 40s, so that just extends the demographic. New teenage boys are still coming in, and girls, so that’s good. But we’re also seeing older cohorts coming in mostly through mobile, through Candy Crush but also Wordle and Connections. Those are entry points into gaming that make them more comfortable with gaming and may take them to PC and console gaming as well.
You said there was a third thing. What was the third thing?
The third thing… of course you can’t do an interview for three minutes and not say AI, but AI is a real tailwind for us as well.
How do you think AI is a tailwind for Logitech in particular?
In three ways. First, like for any other company, is internal productivity. We’re seeing it on the software engineering side, where coding and testing have clearly become more efficient, but we’re also seeing it on the creative and brand-building side, again, where things are getting more efficient but also sometimes more creative.
More importantly, on the product side, there are two ways in which AI will be a tailwind. First of all, we’ve always been a human-to-technology interface company, and we’re starting to be an interface to the large language models. A couple of months ago, we launched the Logi AI Prompt Builder, which is basically a shortcut in our software to ChatGPT. It has millions of unique users already, and it’s just a simpler way for people to use ChatGPT and not get out of their flow when they use all of our mice and keyboards in English-speaking countries. There will be much more to follow in terms of being that human-technology interface.
There’s a third area that is big on AI, which is in audio and video. We have a big video conferencing business, a headphones business. That’s really machine learning and large data models, and the company’s been at those for a number of years, but we’re seeing the quality of things like two-way noise cancellation or video conferencing equipment that actually knows when to zoom in on you when you’re speaking and not when you’re opening a packet of crisps. Those kinds of things are really important, and I foresee massive quality improvements thanks to machine learning in the years ahead.
I want to come back to the AI question because I think there’s a lot to unpack there, and there are a lot of obvious opportunities, like you said, in audio and video. And then there are some opportunities that, I think, deserve a little more time around AI prompt building and that sort of thing.
But I want to stay focused for a second on you. You’re the new CEO. So covid, work from home, created a massive opportunity for Logitech. I bought a black market webcam at the end of 2020. It was Chinese. It wasn’t even meant for this market.
I love it.
The previous administration really ramped production. They saw huge growth. Then there was an enterprise push as more and more companies embraced hybrid and remote and refitted all their conference rooms. That all crashed back to earth, and there were a couple of years when the growth was falling. Logitech’s fourth quarter earnings released back in April marked your first quarter of sales growth in over two years. You also reported growth in your most recent quarter. What is bringing that growth back?
Product innovation and markets that are stabilizing a little bit post-covid [are contributing to that growth]. I have to say, this company should be very proud of what it did during covid under Bracken. It did a really great job, but obviously it was a bit of a sugar high. That said, the company is 50 percent bigger today than it was pre-covid, so it hasn’t all come crashing down to earth.
I think what we’ve done is we’ve really been focusing on great execution and on things that we can control. There are some things that we can’t control: inflation, consumer confidence, corporate IT budgets for our video conferencing business. But within those constraints, we’ve been growing our share. That was one of the drivers of us getting back to growth in Q4. We’ve been delivering really exciting innovation, and we’ll continue to do those things.
You called it a sugar high. I feel like the broad story of tech in particular is the sugar high of overinvestment during covid, of competing to hire every single person that existed in the world who could write code and then assuming that those trends would be permanent and we would all stay inside and live our lives mediated through screens on the internet forever. Many companies did not survive that sugar high. Is it that simple, that Logitech just weathered the covid highs and the trends and is back to a stable place now?
We’re not back to where we were in 2019. Again, we’re 50 percent bigger as a company, and the way people work is so different today versus 2019. Virtually every company that I speak to, and I speak to many of them because they’re all our customers, wants to be hybrid. They want their people to come into the office two or three days a week, but they also want to offer the flexibility of working from home or working from anywhere. That is obviously very different from in 2019. We pride ourselves on being a model for ways of working because we sell this stuff, so I think we’re very well positioned to help our corporate customers give people a great experience both in the office and at home.
You mentioned that you are in the California office today, and it’s your first day there. You moved to Switzerland when you got this job. How are you structuring your time between remote, hybrid, and in person? How’s that working for you?
Sadly, I live on an airplane, it feels like. Logitech is very special in that it is a super global company. We’re on the ground in more than 100 countries, and we have great capabilities around the world. I spend probably 60 percent of my time in offices that are not my own. When I’m in California, or I spent these first seven months [on the job] in our Swiss office, I try to be in the office. But I might also, if I start early — like today, I started at 6AM — go back home at 1PM and get some exercise and then work more later on. That’s a level of flexibility that I don’t think we necessarily had pre-covid, which is great.
Do you ever find yourself in that horrible situation of being alone in a conference room on a video call?
That’s just ridiculous, right?
That’s my nightmare. If I go to the office and I’m the only one there and everyone else is on a video call, I wonder why we even have an office.
[Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have this concept of gravity days at Logitech. On the gravity days, everyone’s there so you’re not by yourself.
What are the gravity days?
It depends on the teams. My gravity days here are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I’ll see most of the leadership team. But different teams have different gravity days that they pick themselves.
And then are you living on a plane just to be in person wherever you need to be?
Yes, and part of that is because I’m new — and I’m not just new to the company; I’m also new to the industry. I need to meet people, our own people, but very much also suppliers, customers, consumers, investors. There are just a lot of people to meet, and certainly a first meeting, I think, is still best done in person.
This brings us very neatly to what I think of as the Decoder questions. I was listening to the first fireside chat you had for your investors five days into the job, and I heard you say that your style is to be as close to the customer and as close to the people doing the work as possible because they know best. That’s you on planes. But ultimately, you have to make a lot of decisions. What kind of decisions do you want to be making? What’s your framework for making them?
I think company strategy is a great way to set that decision framework. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months, first listening, then co-creating that strategy, and then setting the strategy and setting the bar high. If I unpack that a little bit, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know and that we all don’t know, so listening was first. Then we sat down with the leadership team first to really make choices. What’s our goal? For 2031, because that’s when Logitech will be 50 years old, we set a goal of doubling the business and reducing our carbon footprint by 50 percent while retaining really attractive margins.
We set a mission, which we’ve said is extending human potential in work and in play. We had a good mission, but it was three pages long, so I really wanted to simplify that. And “extending human potential,” those words are carefully chosen. So “extending” is obviously a riff on the mouse. The mouse built this house. It extends your arm, so we want to extend—
You say, “The mouse built this house”?
Yeah, that’s what they say here — and I say it. I like it.
That should be the whole mission, I got to be honest with you. I think it’s a strong contender.
That’s right. But we extend human potential in this age of AI, this age of [Zoom CEO] Eric Yuan saying there are digital twins of all of us coming to meetings. It’s really important that we extend human potential because we can make humans better. We can help you win that game. We can help you be more productive. We can help you connect better when you’re in that conference room by yourself. If we can do that in ways that are also healthier for people on the planet, then extending human potential is really worth waking up for every morning.
And what else is there in life but work and play? We do that in work and play today, but I believe, with my leadership team, that those areas are actually much bigger than where Logitech plays today. Today, we’re mostly focused on work. We focus on office workers. Most people in the world don’t work in an office. They work in retail, healthcare, education, construction, you name it. And we can play there, too. And in gaming, we’re mostly focused on PC gaming. Today, there’s a lot more play out there than just PC gaming. That broadens our TAM, our total addressable market, for the future, which is an opportunity to deliver that growth.
That’s a long-winded way of saying what we’re doing. That is our framework for decision-making. We’ve then made some pretty clear choices where to play and how to win below that, and now that that is in place, as a leader, I can circle back and say, “Okay, I listened. We co-create it and we set the bar high.” Now, I circle back and I listen again. I go back and I listen to people and say, “What do they need? What obstacles do I need to take away so that they can deliver on doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half?”
What kind of obstacles have you removed so far?
Well, we’re in the process [of doing this]. I think some of those obstacles might be the result of that sugar high. We got a little complicated in our organization because we had a lot of people, and that usually makes things a little more complicated. So we’re about to do some simplifications and also invest some more money in areas where we’re maybe not quite as good as we need to be.
Historically, we’re a fantastic B2C company. We sell our stuff to Amazon, to Best Buy, to MediaMarkt. That’s who we are. B2B is much newer. And again, Bracken and the team did a great job of building a B2B business from scratch with a really disruptive video conferencing product. But we’re like teenagers in that space. I wouldn’t call us babies, but we’re like teenagers. If you compare our capabilities, especially on the go-to-market side, to some of the more legacy players in B2B, we’re just newer. That’s a place where we will be investing, and that’s been an obstacle.
You have brought up changing the org chart, which is bait for the show. That’s what Decoder is all about. When I talked to Bracken last, I will never forget it, he described one of the most complicated org charts I’ve ever heard. It seemed to be working. He seemed to be happy with it. He told me, and I went and looked it up, he had 23 direct reports. Most of the teams across the company were set up to be almost completely independent, and he was totally fine with duplicated efforts and resources.
So if two teams were both going to do microphones, that was fine as long as they were both going to market and the teams independently were profitable or successful in their own way. I think he told me there were something like 20 or 30 product teams just running under the various brands. That feels like the thing you’re about to change. Is that what you’re changing?
Yeah, and again, I don’t want to blame previous setups because they were working for their time. The track record of value creation here at Logitech is fantastic. But I think now what I’m hearing from our people and what we’re seeing in some of the results over the past few years is that we do need to simplify because things have gotten a little bit too complicated.
Part of that, by the way, is the brand story. Logitech tried to become a multi-brand company, but today, 97 percent of our sales are in the Logitech brand, Logitech and Logitech G, and I consider those one brand, really. So it’s important that we make sure that 97 percent of our resources are focused on that brand and that we don’t get too scattered around the company. That’s one of the other strategic choices that we’ve made: we will build one fantastic iconic Logitech brand, and that’s our focus.
A lot of the other brands you’re describing are the result of acquisitions. There’s Ultimate Ears, Jaybird, Blue Microphones, Streamlabs — and the list goes on. There have been a lot of acquisitions and there are a lot of new products. Then there are attempts to be more consumer with the Logi brand. Is all of that stuff going to come in under Logitech, or are you going to leave those alone?
Well, again, it’s the tail wagging the dog, right? It’s very, very small. And some of it has already been folded in successfully under the Logitech brand. If you look at Astro, which was a really good acquisition, it’s now part of Logitech. That makes a lot of sense. And it absolutely doesn’t mean we won’t do acquisitions in the future, but again, when they can be folded in, they probably should.
There are much, much bigger companies with much bigger brands that don’t rely on a whole stable of brands. So I’m excited about that. And then you also mentioned product development and engineering, which, of course, is the heart of this company. Again, there’s probably room for a little bit more synergy, and this is, by the way, not about cost-cutting. It’s just about getting more out of the resources that we have if we talk to each other a little bit more.
I’m assuming you’re not going to stick with 23 direct reports and a bunch of basically startup founders everywhere.
I already haven’t, that I know.
To your point, it worked.
Absolutely.
I remember talking to Bracken. I was like, “That sounds pretty fun,” and he seemed like he was having a good time. But you need to change it now. How are you doing that? What’s the structure now?
I’m already down to 12 or 13 direct reports, so it’s already streamlined in that way. I think running the company along the lines of three big businesses — personal workspace, gaming, and Logitech for enterprise — is a really important way of going forward, and that’s what we’ll be doing.
Again, historically, we’re very much a consumer company, so across [personal workspace solutions] and gaming, we’ll be focused on the end user to consumer, the customer, Amazon, Walmart, Gigabyte, MediaMarkt, etc. And B2B is a different kettle of fish where we still have to build significant capability, which is a huge opportunity because, again, we’ve got fabulous products for corporate customers, and our penetration is still very low. So I’m really excited about the growth potential of our B2B business.
Inside of that structure, which feels like a go-to-market structure, you’ve got the three big consumer segments, and you’ve got products that might move between them. You do still have some brands that people love. Ultimate Ears is a brand that I love. That was my first fancy pair of headphones. You have Blue Microphones, where half or a quarter of the podcasts in the world are on fancy Blue Microphones, and they’re a fixture of all the studios. Are you going to leave some of those to their high-end customers?
Yeah, absolutely, and we retain a small Ultimate Ears team who are doing great stuff. They just launched the new Wonderboom, which is a super cool product. The same is true for Blue. Absolutely, those little teams, again, we’re super sufficient and scrappy on those, but they’re great products and they’ll stay in place and they’re as loved as the big dogs.
When you were going through and saying, “Okay, I have to fold some into the three big buckets and I’m going to leave some of these alone,” what was the framework you used? What was the marker for you to say, “Okay, we’re going to set Blue aside, but this one we have to fold into the main consumer Logitech brand”?
I think the framework is a framework of growth. So if we want to double the business by 2031, then you work back and you say, “Okay, what do we need to do?” Well, we need to grow organically, mid-single digits, and we want to do some M&A. What are the spaces that we’ll play in? It will be work and play and it will be B2B and B2C. Then, when you look at the building blocks, the big chunks will be in B2B video conferencing and personal workspace products, in gaming and in PWS products.
So then, underneath that, yes, you have to fit in some of these smaller pieces, and that’s totally fine. I’ve always found throughout my career that it’s actually fun to work on some of these smaller pieces because you have a little more freedom. If you do well, people think you’re fantastic. If you don’t do well, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s a nice place to be in.
One of the other things you said in that investor call, which is also just pure Decoder bait and I thank you for it, is that one of your core beliefs is that companies are perfectly designed to get the results that they are getting. Whatever result you get you can just run right back to the structure of the company. Explain that in more depth.
The results that we got last quarter, which we’re actually pleased with because we were back to growth and we had really good margins, are the result of the structure that we had then. Now, I’m a big believer that you have to make a few changes if you want to get, in our case, even better results, a little faster growth with the same margins, and not unimportantly, reduce that carbon footprint by 50 percent. If you expect the same results, then it’s fine to stay with that same organization. If you expect results that are a little different, you need to make some tweaks. Again, I don’t think Logitech is a disaster turnaround story at all. This is a good-to-great story. But if we want to be great, then we have to make some tweaks.
As you think about changing the structure, you talked about your process here tonight. You talked to everybody. You listened. You co-created some ideas. There are some goals here. You’re saying, “I’m designing a structure to get to some very explicit, probably measurable goals.” Do those look mostly like growth? Does it look like product innovation? Does it look like flipping the apple cart over and inventing the next iPhone?
This is a product and innovation company at its heart. So that’s the way we grow, with great, fantastic products that our users love. But that’s the what and the how. In terms of the outcome, yes, it’s about growth. So we’ve said we want to double the business by 2031 and reduce our carbon footprint because that’s something the company committed to well before I got here, which is not so easy to do when you double your business because each one of those mice and keyboards emits more carbon. Then, of course, we want to create great value for investors. So gross margins and operating income margins are important, and we’ve guided for some really attractive levels.
You’re the new CEO. You got hired by a board of directors. Some of that board of directors is leaving. You’re going to have some new members that the shareholders can vote for. You’d like them to vote for you to be added to the board of directors.
When you set that goal and you say, “I’m changing the structure of the company,” or even when you’re interviewing for the job, did you come in and say, “Look, I think we should double the size of the company by 2031”? Was that the pitch? Was it, “I think there’s a new vision”? Now, when you’re actually executing and saying these things out loud, do you feel the pressure to grow from your investors or your board members? Where does that come from?
I would say, first of all, on the process to get this role, kudos to the board of Logitech. I thought they did a really great job in the interviewing process, where, I’ll spill the beans, but they asked each of the candidates to do a 15- to 20-minute presentation on what they thought the company should be. Now, of course, as an external candidate, you do that not knowing a whole lot.
So, while some of the themes I talked about have come back in my actual strategy, some of the things have changed because obviously I know a lot more now than I did before I joined. But that was helpful because it allows the board to see where the candidate wants to take the company. But you’d be surprised that not all boards do that.
So that was the hiring process. You didn’t walk in saying, “I’m going to double the size of the company.” But now is when you’re saying that?
Yes.
And is that a decision that is coming from the board in service to its investors?
No. Again, this is listening, co-creating, and then engaging with the board deeply on “does this make sense — these goals, this vision?” And then these “where to play” and “how to win” choices, do those make sense? The board was a really important stakeholder, obviously, in finalizing that. But so were the people of Logitech. I’m a big believer in co-creation, and that’s not just co-creation with the leadership team.
We actually invited all 7,000 employees to come to co-creation sessions around the world where we shared with them an MVP of our strategy. But then we said, “Tell us three things you’d like and three things you want to add or change.” We had great feedback on that, and that really shaped the final strategy.
What was the biggest thing that you added or changed or the biggest thing that people really liked?
What they really liked is the continued focus on products and innovation. Again, that is our lifeblood, and we have so many fantastic engineers and designers, so that came out very, very clearly. I think what surprised me was actually the passion for sustainability. There’s a huge passion around the world for what we can do to lead in tech on reducing the carbon footprint where there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of increasing carbon footprints, unfortunately, in the age of AI. There was more passion for that topic than I had expected. So again, it’s important in our strategy going forward.
Let’s talk about the products. They are the lifeblood of the company. I’m going to say “the mouse built this house” all the time. It’s very good. I can’t believe I never knew that before. It’s a pretty sprawling product lineup. You’re in a million categories. How did you acquaint yourself with all of it?
There are three big ones.
Well, sure, but everything from smart home doorbells to mice to headphones, it’s a lot of things.
I think those are pretty much gone.
So wait, you’re going to leave the smart home?
No, there’s our timing. I need to double-check, but I’m not even sure those are still being sold. It’s really personal workspace, video conferencing, and gaming.
What about all the customers you sold smart home cameras to who have cloud service dependencies?
We’ll continue to support, of course, what we’ve sold for some time.
I’m always curious because every new category now has some sort of ongoing service dependency, which feels very risky. Our audience is constantly telling us that one reason they go back to big companies over and over again and won’t buy products from challengers or startups is that they don’t want their products to disappear. And then big companies like Google have broken that trust anyway. This is a really ongoing conversation with The Verge audience. It must be new for you. When you were at Procter & Gamble, I’m assuming people didn’t buy shampoo and then worry you were going to stop selling shampoo.
That’s so true, and it’s such an interesting topic. Actually, at Procter & Gamble, we did get lots of people calling when you took their lipstick shade out, but that’s a little different. There’s no software inside.
Yeah, you weren’t breaking all the existing lipsticks that had been sold.
Exactly. Again, this is a space that’s somewhat newer for Logitech, but it’s incredibly strategic. We don’t do just pure hardware. We do design-led, software-enabled hardware, and that software component in the age of AI is more important every day. The services that we provide to our corporate customers are actually a nicely growing part of the business that didn’t exist a few years ago because Logitech was new to B2B and wasn’t charging for its services. Now we are.
I think we deliver great software services to our B2B customers, but we are learning. On the consumer side as well, through Logitech Options Plus, the software, it’s very important to deliver superior products for our users. We now have more software engineers than hardware engineers, which is a big milestone.
This comes up in surprising ways on Decoder. The CTO of John Deere once told me that John Deere has more software engineers than hardware engineers because it has to support the ongoing service and cloud capabilities of the tractor. This makes a little more sense for Logitech, but really what we’re talking about is an ongoing cost. You sell me the keyboard once. It’s got Options Plus. It has an AI button. I push the button, and someone has to make sure the software still works. Someone probably has to pay ChatGPT for access to the service. Where is that going to come from? Are you baking that into the margin of the keyboard or the mouse?
Absolutely. We’re baking that in, and I’m not particularly worried about that. What I’m actually hoping is that this will contribute to the longevity of our products, that we’ll have more premium products but products that last longer because they’re superior and because we can continue to update them over time. And again, I talked about doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half. The longevity piece is really important.
I’m very intrigued. The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.
What made the mouse a forever mouse?
It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.
But, again, I just come back to the cost. You sell me the mouse once. Maybe I’ll pay 200 bucks for it.
The business model obviously is the challenge there. So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model? In our video conferencing business, that is now a very important part of the model, the services, and it’s critical for corporate customers.
Let’s come to that in a second because that makes sense to me. You sell managed services to enterprises. You price support contracts for cameras and whatever. That’s an ongoing need businesses have. I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”
Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.
But Rolex has to employ software engineers to ship me over-the-air updates forever.
But the artifact is like your Rolex, and then given that we know the technology that we attach to changes, it’s not going to be like your Rolex in that it doesn’t have to ever change. Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.
It certainly will help with sustainability. There are two ways people have traditionally proposed monetizing hardware over time. It’s subscription fees and it’s advertising. Is there a third way that I don’t know about that you’re thinking of?
No. The third way is the traditional model of “we innovate and we have you upgrade.” That’s the current model. And we’re pretty damn good at that model because we have pretty damn good innovators around the company who do come up with fabulous products.
That is definitely the model today. It’s not a bad model at all, especially since we’re continuing to design for more sustainable products. We’re continuing to recycle and refurbish products. All of that is good. But that said, I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that.
I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?
Possibly.
And that would be the forever mouse?
Yeah.
So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.
Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.
But it’s a mouse.
But it’s a mouse, yeah.
I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.
[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.
You mentioned AI earlier. You have rolled out some of the AI features in the new versions of Options Plus. There is a mouse with an AI button.
Actually, sorry, Nilay. I am going to give you just a little piece of information. So the mouse built this house. Is that a traditional category? Will it go away? Is it old and tired? We don’t believe so because only about 50 percent of people use a mouse and a keyboard today, a separate keyboard.
Some only have a mouse or only a keyboard, but many of them have both. But the thing that shocked me was that the average spend on that globally is $26, which is really so low. This is stuff you use every day, that sits on your desk every day, that you look at every day. That’s like the price of four coffees at Starbucks or less than a Nike running shirt. There is so much room to create more value in that space as we make people more productive — to extend human potential.
Do you think the growth comes from going from 50 to 55 percent, or does it come from selling the 50 percent more expensive products?
Both. Absolutely both. That’s why this is still an exciting category.
One of the things about keyboards in particular is that they have become lifestyle items. You see influencers on TikTok talk about their setups. We run photos of people’s setups. People have deep abiding attachments to their key switches in their keyboards. I’m assuming this is new to you, unless you were a diehard mechanical keyboard fan before, which would be amazing. You’re looking at it from a background in consumer products. What’s your view of that, of the keyboard as a lifestyle product?
I definitely think it’s an important lifestyle product. Obviously, on the gaming side, it’s a really important lifestyle product, and again, it’s a real growth opportunity for us for many years to come. On the work side, what I’m intrigued by is that the needs of different people are very different when it comes to keyboards and mice. So we have done a nice job of growing this business by targeting different groups.
You have advanced users: a software engineer; a financial analyst who is in Excel all day. They need our MX line where you can do tons of shortcuts. I met someone over the weekend who — I didn’t even know this was possible — had done 120 shortcuts on one of our mice. I’m like, “What? I’m proud I have four.” But anyway, these are super advanced users, and we make MX products for them.
Then you have people who have some wellness issues because they’re also typing all day, but they’re sitting at the kitchen table or on an airplane like me, and they’re screwing up their arms. So the Ergo line — also very premium, very beautiful — is really made for them. I use an Ergo keyboard. It’s fantastic. It really helps on the shoulder and the arm. Then you have more lifestyle, younger people, especially in China, who want the pink mouse or who want the mouse that goes with the latest game. So these are really different groups, and I think we have opportunities to go even deeper on those consumer needs to build exactly the right products for them.
That differentiation between gaming and professional and lifestyle, you can pull them apart. I think a lot of companies try to pull them apart. But I think, from my view, they’re getting mashed together. The needs of a gamer and the needs of the Excel macro fanatic, they’re more the same than different in some cases. And then the high-design lifestyle category and gaming as a lifestyle are also the same in very important ways. How do you pull those apart? What’s your approach to that, especially because you have a view from the outside?
Absolutely. It’s funny. It’s an “and, and.” In some cases, you’re absolutely right, things are blurring. In China, we’re seeing a lot of people working with our gaming stuff, but then there’s also complete bifurcation. Our top-of-the-line gaming mouse is the Pro Light, which is the most simplistic-looking from the outside: a super light, thin thing with a lot of exciting software inside. Whereas our top-of-the-line MX mouse for advanced users is not at all minimalistic because it has 18 buttons and scrollers and whatever. You’ll see the same guy who’s a software engineer by day and a gamer by night use both. So it’s a “yes, and.” And again, it’s really important we understand all of those users and that we build fabulous products for them.
The really interesting thing about keyboards and mice is that they’re tied to desktop computing as a paradigm, particularly mice. You can plug a mouse into an iPad, but why? You can buy the case, and Apple has a lot of decisions to make about the future of the iPad, but really what we’re talking about is desktop computers: macOS, Windows, Linux, big monitors maybe.
There’s an endless prediction that this will go away, that mobile will take over everything. That prediction does not appear to have borne out. When you’re thinking about Logitech’s markets, how do you evaluate that? Is it that eventually everyone will just have a phone and the laptop will go away? Even if the evidence doesn’t seem to bear it out, it is a permanent prediction in the tech industry.
It’s definitely a permanent prediction. As I onboarded at the company, I had a few history lessons. I went through historical documents, and this same thing came up 20–25 years ago: the PC is imminently disappearing. That has not happened, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t absolutely be paranoid. One of our innovation streams is called “Beyond the PC,” and we’re dedicating significant resources to innovating beyond the PC.
Of course, some of what we sell today, quite a good amount of what we sell today, video conferencing, is already beyond the PC. That’s important. If you look at one of our recent innovations, we announced two weeks ago the MX Ink, which is a stylus for the Meta Quest. That’s definitely beyond the PC. So hopefully you get a sense of what we’ll need to do more of in this space, but we know how to do it. I like this example a lot, the MX Ink stylus for Meta, because it’s beyond the PC but also helps us think about work beyond the office. Who’s going to use that stylus? It’s creative people, it’s doctors. It’s not your traditional office worker.
One thing that’s really difficult about going beyond the PC is that there are vastly more gatekeepers once you leave the realm of Mac and Windows. It’s Apple and Google in particular. There are things that they will simply not allow you to do with their devices. There’s software you can’t ship. There are drivers you can’t load. There are peripherals that won’t attach, all the way down the line. Has that been a bit of a wake-up call?
Well, it’s been an area where I’m actually very impressed. Logitech, I think, has the best set of partnerships in the industry, and it’s proud of it and it nurtures those partnerships. Whether it’s Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Zoom, we work closely with all of them, and we’re able to develop products with and for them, including Apple, which is fantastic but a little secretive at times, which is their right and they’re amazing.
We just came out with a Combo Touch for the new iPads, which is a beautiful product, and we work with Apple with Berlin walls around [those products]. So it’s kind of funny. My team in Taiwan who works on that, they were wearing T-shirts when I came that said, “My work is so secretive, I don’t even know what I’m working on.”
[Laughs] That’s very good.
But that’s a really close collaboration with a fabulous company, Apple. MX Ink is an example of Meta. And obviously we’re very close in our video conferencing business and beyond to Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. It’s a unique set of partnerships. This company was born as an American and Swiss company. That neutrality of working with all these partners is where the Swissness comes to life best.
Let me ask you to compare more directly. A lot of times in the tech world when people complain about app store policies or restrictions on what the OS will let you do or the Apple tax, the immediate comparison is, “Well, Walmart controls what goes in its stores,” or, “Target controls what goes in its stores.” You used to work on Head & Shoulders, and if you wanted the end cap at Walmart for Head & Shoulders, you had to pay them some extra money for additional marketing. The analogy is there. It comes up all the time.
You’re a very unique person to ask this question of, because I have always thought, well, Walmart has competition. If you’re not getting a favorable rate to put the shampoo in Walmart, you can go to Target or the grocery store or Walgreens or wherever else. The platforms do not have that in that way. Have you felt that yet in your seven months?
You’re right that they don’t in that way. If I use video conferencing as an example, there is competition. Microsoft is obviously very large, but there is Google and there is Zoom. We do work really well with all three of them and we value all three of them and we put significant resources against all three of them, and they do the same with us. It’s not like there’s only one. And that’s true when it comes to virtual reality as well as beyond the PC. It’s a real competitive advantage for Logitech to have this range of partnerships and not just be in bed with any one of them.
Are there things you’d like to build or ideas you’ve heard that are being blocked by the various rules that the mobile platforms have in place?
No. Again, it’s been seven months so this may change, but from what I’ve seen, we can talk about everything, including with the very big boys. I love that and I think that will lead to some really great innovation going forward.
But if you wanted to have the AI button on a keyboard connected to an iPad that brought up your overlay and Options Plus to create a prompt, Apple would simply not let you do that on iPadOS in the way that you can on Windows and macOS.
Yeah, and again, I’m not sure that’s something we would die on our sword for.
Makes sense. The other piece of the puzzle here is basically everybody at some point tells me that they won’t die on their sword to continue connecting to Apple, but it just seems very obvious to me that comparison to retail falls apart because there are so many more retailers.
Yeah, although Walmart, don’t underestimate the size of Walmart, certainly in the US.
Fair enough. The other world Logitech lives in is the world of standards. There’s USB for however much you’re going to play in the smart home. There’s Matter. There’s Bluetooth. Every time we do an episode on standards, we discover it’s intensely political and almost not technical in a very specific way. Has that come up for you — “Boy, we need to make sure that the next version of the USB standard can do all the things we want it to do”? Or are you saying, “We’re going to let the platforms figure that out”?
We’re really active in all of the industry forums and associations that talk about standards because it is really important for us, not just for the platforms. I would say the most important thing is that there is a standard because, when there isn’t, that just creates complexity and cost for everyone. We’re active and always trying to go for a standard.
I think we’ll have to go to some new standards as well. One of the things I’m quite proud of at Logitech is that we carbon-label our products with a really solid methodology. It shows that your mouse is 1.5 in terms of emissions and your keyboard is 15 and your video conference, I don’t know by heart, but it’s a lot more. What would be super interesting is if we could get to an industry standard for carbon labeling so that consumers and corporate consumers can make a choice on a product that has lower emissions. That’s one of the things we’re trying to work with some industry associations and groups on. But in general, standardization is important for the industry, and we’ll push that as hard as we can.
Did you open a door in some office at Logitech and find the people who have to work with the standards board and it’s just a group of sad lawyers?
They’re really exciting. They’re great.
I’m dying to know.
There’s not a lot of them. There’s like one, but they’re super active.
You’ve talked about climate and sustainability several times now. Let’s talk about it in the context of AI. A bunch of the big companies, in particular companies investing in data centers and foundation models, they’re blowing their climate goals out of the water because they’re spending so much more in energy to power these AI systems. Those things are obviously in tension. You’re in on AI. You have Options Plus. You have the buttons on the mice. Then you’re also talking about being sustainable. How are you managing that tension?
Clearly we’re not building LLMs ourselves, so the impact of our stuff is very modest. It’s on the edge. In the context of our total footprint, we don’t expect that to have a significant impact. Our impact sits in materials and components, in PCBs and plastics, and it sits in the circularity, or the lack thereof. Because we sell stuff, hardware, and that’s a huge part of our footprint.
So that is not where I’m concerned, but clearly, as an industry, we should be super concerned about the fact that pretty much every player has goals to be carbon neutral by 2040 or 2050, but right now the numbers are only going up and up and up. That is very concerning. We’re a relatively small player, but I hope we can be a pioneer and show the way on taking real climate action rather than just buying offsets.
Some of your goals are using more than 70 percent recycled plastic in manufacturing. Can you get to 100 percent? Is that feasible?
We should be able to get very close. The first priority for us on our glide path to a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 is to expand what we already know how to do. I’m really proud that Logitech is already at 75 percent of products using recycled plastic. That is huge. Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, they’re like 20 percent. This is huge on a large number of products every year. We also know what to do in terms of low-carbon aluminum, low-carbon some other things. We’ve got to scale what we already know how to do, and I think we can get very close to 100 percent.
Then we have to use renewable energy wherever we can because that is a big part of our footprint. And then third and fourth, we have to innovate and we have to drive circularity. The last one is probably the hardest innovation to come. PCBs are a big focus for innovation. They’re a big part of our footprint as well, and they’re very carbon-intensive. We know what the four pillars are: We have to scale. We have to use renewable energy. We have to innovate, and we have to go for circularity. And then I think we have a fighting chance to actually be minus 50 percent and again grow the business because that’s the tricky thing here and that’s what Google and Microsoft are really struggling with right now.
Can you quickly define circularity?
The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.
Let’s end on the forever mouse because I’m fascinated by this concept: the idea that you would have a mouse and you’d buy it once and then you’d maybe pay some fees for software upgrades or you’d trade it in and get a newer one, and that would be a recurring revenue source for you. That all depends on a vision of what the mouse software should do besides just move the cursor around. But whenever we do episodes with anything to do with AI, our audience is like, “We don’t want this.” In a very direct way, sometimes they’re like, “We don’t want this and we especially don’t want it here.”
We might want it when we want it. I might want to use generative fill in Photoshop on my terms, but I don’t need it to follow me around the computer. And even if you’re saying the climate impact is minimal, I certainly don’t want to feel like there’s any climate impact of using my mouse and expanding the range of places where you might go ask OpenAI for inference. That’s one problem. The second problem is you’re still competing with OpenAI and Google and Apple to be the primary interface for their backend services, right? You’re not training your own model.
The question for me is really twofold. It’s one: is there a vision beyond “the software will do more for you” than just drive your mouse around? And the second part is: even if it can do more, can you realistically compete against the giants that have every incentive to make sure that you never look anywhere else?
On the second piece, this company has been a human-technology interface for its entire existence. And while the mouse built this house and maybe there won’t be mice forever — although I think there’ll be mice for a long time to come — we’ve always been that human-technology interface. There were always people who said, “Well, Google and Microsoft won’t want you to be.” In fact, they often come to us and say, “We want an interface.” So, that MX Ink, it’s not that we were pushing Meta really hard. It was Meta saying, “Oh, we’d love for you to do something like this,” and us saying, “Well, we think we can.”
I think the big players will continue to want to work with players like us who have the luxury of focus. For us, a $40 million idea is 1 percent growth. Whereas, for Microsoft or Google, that’s nothing. That luxury of focus is important, and I think we’ll continue to be a human-technology interface in that way. Should the mouse do more than just move the cursor? Absolutely. And it does that today, and I think similarly about being more productive with shortcuts to the large language models and all kinds of other things. The guy that I met at a barbecue over the weekend who has programmed 120 shortcuts on his mouse, that’s the kind of stuff that can extend human potential in ways that are healthier.
This idea — that Logitech sits at a machine-human interface — right now, it’s expressed in Options Plus. Your software that has AI in it is essentially prompt engineering, right? You’re guiding people through the process of making a prompt, which is, for better or worse, how we are all talking to AI right now.
Yeah, totally.
Is that it? Is that the vision? Is there a different vision? Is that just the stopping point right now?
No, I think we’re at the beginning of AI, and [with time], it will become multimodal and we won’t even need to build prompts because it will know what prompts we need. Things will evolve exactly how that will evolve. Who knows? But I think the human is going to be a limiting factor. Human hands, the human brain. I suspect we’ll still need human-technology interfaces. They may not look exactly like what Logitech sells today, but I think the future for human-technology interfaces is really, really bright.
The danger there is that’s also what Apple and Microsoft and Google see. I talked to Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, and they happily tell me that AI is a platform shift. And what they mean is that it’s an interface shift, that we’re going to get the phone out of your hand or you’re going to deal with something else that is not Apple’s phone. That’s very much what they mean.
What they’re talking about is, “Okay, you’re going to talk to the computer. It’s going to do stuff for you.” Or, “You’re going to issue a set of commands, and the computer will figure out how to do whatever task you want it to.” You can already see they’re getting there. You can see some of the demos of the concepts. Do you worry about that disintermediating Logitech?
Yeah, but again, there’s still going to be technology, whether that’s an AI button or something else. I think Logitech did a really fine job surviving the shift from PC to phone and still being a fabulous interface. I’m pretty sure that with the fabulous engineers and designers we have, we’ll also be an interface to whatever’s next.
Well, that’s a great place to end it. Hanneke, tell the people what you think is next for Logitech. You’ve been there for seven months. What’s the stuff you’re looking forward to now that you’ve figured it out?
We’ve got a great bunch of innovations coming up. I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. [Laughs.] As we go toward the end of your holidays, I think we have a really bright fiscal year ahead, and then we’ll continue to extend human potential in work and play.
I love it. Well, the mouse built this house. This is amazing. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.
Alright, it is so nice to see you, Nilay.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Logitech

The new head of Logitech discusses the company’s return to growth and plans to reduce its carbon footprint by half.

Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty new to the role: she joined the company last October, after the former CEO, Bracken Darrell, left.

You might remember Bracken — he was on Decoder back in 2021, basically at the height of the covid-19 pandemic-era boom in home office sales, when Logitech was selling mice, keyboards, and webcams as fast as it could make them.

Obviously, things have changed since then. Logitech, like so many companies that saw huge pandemic booms, very abruptly saw that growth slow down when the world began to normalize. Bracken left Logitech last June to go to the company that owns Vans and Supreme, and Logitech brought on Hanneke, a longtime executive with an extensive background in consumer goods at conglomerates like Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

Hanneke and I talked about the structural changes she’s already making at Logitech and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sounds like some Logitech products, like its smart home doorbells and cameras, are not long for this world.

Hanneke says that people often say “the mouse built this house” inside Logitech, which is a delightful catchphrase I’d never heard before. From there, we talked about how new interface paradigms like voice and AI might upend mice and keyboards and how she’s thinking about the company’s long-term future in a world where traditional PC sales might go down.

Of course, we talked about whether anyone wants their mouse to be anything more than a mouse — Logitech is adding AI features and even AI buttons to some of its products, and I wanted to know if that’s working.

You’ll hear Hanneke talk about a concept called the “forever mouse,” or a mouse you buy once and upgrade over time with new software features — features that, of course, might carry a subscription fee. Subscription mice! It’s a lot.

You’ll also hear Hanneke talk about how she plans to grow the business and hit an ambitious carbon footprint reduction milestone by the end of the decade as well as where she thinks the company needs to go next. There’s a lot in this one.

Okay, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanneke Faber, you are the new-ish CEO of Logitech. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you so much.

I am really excited to talk to you. You have been on the job as CEO for seven months now?

Seven months. I started on December 1st.

So you’re in. You’re settled. You know where the bathrooms are, which is step one.

Yeah, for sure. Although today’s my first day actually in the office in California. I’ve been in Switzerland so far, so you catch me on day one.

Well, I’m just going to ask you where different things are in that office for the rest of the hour.

[Laughs]

Logitech is a fascinating company. It’s one of those companies that I think is undercover. When we started Decoder, one of our first ideas was that we should talk to more than five CEOs, and Logitech is one of those companies that is just ever-present in the world of technology. It is a partner to the big companies. It’s in everyone’s office. It’s in lots of people’s homes. It’s basically a core fixture of gaming. You play in a lot of spaces.

I talked to your predecessor, Bracken Darrell, in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic in 2021, when everything was a lot different. Sales were skyrocketing, and he changed his strategy a little bit. Bracken recently left. He now runs Supreme and Vans, which was a shift. We’ll talk to him about that. You have a background in consumer goods at Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Why jump to Logitech when the job opened up?

Actually, Bracken came from P&G as well, so that’s not so different. But I’ve been really fortunate throughout my career of working in different industries. I worked mostly in beauty at P&G. I actually worked in tech for four years at Ahold Delhaize. I ran their e-commerce business when it was almost nonexistent. We built a really cool online grocery business. And then, for the last six years, I ran Unilever’s global food business.

So [despite being] different businesses, I think there are some themes that apply to Logitech: a focus on the user and the consumer first; a focus on innovation and product. And then, finally, really global footprints in every job I’ve worked in and a mix of B2B and B2C. All of those things do translate. Of course, this is a new industry and a new company for me, but it’s great to bring a whole bunch of things that I have experience with and learn a few new things as well.

One of the things that’s really interesting to me about Logitech is that people tend to think of its core products — mice, keyboards, headsets, webcams — as commodities, but they’re still technology products. There’s a lot of innovation left in those spaces. Logitech has driven some of that innovation, but then you see other weird things blossom into cultures unto themselves — mechanical keyboards, for example. There are webcam startups again, which is really interesting. That was not a thing that was happening pre-covid.

Do you view the opportunity here as an operational opportunity, as an innovation opportunity, as a “find new categories and make them grow” opportunity? What is your macro view of the situation?

There are three main tailwinds on our core business. The first one is new ways of working, hybrid working. That’s good for our personal workspace business, the traditional mice and keyboards, because everyone needs multiple setups. And obviously it’s good for our video conferencing business. So the new ways of working post-covid are a real tailwind for us.

Second is gaming. Gaming, just as a space, continues to grow, and especially with new demographics. Almost half of gamers are now women, which is amazing. And older people game. It’s no longer just teenage boys. We see the market continue to grow.

Wait, can I ask you one question about older people in that context?

Yeah. Sorry, older than teenage boys?

Sure. Is it that a set of teenage boys who were gamers 15 years ago got older, or is it older people are becoming new gamers?

I think we’re seeing a little bit of both, although it’s probably the first trend that is the biggest one. The teenage boys of 15 years ago are now in their 30s and 40s, so that just extends the demographic. New teenage boys are still coming in, and girls, so that’s good. But we’re also seeing older cohorts coming in mostly through mobile, through Candy Crush but also Wordle and Connections. Those are entry points into gaming that make them more comfortable with gaming and may take them to PC and console gaming as well.

You said there was a third thing. What was the third thing?

The third thing… of course you can’t do an interview for three minutes and not say AI, but AI is a real tailwind for us as well.

How do you think AI is a tailwind for Logitech in particular?

In three ways. First, like for any other company, is internal productivity. We’re seeing it on the software engineering side, where coding and testing have clearly become more efficient, but we’re also seeing it on the creative and brand-building side, again, where things are getting more efficient but also sometimes more creative.

More importantly, on the product side, there are two ways in which AI will be a tailwind. First of all, we’ve always been a human-to-technology interface company, and we’re starting to be an interface to the large language models. A couple of months ago, we launched the Logi AI Prompt Builder, which is basically a shortcut in our software to ChatGPT. It has millions of unique users already, and it’s just a simpler way for people to use ChatGPT and not get out of their flow when they use all of our mice and keyboards in English-speaking countries. There will be much more to follow in terms of being that human-technology interface.

There’s a third area that is big on AI, which is in audio and video. We have a big video conferencing business, a headphones business. That’s really machine learning and large data models, and the company’s been at those for a number of years, but we’re seeing the quality of things like two-way noise cancellation or video conferencing equipment that actually knows when to zoom in on you when you’re speaking and not when you’re opening a packet of crisps. Those kinds of things are really important, and I foresee massive quality improvements thanks to machine learning in the years ahead.

I want to come back to the AI question because I think there’s a lot to unpack there, and there are a lot of obvious opportunities, like you said, in audio and video. And then there are some opportunities that, I think, deserve a little more time around AI prompt building and that sort of thing.

But I want to stay focused for a second on you. You’re the new CEO. So covid, work from home, created a massive opportunity for Logitech. I bought a black market webcam at the end of 2020. It was Chinese. It wasn’t even meant for this market.

I love it.

The previous administration really ramped production. They saw huge growth. Then there was an enterprise push as more and more companies embraced hybrid and remote and refitted all their conference rooms. That all crashed back to earth, and there were a couple of years when the growth was falling. Logitech’s fourth quarter earnings released back in April marked your first quarter of sales growth in over two years. You also reported growth in your most recent quarter. What is bringing that growth back?

Product innovation and markets that are stabilizing a little bit post-covid [are contributing to that growth]. I have to say, this company should be very proud of what it did during covid under Bracken. It did a really great job, but obviously it was a bit of a sugar high. That said, the company is 50 percent bigger today than it was pre-covid, so it hasn’t all come crashing down to earth.

I think what we’ve done is we’ve really been focusing on great execution and on things that we can control. There are some things that we can’t control: inflation, consumer confidence, corporate IT budgets for our video conferencing business. But within those constraints, we’ve been growing our share. That was one of the drivers of us getting back to growth in Q4. We’ve been delivering really exciting innovation, and we’ll continue to do those things.

You called it a sugar high. I feel like the broad story of tech in particular is the sugar high of overinvestment during covid, of competing to hire every single person that existed in the world who could write code and then assuming that those trends would be permanent and we would all stay inside and live our lives mediated through screens on the internet forever. Many companies did not survive that sugar high. Is it that simple, that Logitech just weathered the covid highs and the trends and is back to a stable place now?

We’re not back to where we were in 2019. Again, we’re 50 percent bigger as a company, and the way people work is so different today versus 2019. Virtually every company that I speak to, and I speak to many of them because they’re all our customers, wants to be hybrid. They want their people to come into the office two or three days a week, but they also want to offer the flexibility of working from home or working from anywhere. That is obviously very different from in 2019. We pride ourselves on being a model for ways of working because we sell this stuff, so I think we’re very well positioned to help our corporate customers give people a great experience both in the office and at home.

You mentioned that you are in the California office today, and it’s your first day there. You moved to Switzerland when you got this job. How are you structuring your time between remote, hybrid, and in person? How’s that working for you?

Sadly, I live on an airplane, it feels like. Logitech is very special in that it is a super global company. We’re on the ground in more than 100 countries, and we have great capabilities around the world. I spend probably 60 percent of my time in offices that are not my own. When I’m in California, or I spent these first seven months [on the job] in our Swiss office, I try to be in the office. But I might also, if I start early — like today, I started at 6AM — go back home at 1PM and get some exercise and then work more later on. That’s a level of flexibility that I don’t think we necessarily had pre-covid, which is great.

Do you ever find yourself in that horrible situation of being alone in a conference room on a video call?

That’s just ridiculous, right?

That’s my nightmare. If I go to the office and I’m the only one there and everyone else is on a video call, I wonder why we even have an office.

[Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have this concept of gravity days at Logitech. On the gravity days, everyone’s there so you’re not by yourself.

What are the gravity days?

It depends on the teams. My gravity days here are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I’ll see most of the leadership team. But different teams have different gravity days that they pick themselves.

And then are you living on a plane just to be in person wherever you need to be?

Yes, and part of that is because I’m new — and I’m not just new to the company; I’m also new to the industry. I need to meet people, our own people, but very much also suppliers, customers, consumers, investors. There are just a lot of people to meet, and certainly a first meeting, I think, is still best done in person.

This brings us very neatly to what I think of as the Decoder questions. I was listening to the first fireside chat you had for your investors five days into the job, and I heard you say that your style is to be as close to the customer and as close to the people doing the work as possible because they know best. That’s you on planes. But ultimately, you have to make a lot of decisions. What kind of decisions do you want to be making? What’s your framework for making them?

I think company strategy is a great way to set that decision framework. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months, first listening, then co-creating that strategy, and then setting the strategy and setting the bar high. If I unpack that a little bit, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know and that we all don’t know, so listening was first. Then we sat down with the leadership team first to really make choices. What’s our goal? For 2031, because that’s when Logitech will be 50 years old, we set a goal of doubling the business and reducing our carbon footprint by 50 percent while retaining really attractive margins.

We set a mission, which we’ve said is extending human potential in work and in play. We had a good mission, but it was three pages long, so I really wanted to simplify that. And “extending human potential,” those words are carefully chosen. So “extending” is obviously a riff on the mouse. The mouse built this house. It extends your arm, so we want to extend—

You say, “The mouse built this house”?

Yeah, that’s what they say here — and I say it. I like it.

That should be the whole mission, I got to be honest with you. I think it’s a strong contender.

That’s right. But we extend human potential in this age of AI, this age of [Zoom CEO] Eric Yuan saying there are digital twins of all of us coming to meetings. It’s really important that we extend human potential because we can make humans better. We can help you win that game. We can help you be more productive. We can help you connect better when you’re in that conference room by yourself. If we can do that in ways that are also healthier for people on the planet, then extending human potential is really worth waking up for every morning.

And what else is there in life but work and play? We do that in work and play today, but I believe, with my leadership team, that those areas are actually much bigger than where Logitech plays today. Today, we’re mostly focused on work. We focus on office workers. Most people in the world don’t work in an office. They work in retail, healthcare, education, construction, you name it. And we can play there, too. And in gaming, we’re mostly focused on PC gaming. Today, there’s a lot more play out there than just PC gaming. That broadens our TAM, our total addressable market, for the future, which is an opportunity to deliver that growth.

That’s a long-winded way of saying what we’re doing. That is our framework for decision-making. We’ve then made some pretty clear choices where to play and how to win below that, and now that that is in place, as a leader, I can circle back and say, “Okay, I listened. We co-create it and we set the bar high.” Now, I circle back and I listen again. I go back and I listen to people and say, “What do they need? What obstacles do I need to take away so that they can deliver on doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half?”

What kind of obstacles have you removed so far?

Well, we’re in the process [of doing this]. I think some of those obstacles might be the result of that sugar high. We got a little complicated in our organization because we had a lot of people, and that usually makes things a little more complicated. So we’re about to do some simplifications and also invest some more money in areas where we’re maybe not quite as good as we need to be.

Historically, we’re a fantastic B2C company. We sell our stuff to Amazon, to Best Buy, to MediaMarkt. That’s who we are. B2B is much newer. And again, Bracken and the team did a great job of building a B2B business from scratch with a really disruptive video conferencing product. But we’re like teenagers in that space. I wouldn’t call us babies, but we’re like teenagers. If you compare our capabilities, especially on the go-to-market side, to some of the more legacy players in B2B, we’re just newer. That’s a place where we will be investing, and that’s been an obstacle.

You have brought up changing the org chart, which is bait for the show. That’s what Decoder is all about. When I talked to Bracken last, I will never forget it, he described one of the most complicated org charts I’ve ever heard. It seemed to be working. He seemed to be happy with it. He told me, and I went and looked it up, he had 23 direct reports. Most of the teams across the company were set up to be almost completely independent, and he was totally fine with duplicated efforts and resources.

So if two teams were both going to do microphones, that was fine as long as they were both going to market and the teams independently were profitable or successful in their own way. I think he told me there were something like 20 or 30 product teams just running under the various brands. That feels like the thing you’re about to change. Is that what you’re changing?

Yeah, and again, I don’t want to blame previous setups because they were working for their time. The track record of value creation here at Logitech is fantastic. But I think now what I’m hearing from our people and what we’re seeing in some of the results over the past few years is that we do need to simplify because things have gotten a little bit too complicated.

Part of that, by the way, is the brand story. Logitech tried to become a multi-brand company, but today, 97 percent of our sales are in the Logitech brand, Logitech and Logitech G, and I consider those one brand, really. So it’s important that we make sure that 97 percent of our resources are focused on that brand and that we don’t get too scattered around the company. That’s one of the other strategic choices that we’ve made: we will build one fantastic iconic Logitech brand, and that’s our focus.

A lot of the other brands you’re describing are the result of acquisitions. There’s Ultimate Ears, Jaybird, Blue Microphones, Streamlabs — and the list goes on. There have been a lot of acquisitions and there are a lot of new products. Then there are attempts to be more consumer with the Logi brand. Is all of that stuff going to come in under Logitech, or are you going to leave those alone?

Well, again, it’s the tail wagging the dog, right? It’s very, very small. And some of it has already been folded in successfully under the Logitech brand. If you look at Astro, which was a really good acquisition, it’s now part of Logitech. That makes a lot of sense. And it absolutely doesn’t mean we won’t do acquisitions in the future, but again, when they can be folded in, they probably should.

There are much, much bigger companies with much bigger brands that don’t rely on a whole stable of brands. So I’m excited about that. And then you also mentioned product development and engineering, which, of course, is the heart of this company. Again, there’s probably room for a little bit more synergy, and this is, by the way, not about cost-cutting. It’s just about getting more out of the resources that we have if we talk to each other a little bit more.

I’m assuming you’re not going to stick with 23 direct reports and a bunch of basically startup founders everywhere.

I already haven’t, that I know.

To your point, it worked.

Absolutely.

I remember talking to Bracken. I was like, “That sounds pretty fun,” and he seemed like he was having a good time. But you need to change it now. How are you doing that? What’s the structure now?

I’m already down to 12 or 13 direct reports, so it’s already streamlined in that way. I think running the company along the lines of three big businesses — personal workspace, gaming, and Logitech for enterprise — is a really important way of going forward, and that’s what we’ll be doing.

Again, historically, we’re very much a consumer company, so across [personal workspace solutions] and gaming, we’ll be focused on the end user to consumer, the customer, Amazon, Walmart, Gigabyte, MediaMarkt, etc. And B2B is a different kettle of fish where we still have to build significant capability, which is a huge opportunity because, again, we’ve got fabulous products for corporate customers, and our penetration is still very low. So I’m really excited about the growth potential of our B2B business.

Inside of that structure, which feels like a go-to-market structure, you’ve got the three big consumer segments, and you’ve got products that might move between them. You do still have some brands that people love. Ultimate Ears is a brand that I love. That was my first fancy pair of headphones. You have Blue Microphones, where half or a quarter of the podcasts in the world are on fancy Blue Microphones, and they’re a fixture of all the studios. Are you going to leave some of those to their high-end customers?

Yeah, absolutely, and we retain a small Ultimate Ears team who are doing great stuff. They just launched the new Wonderboom, which is a super cool product. The same is true for Blue. Absolutely, those little teams, again, we’re super sufficient and scrappy on those, but they’re great products and they’ll stay in place and they’re as loved as the big dogs.

When you were going through and saying, “Okay, I have to fold some into the three big buckets and I’m going to leave some of these alone,” what was the framework you used? What was the marker for you to say, “Okay, we’re going to set Blue aside, but this one we have to fold into the main consumer Logitech brand”?

I think the framework is a framework of growth. So if we want to double the business by 2031, then you work back and you say, “Okay, what do we need to do?” Well, we need to grow organically, mid-single digits, and we want to do some M&A. What are the spaces that we’ll play in? It will be work and play and it will be B2B and B2C. Then, when you look at the building blocks, the big chunks will be in B2B video conferencing and personal workspace products, in gaming and in PWS products.

So then, underneath that, yes, you have to fit in some of these smaller pieces, and that’s totally fine. I’ve always found throughout my career that it’s actually fun to work on some of these smaller pieces because you have a little more freedom. If you do well, people think you’re fantastic. If you don’t do well, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s a nice place to be in.

One of the other things you said in that investor call, which is also just pure Decoder bait and I thank you for it, is that one of your core beliefs is that companies are perfectly designed to get the results that they are getting. Whatever result you get you can just run right back to the structure of the company. Explain that in more depth.

The results that we got last quarter, which we’re actually pleased with because we were back to growth and we had really good margins, are the result of the structure that we had then. Now, I’m a big believer that you have to make a few changes if you want to get, in our case, even better results, a little faster growth with the same margins, and not unimportantly, reduce that carbon footprint by 50 percent. If you expect the same results, then it’s fine to stay with that same organization. If you expect results that are a little different, you need to make some tweaks. Again, I don’t think Logitech is a disaster turnaround story at all. This is a good-to-great story. But if we want to be great, then we have to make some tweaks.

As you think about changing the structure, you talked about your process here tonight. You talked to everybody. You listened. You co-created some ideas. There are some goals here. You’re saying, “I’m designing a structure to get to some very explicit, probably measurable goals.” Do those look mostly like growth? Does it look like product innovation? Does it look like flipping the apple cart over and inventing the next iPhone?

This is a product and innovation company at its heart. So that’s the way we grow, with great, fantastic products that our users love. But that’s the what and the how. In terms of the outcome, yes, it’s about growth. So we’ve said we want to double the business by 2031 and reduce our carbon footprint because that’s something the company committed to well before I got here, which is not so easy to do when you double your business because each one of those mice and keyboards emits more carbon. Then, of course, we want to create great value for investors. So gross margins and operating income margins are important, and we’ve guided for some really attractive levels.

You’re the new CEO. You got hired by a board of directors. Some of that board of directors is leaving. You’re going to have some new members that the shareholders can vote for. You’d like them to vote for you to be added to the board of directors.

When you set that goal and you say, “I’m changing the structure of the company,” or even when you’re interviewing for the job, did you come in and say, “Look, I think we should double the size of the company by 2031”? Was that the pitch? Was it, “I think there’s a new vision”? Now, when you’re actually executing and saying these things out loud, do you feel the pressure to grow from your investors or your board members? Where does that come from?

I would say, first of all, on the process to get this role, kudos to the board of Logitech. I thought they did a really great job in the interviewing process, where, I’ll spill the beans, but they asked each of the candidates to do a 15- to 20-minute presentation on what they thought the company should be. Now, of course, as an external candidate, you do that not knowing a whole lot.

So, while some of the themes I talked about have come back in my actual strategy, some of the things have changed because obviously I know a lot more now than I did before I joined. But that was helpful because it allows the board to see where the candidate wants to take the company. But you’d be surprised that not all boards do that.

So that was the hiring process. You didn’t walk in saying, “I’m going to double the size of the company.” But now is when you’re saying that?

Yes.

And is that a decision that is coming from the board in service to its investors?

No. Again, this is listening, co-creating, and then engaging with the board deeply on “does this make sense — these goals, this vision?” And then these “where to play” and “how to win” choices, do those make sense? The board was a really important stakeholder, obviously, in finalizing that. But so were the people of Logitech. I’m a big believer in co-creation, and that’s not just co-creation with the leadership team.

We actually invited all 7,000 employees to come to co-creation sessions around the world where we shared with them an MVP of our strategy. But then we said, “Tell us three things you’d like and three things you want to add or change.” We had great feedback on that, and that really shaped the final strategy.

What was the biggest thing that you added or changed or the biggest thing that people really liked?

What they really liked is the continued focus on products and innovation. Again, that is our lifeblood, and we have so many fantastic engineers and designers, so that came out very, very clearly. I think what surprised me was actually the passion for sustainability. There’s a huge passion around the world for what we can do to lead in tech on reducing the carbon footprint where there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of increasing carbon footprints, unfortunately, in the age of AI. There was more passion for that topic than I had expected. So again, it’s important in our strategy going forward.

Let’s talk about the products. They are the lifeblood of the company. I’m going to say “the mouse built this house” all the time. It’s very good. I can’t believe I never knew that before. It’s a pretty sprawling product lineup. You’re in a million categories. How did you acquaint yourself with all of it?

There are three big ones.

Well, sure, but everything from smart home doorbells to mice to headphones, it’s a lot of things.

I think those are pretty much gone.

So wait, you’re going to leave the smart home?

No, there’s our timing. I need to double-check, but I’m not even sure those are still being sold. It’s really personal workspace, video conferencing, and gaming.

What about all the customers you sold smart home cameras to who have cloud service dependencies?

We’ll continue to support, of course, what we’ve sold for some time.

I’m always curious because every new category now has some sort of ongoing service dependency, which feels very risky. Our audience is constantly telling us that one reason they go back to big companies over and over again and won’t buy products from challengers or startups is that they don’t want their products to disappear. And then big companies like Google have broken that trust anyway. This is a really ongoing conversation with The Verge audience. It must be new for you. When you were at Procter & Gamble, I’m assuming people didn’t buy shampoo and then worry you were going to stop selling shampoo.

That’s so true, and it’s such an interesting topic. Actually, at Procter & Gamble, we did get lots of people calling when you took their lipstick shade out, but that’s a little different. There’s no software inside.

Yeah, you weren’t breaking all the existing lipsticks that had been sold.

Exactly. Again, this is a space that’s somewhat newer for Logitech, but it’s incredibly strategic. We don’t do just pure hardware. We do design-led, software-enabled hardware, and that software component in the age of AI is more important every day. The services that we provide to our corporate customers are actually a nicely growing part of the business that didn’t exist a few years ago because Logitech was new to B2B and wasn’t charging for its services. Now we are.

I think we deliver great software services to our B2B customers, but we are learning. On the consumer side as well, through Logitech Options Plus, the software, it’s very important to deliver superior products for our users. We now have more software engineers than hardware engineers, which is a big milestone.

This comes up in surprising ways on Decoder. The CTO of John Deere once told me that John Deere has more software engineers than hardware engineers because it has to support the ongoing service and cloud capabilities of the tractor. This makes a little more sense for Logitech, but really what we’re talking about is an ongoing cost. You sell me the keyboard once. It’s got Options Plus. It has an AI button. I push the button, and someone has to make sure the software still works. Someone probably has to pay ChatGPT for access to the service. Where is that going to come from? Are you baking that into the margin of the keyboard or the mouse?

Absolutely. We’re baking that in, and I’m not particularly worried about that. What I’m actually hoping is that this will contribute to the longevity of our products, that we’ll have more premium products but products that last longer because they’re superior and because we can continue to update them over time. And again, I talked about doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half. The longevity piece is really important.

I’m very intrigued. The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.

What made the mouse a forever mouse?

It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.

But, again, I just come back to the cost. You sell me the mouse once. Maybe I’ll pay 200 bucks for it.

The business model obviously is the challenge there. So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model? In our video conferencing business, that is now a very important part of the model, the services, and it’s critical for corporate customers.

Let’s come to that in a second because that makes sense to me. You sell managed services to enterprises. You price support contracts for cameras and whatever. That’s an ongoing need businesses have. I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”

Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.

But Rolex has to employ software engineers to ship me over-the-air updates forever.

But the artifact is like your Rolex, and then given that we know the technology that we attach to changes, it’s not going to be like your Rolex in that it doesn’t have to ever change. Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.

It certainly will help with sustainability. There are two ways people have traditionally proposed monetizing hardware over time. It’s subscription fees and it’s advertising. Is there a third way that I don’t know about that you’re thinking of?

No. The third way is the traditional model of “we innovate and we have you upgrade.” That’s the current model. And we’re pretty damn good at that model because we have pretty damn good innovators around the company who do come up with fabulous products.

That is definitely the model today. It’s not a bad model at all, especially since we’re continuing to design for more sustainable products. We’re continuing to recycle and refurbish products. All of that is good. But that said, I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that.

I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?

Possibly.

And that would be the forever mouse?

Yeah.

So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.

Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.

But it’s a mouse.

But it’s a mouse, yeah.

I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.

[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.

You mentioned AI earlier. You have rolled out some of the AI features in the new versions of Options Plus. There is a mouse with an AI button.

Actually, sorry, Nilay. I am going to give you just a little piece of information. So the mouse built this house. Is that a traditional category? Will it go away? Is it old and tired? We don’t believe so because only about 50 percent of people use a mouse and a keyboard today, a separate keyboard.

Some only have a mouse or only a keyboard, but many of them have both. But the thing that shocked me was that the average spend on that globally is $26, which is really so low. This is stuff you use every day, that sits on your desk every day, that you look at every day. That’s like the price of four coffees at Starbucks or less than a Nike running shirt. There is so much room to create more value in that space as we make people more productive — to extend human potential.

Do you think the growth comes from going from 50 to 55 percent, or does it come from selling the 50 percent more expensive products?

Both. Absolutely both. That’s why this is still an exciting category.

One of the things about keyboards in particular is that they have become lifestyle items. You see influencers on TikTok talk about their setups. We run photos of people’s setups. People have deep abiding attachments to their key switches in their keyboards. I’m assuming this is new to you, unless you were a diehard mechanical keyboard fan before, which would be amazing. You’re looking at it from a background in consumer products. What’s your view of that, of the keyboard as a lifestyle product?

I definitely think it’s an important lifestyle product. Obviously, on the gaming side, it’s a really important lifestyle product, and again, it’s a real growth opportunity for us for many years to come. On the work side, what I’m intrigued by is that the needs of different people are very different when it comes to keyboards and mice. So we have done a nice job of growing this business by targeting different groups.

You have advanced users: a software engineer; a financial analyst who is in Excel all day. They need our MX line where you can do tons of shortcuts. I met someone over the weekend who — I didn’t even know this was possible — had done 120 shortcuts on one of our mice. I’m like, “What? I’m proud I have four.” But anyway, these are super advanced users, and we make MX products for them.

Then you have people who have some wellness issues because they’re also typing all day, but they’re sitting at the kitchen table or on an airplane like me, and they’re screwing up their arms. So the Ergo line — also very premium, very beautiful — is really made for them. I use an Ergo keyboard. It’s fantastic. It really helps on the shoulder and the arm. Then you have more lifestyle, younger people, especially in China, who want the pink mouse or who want the mouse that goes with the latest game. So these are really different groups, and I think we have opportunities to go even deeper on those consumer needs to build exactly the right products for them.

That differentiation between gaming and professional and lifestyle, you can pull them apart. I think a lot of companies try to pull them apart. But I think, from my view, they’re getting mashed together. The needs of a gamer and the needs of the Excel macro fanatic, they’re more the same than different in some cases. And then the high-design lifestyle category and gaming as a lifestyle are also the same in very important ways. How do you pull those apart? What’s your approach to that, especially because you have a view from the outside?

Absolutely. It’s funny. It’s an “and, and.” In some cases, you’re absolutely right, things are blurring. In China, we’re seeing a lot of people working with our gaming stuff, but then there’s also complete bifurcation. Our top-of-the-line gaming mouse is the Pro Light, which is the most simplistic-looking from the outside: a super light, thin thing with a lot of exciting software inside. Whereas our top-of-the-line MX mouse for advanced users is not at all minimalistic because it has 18 buttons and scrollers and whatever. You’ll see the same guy who’s a software engineer by day and a gamer by night use both. So it’s a “yes, and.” And again, it’s really important we understand all of those users and that we build fabulous products for them.

The really interesting thing about keyboards and mice is that they’re tied to desktop computing as a paradigm, particularly mice. You can plug a mouse into an iPad, but why? You can buy the case, and Apple has a lot of decisions to make about the future of the iPad, but really what we’re talking about is desktop computers: macOS, Windows, Linux, big monitors maybe.

There’s an endless prediction that this will go away, that mobile will take over everything. That prediction does not appear to have borne out. When you’re thinking about Logitech’s markets, how do you evaluate that? Is it that eventually everyone will just have a phone and the laptop will go away? Even if the evidence doesn’t seem to bear it out, it is a permanent prediction in the tech industry.

It’s definitely a permanent prediction. As I onboarded at the company, I had a few history lessons. I went through historical documents, and this same thing came up 20–25 years ago: the PC is imminently disappearing. That has not happened, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t absolutely be paranoid. One of our innovation streams is called “Beyond the PC,” and we’re dedicating significant resources to innovating beyond the PC.

Of course, some of what we sell today, quite a good amount of what we sell today, video conferencing, is already beyond the PC. That’s important. If you look at one of our recent innovations, we announced two weeks ago the MX Ink, which is a stylus for the Meta Quest. That’s definitely beyond the PC. So hopefully you get a sense of what we’ll need to do more of in this space, but we know how to do it. I like this example a lot, the MX Ink stylus for Meta, because it’s beyond the PC but also helps us think about work beyond the office. Who’s going to use that stylus? It’s creative people, it’s doctors. It’s not your traditional office worker.

One thing that’s really difficult about going beyond the PC is that there are vastly more gatekeepers once you leave the realm of Mac and Windows. It’s Apple and Google in particular. There are things that they will simply not allow you to do with their devices. There’s software you can’t ship. There are drivers you can’t load. There are peripherals that won’t attach, all the way down the line. Has that been a bit of a wake-up call?

Well, it’s been an area where I’m actually very impressed. Logitech, I think, has the best set of partnerships in the industry, and it’s proud of it and it nurtures those partnerships. Whether it’s Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Zoom, we work closely with all of them, and we’re able to develop products with and for them, including Apple, which is fantastic but a little secretive at times, which is their right and they’re amazing.

We just came out with a Combo Touch for the new iPads, which is a beautiful product, and we work with Apple with Berlin walls around [those products]. So it’s kind of funny. My team in Taiwan who works on that, they were wearing T-shirts when I came that said, “My work is so secretive, I don’t even know what I’m working on.”

[Laughs] That’s very good.

But that’s a really close collaboration with a fabulous company, Apple. MX Ink is an example of Meta. And obviously we’re very close in our video conferencing business and beyond to Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. It’s a unique set of partnerships. This company was born as an American and Swiss company. That neutrality of working with all these partners is where the Swissness comes to life best.

Let me ask you to compare more directly. A lot of times in the tech world when people complain about app store policies or restrictions on what the OS will let you do or the Apple tax, the immediate comparison is, “Well, Walmart controls what goes in its stores,” or, “Target controls what goes in its stores.” You used to work on Head & Shoulders, and if you wanted the end cap at Walmart for Head & Shoulders, you had to pay them some extra money for additional marketing. The analogy is there. It comes up all the time.

You’re a very unique person to ask this question of, because I have always thought, well, Walmart has competition. If you’re not getting a favorable rate to put the shampoo in Walmart, you can go to Target or the grocery store or Walgreens or wherever else. The platforms do not have that in that way. Have you felt that yet in your seven months?

You’re right that they don’t in that way. If I use video conferencing as an example, there is competition. Microsoft is obviously very large, but there is Google and there is Zoom. We do work really well with all three of them and we value all three of them and we put significant resources against all three of them, and they do the same with us. It’s not like there’s only one. And that’s true when it comes to virtual reality as well as beyond the PC. It’s a real competitive advantage for Logitech to have this range of partnerships and not just be in bed with any one of them.

Are there things you’d like to build or ideas you’ve heard that are being blocked by the various rules that the mobile platforms have in place?

No. Again, it’s been seven months so this may change, but from what I’ve seen, we can talk about everything, including with the very big boys. I love that and I think that will lead to some really great innovation going forward.

But if you wanted to have the AI button on a keyboard connected to an iPad that brought up your overlay and Options Plus to create a prompt, Apple would simply not let you do that on iPadOS in the way that you can on Windows and macOS.

Yeah, and again, I’m not sure that’s something we would die on our sword for.

Makes sense. The other piece of the puzzle here is basically everybody at some point tells me that they won’t die on their sword to continue connecting to Apple, but it just seems very obvious to me that comparison to retail falls apart because there are so many more retailers.

Yeah, although Walmart, don’t underestimate the size of Walmart, certainly in the US.

Fair enough. The other world Logitech lives in is the world of standards. There’s USB for however much you’re going to play in the smart home. There’s Matter. There’s Bluetooth. Every time we do an episode on standards, we discover it’s intensely political and almost not technical in a very specific way. Has that come up for you — “Boy, we need to make sure that the next version of the USB standard can do all the things we want it to do”? Or are you saying, “We’re going to let the platforms figure that out”?

We’re really active in all of the industry forums and associations that talk about standards because it is really important for us, not just for the platforms. I would say the most important thing is that there is a standard because, when there isn’t, that just creates complexity and cost for everyone. We’re active and always trying to go for a standard.

I think we’ll have to go to some new standards as well. One of the things I’m quite proud of at Logitech is that we carbon-label our products with a really solid methodology. It shows that your mouse is 1.5 in terms of emissions and your keyboard is 15 and your video conference, I don’t know by heart, but it’s a lot more. What would be super interesting is if we could get to an industry standard for carbon labeling so that consumers and corporate consumers can make a choice on a product that has lower emissions. That’s one of the things we’re trying to work with some industry associations and groups on. But in general, standardization is important for the industry, and we’ll push that as hard as we can.

Did you open a door in some office at Logitech and find the people who have to work with the standards board and it’s just a group of sad lawyers?

They’re really exciting. They’re great.

I’m dying to know.

There’s not a lot of them. There’s like one, but they’re super active.

You’ve talked about climate and sustainability several times now. Let’s talk about it in the context of AI. A bunch of the big companies, in particular companies investing in data centers and foundation models, they’re blowing their climate goals out of the water because they’re spending so much more in energy to power these AI systems. Those things are obviously in tension. You’re in on AI. You have Options Plus. You have the buttons on the mice. Then you’re also talking about being sustainable. How are you managing that tension?

Clearly we’re not building LLMs ourselves, so the impact of our stuff is very modest. It’s on the edge. In the context of our total footprint, we don’t expect that to have a significant impact. Our impact sits in materials and components, in PCBs and plastics, and it sits in the circularity, or the lack thereof. Because we sell stuff, hardware, and that’s a huge part of our footprint.

So that is not where I’m concerned, but clearly, as an industry, we should be super concerned about the fact that pretty much every player has goals to be carbon neutral by 2040 or 2050, but right now the numbers are only going up and up and up. That is very concerning. We’re a relatively small player, but I hope we can be a pioneer and show the way on taking real climate action rather than just buying offsets.

Some of your goals are using more than 70 percent recycled plastic in manufacturing. Can you get to 100 percent? Is that feasible?

We should be able to get very close. The first priority for us on our glide path to a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 is to expand what we already know how to do. I’m really proud that Logitech is already at 75 percent of products using recycled plastic. That is huge. Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, they’re like 20 percent. This is huge on a large number of products every year. We also know what to do in terms of low-carbon aluminum, low-carbon some other things. We’ve got to scale what we already know how to do, and I think we can get very close to 100 percent.

Then we have to use renewable energy wherever we can because that is a big part of our footprint. And then third and fourth, we have to innovate and we have to drive circularity. The last one is probably the hardest innovation to come. PCBs are a big focus for innovation. They’re a big part of our footprint as well, and they’re very carbon-intensive. We know what the four pillars are: We have to scale. We have to use renewable energy. We have to innovate, and we have to go for circularity. And then I think we have a fighting chance to actually be minus 50 percent and again grow the business because that’s the tricky thing here and that’s what Google and Microsoft are really struggling with right now.

Can you quickly define circularity?

The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.

Let’s end on the forever mouse because I’m fascinated by this concept: the idea that you would have a mouse and you’d buy it once and then you’d maybe pay some fees for software upgrades or you’d trade it in and get a newer one, and that would be a recurring revenue source for you. That all depends on a vision of what the mouse software should do besides just move the cursor around. But whenever we do episodes with anything to do with AI, our audience is like, “We don’t want this.” In a very direct way, sometimes they’re like, “We don’t want this and we especially don’t want it here.”

We might want it when we want it. I might want to use generative fill in Photoshop on my terms, but I don’t need it to follow me around the computer. And even if you’re saying the climate impact is minimal, I certainly don’t want to feel like there’s any climate impact of using my mouse and expanding the range of places where you might go ask OpenAI for inference. That’s one problem. The second problem is you’re still competing with OpenAI and Google and Apple to be the primary interface for their backend services, right? You’re not training your own model.

The question for me is really twofold. It’s one: is there a vision beyond “the software will do more for you” than just drive your mouse around? And the second part is: even if it can do more, can you realistically compete against the giants that have every incentive to make sure that you never look anywhere else?

On the second piece, this company has been a human-technology interface for its entire existence. And while the mouse built this house and maybe there won’t be mice forever — although I think there’ll be mice for a long time to come — we’ve always been that human-technology interface. There were always people who said, “Well, Google and Microsoft won’t want you to be.” In fact, they often come to us and say, “We want an interface.” So, that MX Ink, it’s not that we were pushing Meta really hard. It was Meta saying, “Oh, we’d love for you to do something like this,” and us saying, “Well, we think we can.”

I think the big players will continue to want to work with players like us who have the luxury of focus. For us, a $40 million idea is 1 percent growth. Whereas, for Microsoft or Google, that’s nothing. That luxury of focus is important, and I think we’ll continue to be a human-technology interface in that way. Should the mouse do more than just move the cursor? Absolutely. And it does that today, and I think similarly about being more productive with shortcuts to the large language models and all kinds of other things. The guy that I met at a barbecue over the weekend who has programmed 120 shortcuts on his mouse, that’s the kind of stuff that can extend human potential in ways that are healthier.

This idea — that Logitech sits at a machine-human interface — right now, it’s expressed in Options Plus. Your software that has AI in it is essentially prompt engineering, right? You’re guiding people through the process of making a prompt, which is, for better or worse, how we are all talking to AI right now.

Yeah, totally.

Is that it? Is that the vision? Is there a different vision? Is that just the stopping point right now?

No, I think we’re at the beginning of AI, and [with time], it will become multimodal and we won’t even need to build prompts because it will know what prompts we need. Things will evolve exactly how that will evolve. Who knows? But I think the human is going to be a limiting factor. Human hands, the human brain. I suspect we’ll still need human-technology interfaces. They may not look exactly like what Logitech sells today, but I think the future for human-technology interfaces is really, really bright.

The danger there is that’s also what Apple and Microsoft and Google see. I talked to Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, and they happily tell me that AI is a platform shift. And what they mean is that it’s an interface shift, that we’re going to get the phone out of your hand or you’re going to deal with something else that is not Apple’s phone. That’s very much what they mean.

What they’re talking about is, “Okay, you’re going to talk to the computer. It’s going to do stuff for you.” Or, “You’re going to issue a set of commands, and the computer will figure out how to do whatever task you want it to.” You can already see they’re getting there. You can see some of the demos of the concepts. Do you worry about that disintermediating Logitech?

Yeah, but again, there’s still going to be technology, whether that’s an AI button or something else. I think Logitech did a really fine job surviving the shift from PC to phone and still being a fabulous interface. I’m pretty sure that with the fabulous engineers and designers we have, we’ll also be an interface to whatever’s next.

Well, that’s a great place to end it. Hanneke, tell the people what you think is next for Logitech. You’ve been there for seven months. What’s the stuff you’re looking forward to now that you’ve figured it out?

We’ve got a great bunch of innovations coming up. I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. [Laughs.] As we go toward the end of your holidays, I think we have a really bright fiscal year ahead, and then we’ll continue to extend human potential in work and play.

I love it. Well, the mouse built this house. This is amazing. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.

Alright, it is so nice to see you, Nilay.

Read More 

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Logitech

The new head of Logitech discusses the company’s return to growth and plans to reduce its carbon footprint by half. Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty new to the role: she joined the company last October, after the former CEO, Bracken Darrell, left.
You might remember Bracken — he was on Decoder back in 2021, basically at the height of the covid-19 pandemic-era boom in home office sales, when Logitech was selling mice, keyboards, and webcams as fast as it could make them.
Obviously, things have changed since then. Logitech, like so many companies that saw huge pandemic booms, very abruptly saw that growth slow down when the world began to normalize. Bracken left Logitech last June to go to the company that owns Vans and Supreme, and Logitech brought on Hanneke, a longtime executive with an extensive background in consumer goods at conglomerates like Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

Hanneke and I talked about the structural changes she’s already making at Logitech and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sounds like some Logitech products, like its smart home doorbells and cameras, are not long for this world.
Hanneke says that people often say “the mouse built this house” inside Logitech, which is a delightful catchphrase I’d never heard before. From there, we talked about how new interface paradigms like voice and AI might upend mice and keyboards and how she’s thinking about the company’s long-term future in a world where traditional PC sales might go down.
Of course, we talked about whether anyone wants their mouse to be anything more than a mouse — Logitech is adding AI features and even AI buttons to some of its products, and I wanted to know if that’s working.
You’ll hear Hanneke talk about a concept called the “forever mouse,” or a mouse you buy once and upgrade over time with new software features — features that, of course, might carry a subscription fee. Subscription mice! It’s a lot.
You’ll also hear Hanneke talk about how she plans to grow the business and hit an ambitious carbon footprint reduction milestone by the end of the decade as well as where she thinks the company needs to go next. There’s a lot in this one.
Okay, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hanneke Faber, you are the new-ish CEO of Logitech. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you so much.
I am really excited to talk to you. You have been on the job as CEO for seven months now?
Seven months. I started on December 1st.
So you’re in. You’re settled. You know where the bathrooms are, which is step one.
Yeah, for sure. Although today’s my first day actually in the office in California. I’ve been in Switzerland so far, so you catch me on day one.
Well, I’m just going to ask you where different things are in that office for the rest of the hour.
[Laughs]
Logitech is a fascinating company. It’s one of those companies that I think is undercover. When we started Decoder, one of our first ideas was that we should talk to more than five CEOs, and Logitech is one of those companies that is just ever-present in the world of technology. It is a partner to the big companies. It’s in everyone’s office. It’s in lots of people’s homes. It’s basically a core fixture of gaming. You play in a lot of spaces.
I talked to your predecessor, Bracken Darrell, in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic in 2021, when everything was a lot different. Sales were skyrocketing, and he changed his strategy a little bit. Bracken recently left. He now runs Supreme and Vans, which was a shift. We’ll talk to him about that. You have a background in consumer goods at Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Why jump to Logitech when the job opened up?
Actually, Bracken came from P&G as well, so that’s not so different. But I’ve been really fortunate throughout my career of working in different industries. I worked mostly in beauty at P&G. I actually worked in tech for four years at Ahold Delhaize. I ran their e-commerce business when it was almost nonexistent. We built a really cool online grocery business. And then, for the last six years, I ran Unilever’s global food business.
So [despite being] different businesses, I think there are some themes that apply to Logitech: a focus on the user and the consumer first; a focus on innovation and product. And then, finally, really global footprints in every job I’ve worked in and a mix of B2B and B2C. All of those things do translate. Of course, this is a new industry and a new company for me, but it’s great to bring a whole bunch of things that I have experience with and learn a few new things as well.

One of the things that’s really interesting to me about Logitech is that people tend to think of its core products — mice, keyboards, headsets, webcams — as commodities, but they’re still technology products. There’s a lot of innovation left in those spaces. Logitech has driven some of that innovation, but then you see other weird things blossom into cultures unto themselves — mechanical keyboards, for example. There are webcam startups again, which is really interesting. That was not a thing that was happening pre-covid.
Do you view the opportunity here as an operational opportunity, as an innovation opportunity, as a “find new categories and make them grow” opportunity? What is your macro view of the situation?
There are three main tailwinds on our core business. The first one is new ways of working, hybrid working. That’s good for our personal workspace business, the traditional mice and keyboards, because everyone needs multiple setups. And obviously it’s good for our video conferencing business. So the new ways of working post-covid are a real tailwind for us.
Second is gaming. Gaming, just as a space, continues to grow, and especially with new demographics. Almost half of gamers are now women, which is amazing. And older people game. It’s no longer just teenage boys. We see the market continue to grow.

Wait, can I ask you one question about older people in that context?
Yeah. Sorry, older than teenage boys?
Sure. Is it that a set of teenage boys who were gamers 15 years ago got older, or is it older people are becoming new gamers?
I think we’re seeing a little bit of both, although it’s probably the first trend that is the biggest one. The teenage boys of 15 years ago are now in their 30s and 40s, so that just extends the demographic. New teenage boys are still coming in, and girls, so that’s good. But we’re also seeing older cohorts coming in mostly through mobile, through Candy Crush but also Wordle and Connections. Those are entry points into gaming that make them more comfortable with gaming and may take them to PC and console gaming as well.
You said there was a third thing. What was the third thing?
The third thing… of course you can’t do an interview for three minutes and not say AI, but AI is a real tailwind for us as well.
How do you think AI is a tailwind for Logitech in particular?
In three ways. First, like for any other company, is internal productivity. We’re seeing it on the software engineering side, where coding and testing have clearly become more efficient, but we’re also seeing it on the creative and brand-building side, again, where things are getting more efficient but also sometimes more creative.
More importantly, on the product side, there are two ways in which AI will be a tailwind. First of all, we’ve always been a human-to-technology interface company, and we’re starting to be an interface to the large language models. A couple of months ago, we launched the Logi AI Prompt Builder, which is basically a shortcut in our software to ChatGPT. It has millions of unique users already, and it’s just a simpler way for people to use ChatGPT and not get out of their flow when they use all of our mice and keyboards in English-speaking countries. There will be much more to follow in terms of being that human-technology interface.
There’s a third area that is big on AI, which is in audio and video. We have a big video conferencing business, a headphones business. That’s really machine learning and large data models, and the company’s been at those for a number of years, but we’re seeing the quality of things like two-way noise cancellation or video conferencing equipment that actually knows when to zoom in on you when you’re speaking and not when you’re opening a packet of crisps. Those kinds of things are really important, and I foresee massive quality improvements thanks to machine learning in the years ahead.
I want to come back to the AI question because I think there’s a lot to unpack there, and there are a lot of obvious opportunities, like you said, in audio and video. And then there are some opportunities that, I think, deserve a little more time around AI prompt building and that sort of thing.
But I want to stay focused for a second on you. You’re the new CEO. So covid, work from home, created a massive opportunity for Logitech. I bought a black market webcam at the end of 2020. It was Chinese. It wasn’t even meant for this market.
I love it.
The previous administration really ramped production. They saw huge growth. Then there was an enterprise push as more and more companies embraced hybrid and remote and refitted all their conference rooms. That all crashed back to earth, and there were a couple of years when the growth was falling. Logitech’s fourth quarter earnings released back in April marked your first quarter of sales growth in over two years. You also reported growth in your most recent quarter. What is bringing that growth back?
Product innovation and markets that are stabilizing a little bit post-covid [are contributing to that growth]. I have to say, this company should be very proud of what it did during covid under Bracken. It did a really great job, but obviously it was a bit of a sugar high. That said, the company is 50 percent bigger today than it was pre-covid, so it hasn’t all come crashing down to earth.
I think what we’ve done is we’ve really been focusing on great execution and on things that we can control. There are some things that we can’t control: inflation, consumer confidence, corporate IT budgets for our video conferencing business. But within those constraints, we’ve been growing our share. That was one of the drivers of us getting back to growth in Q4. We’ve been delivering really exciting innovation, and we’ll continue to do those things.
You called it a sugar high. I feel like the broad story of tech in particular is the sugar high of overinvestment during covid, of competing to hire every single person that existed in the world who could write code and then assuming that those trends would be permanent and we would all stay inside and live our lives mediated through screens on the internet forever. Many companies did not survive that sugar high. Is it that simple, that Logitech just weathered the covid highs and the trends and is back to a stable place now?
We’re not back to where we were in 2019. Again, we’re 50 percent bigger as a company, and the way people work is so different today versus 2019. Virtually every company that I speak to, and I speak to many of them because they’re all our customers, wants to be hybrid. They want their people to come into the office two or three days a week, but they also want to offer the flexibility of working from home or working from anywhere. That is obviously very different from in 2019. We pride ourselves on being a model for ways of working because we sell this stuff, so I think we’re very well positioned to help our corporate customers give people a great experience both in the office and at home.
You mentioned that you are in the California office today, and it’s your first day there. You moved to Switzerland when you got this job. How are you structuring your time between remote, hybrid, and in person? How’s that working for you?
Sadly, I live on an airplane, it feels like. Logitech is very special in that it is a super global company. We’re on the ground in more than 100 countries, and we have great capabilities around the world. I spend probably 60 percent of my time in offices that are not my own. When I’m in California, or I spent these first seven months [on the job] in our Swiss office, I try to be in the office. But I might also, if I start early — like today, I started at 6AM — go back home at 1PM and get some exercise and then work more later on. That’s a level of flexibility that I don’t think we necessarily had pre-covid, which is great.
Do you ever find yourself in that horrible situation of being alone in a conference room on a video call?
That’s just ridiculous, right?
That’s my nightmare. If I go to the office and I’m the only one there and everyone else is on a video call, I wonder why we even have an office.
[Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have this concept of gravity days at Logitech. On the gravity days, everyone’s there so you’re not by yourself.
What are the gravity days?
It depends on the teams. My gravity days here are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I’ll see most of the leadership team. But different teams have different gravity days that they pick themselves.
And then are you living on a plane just to be in person wherever you need to be?
Yes, and part of that is because I’m new — and I’m not just new to the company; I’m also new to the industry. I need to meet people, our own people, but very much also suppliers, customers, consumers, investors. There are just a lot of people to meet, and certainly a first meeting, I think, is still best done in person.
This brings us very neatly to what I think of as the Decoder questions. I was listening to the first fireside chat you had for your investors five days into the job, and I heard you say that your style is to be as close to the customer and as close to the people doing the work as possible because they know best. That’s you on planes. But ultimately, you have to make a lot of decisions. What kind of decisions do you want to be making? What’s your framework for making them?
I think company strategy is a great way to set that decision framework. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months, first listening, then co-creating that strategy, and then setting the strategy and setting the bar high. If I unpack that a little bit, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know and that we all don’t know, so listening was first. Then we sat down with the leadership team first to really make choices. What’s our goal? For 2031, because that’s when Logitech will be 50 years old, we set a goal of doubling the business and reducing our carbon footprint by 50 percent while retaining really attractive margins.
We set a mission, which we’ve said is extending human potential in work and in play. We had a good mission, but it was three pages long, so I really wanted to simplify that. And “extending human potential,” those words are carefully chosen. So “extending” is obviously a riff on the mouse. The mouse built this house. It extends your arm, so we want to extend—
You say, “The mouse built this house”?
Yeah, that’s what they say here — and I say it. I like it.
That should be the whole mission, I got to be honest with you. I think it’s a strong contender.
That’s right. But we extend human potential in this age of AI, this age of [Zoom CEO] Eric Yuan saying there are digital twins of all of us coming to meetings. It’s really important that we extend human potential because we can make humans better. We can help you win that game. We can help you be more productive. We can help you connect better when you’re in that conference room by yourself. If we can do that in ways that are also healthier for people on the planet, then extending human potential is really worth waking up for every morning.
And what else is there in life but work and play? We do that in work and play today, but I believe, with my leadership team, that those areas are actually much bigger than where Logitech plays today. Today, we’re mostly focused on work. We focus on office workers. Most people in the world don’t work in an office. They work in retail, healthcare, education, construction, you name it. And we can play there, too. And in gaming, we’re mostly focused on PC gaming. Today, there’s a lot more play out there than just PC gaming. That broadens our TAM, our total addressable market, for the future, which is an opportunity to deliver that growth.
That’s a long-winded way of saying what we’re doing. That is our framework for decision-making. We’ve then made some pretty clear choices where to play and how to win below that, and now that that is in place, as a leader, I can circle back and say, “Okay, I listened. We co-create it and we set the bar high.” Now, I circle back and I listen again. I go back and I listen to people and say, “What do they need? What obstacles do I need to take away so that they can deliver on doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half?”
What kind of obstacles have you removed so far?
Well, we’re in the process [of doing this]. I think some of those obstacles might be the result of that sugar high. We got a little complicated in our organization because we had a lot of people, and that usually makes things a little more complicated. So we’re about to do some simplifications and also invest some more money in areas where we’re maybe not quite as good as we need to be.
Historically, we’re a fantastic B2C company. We sell our stuff to Amazon, to Best Buy, to MediaMarkt. That’s who we are. B2B is much newer. And again, Bracken and the team did a great job of building a B2B business from scratch with a really disruptive video conferencing product. But we’re like teenagers in that space. I wouldn’t call us babies, but we’re like teenagers. If you compare our capabilities, especially on the go-to-market side, to some of the more legacy players in B2B, we’re just newer. That’s a place where we will be investing, and that’s been an obstacle.
You have brought up changing the org chart, which is bait for the show. That’s what Decoder is all about. When I talked to Bracken last, I will never forget it, he described one of the most complicated org charts I’ve ever heard. It seemed to be working. He seemed to be happy with it. He told me, and I went and looked it up, he had 23 direct reports. Most of the teams across the company were set up to be almost completely independent, and he was totally fine with duplicated efforts and resources.
So if two teams were both going to do microphones, that was fine as long as they were both going to market and the teams independently were profitable or successful in their own way. I think he told me there were something like 20 or 30 product teams just running under the various brands. That feels like the thing you’re about to change. Is that what you’re changing?
Yeah, and again, I don’t want to blame previous setups because they were working for their time. The track record of value creation here at Logitech is fantastic. But I think now what I’m hearing from our people and what we’re seeing in some of the results over the past few years is that we do need to simplify because things have gotten a little bit too complicated.
Part of that, by the way, is the brand story. Logitech tried to become a multi-brand company, but today, 97 percent of our sales are in the Logitech brand, Logitech and Logitech G, and I consider those one brand, really. So it’s important that we make sure that 97 percent of our resources are focused on that brand and that we don’t get too scattered around the company. That’s one of the other strategic choices that we’ve made: we will build one fantastic iconic Logitech brand, and that’s our focus.
A lot of the other brands you’re describing are the result of acquisitions. There’s Ultimate Ears, Jaybird, Blue Microphones, Streamlabs — and the list goes on. There have been a lot of acquisitions and there are a lot of new products. Then there are attempts to be more consumer with the Logi brand. Is all of that stuff going to come in under Logitech, or are you going to leave those alone?
Well, again, it’s the tail wagging the dog, right? It’s very, very small. And some of it has already been folded in successfully under the Logitech brand. If you look at Astro, which was a really good acquisition, it’s now part of Logitech. That makes a lot of sense. And it absolutely doesn’t mean we won’t do acquisitions in the future, but again, when they can be folded in, they probably should.
There are much, much bigger companies with much bigger brands that don’t rely on a whole stable of brands. So I’m excited about that. And then you also mentioned product development and engineering, which, of course, is the heart of this company. Again, there’s probably room for a little bit more synergy, and this is, by the way, not about cost-cutting. It’s just about getting more out of the resources that we have if we talk to each other a little bit more.
I’m assuming you’re not going to stick with 23 direct reports and a bunch of basically startup founders everywhere.
I already haven’t, that I know.
To your point, it worked.
Absolutely.
I remember talking to Bracken. I was like, “That sounds pretty fun,” and he seemed like he was having a good time. But you need to change it now. How are you doing that? What’s the structure now?
I’m already down to 12 or 13 direct reports, so it’s already streamlined in that way. I think running the company along the lines of three big businesses — personal workspace, gaming, and Logitech for enterprise — is a really important way of going forward, and that’s what we’ll be doing.
Again, historically, we’re very much a consumer company, so across [personal workspace solutions] and gaming, we’ll be focused on the end user to consumer, the customer, Amazon, Walmart, Gigabyte, MediaMarkt, etc. And B2B is a different kettle of fish where we still have to build significant capability, which is a huge opportunity because, again, we’ve got fabulous products for corporate customers, and our penetration is still very low. So I’m really excited about the growth potential of our B2B business.
Inside of that structure, which feels like a go-to-market structure, you’ve got the three big consumer segments, and you’ve got products that might move between them. You do still have some brands that people love. Ultimate Ears is a brand that I love. That was my first fancy pair of headphones. You have Blue Microphones, where half or a quarter of the podcasts in the world are on fancy Blue Microphones, and they’re a fixture of all the studios. Are you going to leave some of those to their high-end customers?
Yeah, absolutely, and we retain a small Ultimate Ears team who are doing great stuff. They just launched the new Wonderboom, which is a super cool product. The same is true for Blue. Absolutely, those little teams, again, we’re super sufficient and scrappy on those, but they’re great products and they’ll stay in place and they’re as loved as the big dogs.
When you were going through and saying, “Okay, I have to fold some into the three big buckets and I’m going to leave some of these alone,” what was the framework you used? What was the marker for you to say, “Okay, we’re going to set Blue aside, but this one we have to fold into the main consumer Logitech brand”?
I think the framework is a framework of growth. So if we want to double the business by 2031, then you work back and you say, “Okay, what do we need to do?” Well, we need to grow organically, mid-single digits, and we want to do some M&A. What are the spaces that we’ll play in? It will be work and play and it will be B2B and B2C. Then, when you look at the building blocks, the big chunks will be in B2B video conferencing and personal workspace products, in gaming and in PWS products.
So then, underneath that, yes, you have to fit in some of these smaller pieces, and that’s totally fine. I’ve always found throughout my career that it’s actually fun to work on some of these smaller pieces because you have a little more freedom. If you do well, people think you’re fantastic. If you don’t do well, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s a nice place to be in.
One of the other things you said in that investor call, which is also just pure Decoder bait and I thank you for it, is that one of your core beliefs is that companies are perfectly designed to get the results that they are getting. Whatever result you get you can just run right back to the structure of the company. Explain that in more depth.
The results that we got last quarter, which we’re actually pleased with because we were back to growth and we had really good margins, are the result of the structure that we had then. Now, I’m a big believer that you have to make a few changes if you want to get, in our case, even better results, a little faster growth with the same margins, and not unimportantly, reduce that carbon footprint by 50 percent. If you expect the same results, then it’s fine to stay with that same organization. If you expect results that are a little different, you need to make some tweaks. Again, I don’t think Logitech is a disaster turnaround story at all. This is a good-to-great story. But if we want to be great, then we have to make some tweaks.
As you think about changing the structure, you talked about your process here tonight. You talked to everybody. You listened. You co-created some ideas. There are some goals here. You’re saying, “I’m designing a structure to get to some very explicit, probably measurable goals.” Do those look mostly like growth? Does it look like product innovation? Does it look like flipping the apple cart over and inventing the next iPhone?
This is a product and innovation company at its heart. So that’s the way we grow, with great, fantastic products that our users love. But that’s the what and the how. In terms of the outcome, yes, it’s about growth. So we’ve said we want to double the business by 2031 and reduce our carbon footprint because that’s something the company committed to well before I got here, which is not so easy to do when you double your business because each one of those mice and keyboards emits more carbon. Then, of course, we want to create great value for investors. So gross margins and operating income margins are important, and we’ve guided for some really attractive levels.
You’re the new CEO. You got hired by a board of directors. Some of that board of directors is leaving. You’re going to have some new members that the shareholders can vote for. You’d like them to vote for you to be added to the board of directors.
When you set that goal and you say, “I’m changing the structure of the company,” or even when you’re interviewing for the job, did you come in and say, “Look, I think we should double the size of the company by 2031”? Was that the pitch? Was it, “I think there’s a new vision”? Now, when you’re actually executing and saying these things out loud, do you feel the pressure to grow from your investors or your board members? Where does that come from?
I would say, first of all, on the process to get this role, kudos to the board of Logitech. I thought they did a really great job in the interviewing process, where, I’ll spill the beans, but they asked each of the candidates to do a 15- to 20-minute presentation on what they thought the company should be. Now, of course, as an external candidate, you do that not knowing a whole lot.
So, while some of the themes I talked about have come back in my actual strategy, some of the things have changed because obviously I know a lot more now than I did before I joined. But that was helpful because it allows the board to see where the candidate wants to take the company. But you’d be surprised that not all boards do that.
So that was the hiring process. You didn’t walk in saying, “I’m going to double the size of the company.” But now is when you’re saying that?
Yes.
And is that a decision that is coming from the board in service to its investors?
No. Again, this is listening, co-creating, and then engaging with the board deeply on “does this make sense — these goals, this vision?” And then these “where to play” and “how to win” choices, do those make sense? The board was a really important stakeholder, obviously, in finalizing that. But so were the people of Logitech. I’m a big believer in co-creation, and that’s not just co-creation with the leadership team.
We actually invited all 7,000 employees to come to co-creation sessions around the world where we shared with them an MVP of our strategy. But then we said, “Tell us three things you’d like and three things you want to add or change.” We had great feedback on that, and that really shaped the final strategy.
What was the biggest thing that you added or changed or the biggest thing that people really liked?
What they really liked is the continued focus on products and innovation. Again, that is our lifeblood, and we have so many fantastic engineers and designers, so that came out very, very clearly. I think what surprised me was actually the passion for sustainability. There’s a huge passion around the world for what we can do to lead in tech on reducing the carbon footprint where there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of increasing carbon footprints, unfortunately, in the age of AI. There was more passion for that topic than I had expected. So again, it’s important in our strategy going forward.
Let’s talk about the products. They are the lifeblood of the company. I’m going to say “the mouse built this house” all the time. It’s very good. I can’t believe I never knew that before. It’s a pretty sprawling product lineup. You’re in a million categories. How did you acquaint yourself with all of it?
There are three big ones.
Well, sure, but everything from smart home doorbells to mice to headphones, it’s a lot of things.
I think those are pretty much gone.
So wait, you’re going to leave the smart home?
No, there’s our timing. I need to double-check, but I’m not even sure those are still being sold. It’s really personal workspace, video conferencing, and gaming.
What about all the customers you sold smart home cameras to who have cloud service dependencies?
We’ll continue to support, of course, what we’ve sold for some time.
I’m always curious because every new category now has some sort of ongoing service dependency, which feels very risky. Our audience is constantly telling us that one reason they go back to big companies over and over again and won’t buy products from challengers or startups is that they don’t want their products to disappear. And then big companies like Google have broken that trust anyway. This is a really ongoing conversation with The Verge audience. It must be new for you. When you were at Procter & Gamble, I’m assuming people didn’t buy shampoo and then worry you were going to stop selling shampoo.
That’s so true, and it’s such an interesting topic. Actually, at Procter & Gamble, we did get lots of people calling when you took their lipstick shade out, but that’s a little different. There’s no software inside.
Yeah, you weren’t breaking all the existing lipsticks that had been sold.
Exactly. Again, this is a space that’s somewhat newer for Logitech, but it’s incredibly strategic. We don’t do just pure hardware. We do design-led, software-enabled hardware, and that software component in the age of AI is more important every day. The services that we provide to our corporate customers are actually a nicely growing part of the business that didn’t exist a few years ago because Logitech was new to B2B and wasn’t charging for its services. Now we are.
I think we deliver great software services to our B2B customers, but we are learning. On the consumer side as well, through Logitech Options Plus, the software, it’s very important to deliver superior products for our users. We now have more software engineers than hardware engineers, which is a big milestone.
This comes up in surprising ways on Decoder. The CTO of John Deere once told me that John Deere has more software engineers than hardware engineers because it has to support the ongoing service and cloud capabilities of the tractor. This makes a little more sense for Logitech, but really what we’re talking about is an ongoing cost. You sell me the keyboard once. It’s got Options Plus. It has an AI button. I push the button, and someone has to make sure the software still works. Someone probably has to pay ChatGPT for access to the service. Where is that going to come from? Are you baking that into the margin of the keyboard or the mouse?
Absolutely. We’re baking that in, and I’m not particularly worried about that. What I’m actually hoping is that this will contribute to the longevity of our products, that we’ll have more premium products but products that last longer because they’re superior and because we can continue to update them over time. And again, I talked about doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half. The longevity piece is really important.
I’m very intrigued. The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.
What made the mouse a forever mouse?
It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.
But, again, I just come back to the cost. You sell me the mouse once. Maybe I’ll pay 200 bucks for it.
The business model obviously is the challenge there. So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model? In our video conferencing business, that is now a very important part of the model, the services, and it’s critical for corporate customers.
Let’s come to that in a second because that makes sense to me. You sell managed services to enterprises. You price support contracts for cameras and whatever. That’s an ongoing need businesses have. I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”
Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.
But Rolex has to employ software engineers to ship me over-the-air updates forever.
But the artifact is like your Rolex, and then given that we know the technology that we attach to changes, it’s not going to be like your Rolex in that it doesn’t have to ever change. Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.
It certainly will help with sustainability. There are two ways people have traditionally proposed monetizing hardware over time. It’s subscription fees and it’s advertising. Is there a third way that I don’t know about that you’re thinking of?
No. The third way is the traditional model of “we innovate and we have you upgrade.” That’s the current model. And we’re pretty damn good at that model because we have pretty damn good innovators around the company who do come up with fabulous products.
That is definitely the model today. It’s not a bad model at all, especially since we’re continuing to design for more sustainable products. We’re continuing to recycle and refurbish products. All of that is good. But that said, I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that.
I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?
Possibly.
And that would be the forever mouse?
Yeah.
So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.
Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.
But it’s a mouse.
But it’s a mouse, yeah.
I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.
[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.
You mentioned AI earlier. You have rolled out some of the AI features in the new versions of Options Plus. There is a mouse with an AI button.
Actually, sorry, Nilay. I am going to give you just a little piece of information. So the mouse built this house. Is that a traditional category? Will it go away? Is it old and tired? We don’t believe so because only about 50 percent of people use a mouse and a keyboard today, a separate keyboard.
Some only have a mouse or only a keyboard, but many of them have both. But the thing that shocked me was that the average spend on that globally is $26, which is really so low. This is stuff you use every day, that sits on your desk every day, that you look at every day. That’s like the price of four coffees at Starbucks or less than a Nike running shirt. There is so much room to create more value in that space as we make people more productive — to extend human potential.
Do you think the growth comes from going from 50 to 55 percent, or does it come from selling the 50 percent more expensive products?
Both. Absolutely both. That’s why this is still an exciting category.
One of the things about keyboards in particular is that they have become lifestyle items. You see influencers on TikTok talk about their setups. We run photos of people’s setups. People have deep abiding attachments to their key switches in their keyboards. I’m assuming this is new to you, unless you were a diehard mechanical keyboard fan before, which would be amazing. You’re looking at it from a background in consumer products. What’s your view of that, of the keyboard as a lifestyle product?
I definitely think it’s an important lifestyle product. Obviously, on the gaming side, it’s a really important lifestyle product, and again, it’s a real growth opportunity for us for many years to come. On the work side, what I’m intrigued by is that the needs of different people are very different when it comes to keyboards and mice. So we have done a nice job of growing this business by targeting different groups.
You have advanced users: a software engineer; a financial analyst who is in Excel all day. They need our MX line where you can do tons of shortcuts. I met someone over the weekend who — I didn’t even know this was possible — had done 120 shortcuts on one of our mice. I’m like, “What? I’m proud I have four.” But anyway, these are super advanced users, and we make MX products for them.
Then you have people who have some wellness issues because they’re also typing all day, but they’re sitting at the kitchen table or on an airplane like me, and they’re screwing up their arms. So the Ergo line — also very premium, very beautiful — is really made for them. I use an Ergo keyboard. It’s fantastic. It really helps on the shoulder and the arm. Then you have more lifestyle, younger people, especially in China, who want the pink mouse or who want the mouse that goes with the latest game. So these are really different groups, and I think we have opportunities to go even deeper on those consumer needs to build exactly the right products for them.
That differentiation between gaming and professional and lifestyle, you can pull them apart. I think a lot of companies try to pull them apart. But I think, from my view, they’re getting mashed together. The needs of a gamer and the needs of the Excel macro fanatic, they’re more the same than different in some cases. And then the high-design lifestyle category and gaming as a lifestyle are also the same in very important ways. How do you pull those apart? What’s your approach to that, especially because you have a view from the outside?
Absolutely. It’s funny. It’s an “and, and.” In some cases, you’re absolutely right, things are blurring. In China, we’re seeing a lot of people working with our gaming stuff, but then there’s also complete bifurcation. Our top-of-the-line gaming mouse is the Pro Light, which is the most simplistic-looking from the outside: a super light, thin thing with a lot of exciting software inside. Whereas our top-of-the-line MX mouse for advanced users is not at all minimalistic because it has 18 buttons and scrollers and whatever. You’ll see the same guy who’s a software engineer by day and a gamer by night use both. So it’s a “yes, and.” And again, it’s really important we understand all of those users and that we build fabulous products for them.
The really interesting thing about keyboards and mice is that they’re tied to desktop computing as a paradigm, particularly mice. You can plug a mouse into an iPad, but why? You can buy the case, and Apple has a lot of decisions to make about the future of the iPad, but really what we’re talking about is desktop computers: macOS, Windows, Linux, big monitors maybe.
There’s an endless prediction that this will go away, that mobile will take over everything. That prediction does not appear to have borne out. When you’re thinking about Logitech’s markets, how do you evaluate that? Is it that eventually everyone will just have a phone and the laptop will go away? Even if the evidence doesn’t seem to bear it out, it is a permanent prediction in the tech industry.
It’s definitely a permanent prediction. As I onboarded at the company, I had a few history lessons. I went through historical documents, and this same thing came up 20–25 years ago: the PC is imminently disappearing. That has not happened, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t absolutely be paranoid. One of our innovation streams is called “Beyond the PC,” and we’re dedicating significant resources to innovating beyond the PC.
Of course, some of what we sell today, quite a good amount of what we sell today, video conferencing, is already beyond the PC. That’s important. If you look at one of our recent innovations, we announced two weeks ago the MX Ink, which is a stylus for the Meta Quest. That’s definitely beyond the PC. So hopefully you get a sense of what we’ll need to do more of in this space, but we know how to do it. I like this example a lot, the MX Ink stylus for Meta, because it’s beyond the PC but also helps us think about work beyond the office. Who’s going to use that stylus? It’s creative people, it’s doctors. It’s not your traditional office worker.
One thing that’s really difficult about going beyond the PC is that there are vastly more gatekeepers once you leave the realm of Mac and Windows. It’s Apple and Google in particular. There are things that they will simply not allow you to do with their devices. There’s software you can’t ship. There are drivers you can’t load. There are peripherals that won’t attach, all the way down the line. Has that been a bit of a wake-up call?
Well, it’s been an area where I’m actually very impressed. Logitech, I think, has the best set of partnerships in the industry, and it’s proud of it and it nurtures those partnerships. Whether it’s Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Zoom, we work closely with all of them, and we’re able to develop products with and for them, including Apple, which is fantastic but a little secretive at times, which is their right and they’re amazing.
We just came out with a Combo Touch for the new iPads, which is a beautiful product, and we work with Apple with Berlin walls around [those products]. So it’s kind of funny. My team in Taiwan who works on that, they were wearing T-shirts when I came that said, “My work is so secretive, I don’t even know what I’m working on.”
[Laughs] That’s very good.
But that’s a really close collaboration with a fabulous company, Apple. MX Ink is an example of Meta. And obviously we’re very close in our video conferencing business and beyond to Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. It’s a unique set of partnerships. This company was born as an American and Swiss company. That neutrality of working with all these partners is where the Swissness comes to life best.
Let me ask you to compare more directly. A lot of times in the tech world when people complain about app store policies or restrictions on what the OS will let you do or the Apple tax, the immediate comparison is, “Well, Walmart controls what goes in its stores,” or, “Target controls what goes in its stores.” You used to work on Head & Shoulders, and if you wanted the end cap at Walmart for Head & Shoulders, you had to pay them some extra money for additional marketing. The analogy is there. It comes up all the time.
You’re a very unique person to ask this question of, because I have always thought, well, Walmart has competition. If you’re not getting a favorable rate to put the shampoo in Walmart, you can go to Target or the grocery store or Walgreens or wherever else. The platforms do not have that in that way. Have you felt that yet in your seven months?
You’re right that they don’t in that way. If I use video conferencing as an example, there is competition. Microsoft is obviously very large, but there is Google and there is Zoom. We do work really well with all three of them and we value all three of them and we put significant resources against all three of them, and they do the same with us. It’s not like there’s only one. And that’s true when it comes to virtual reality as well as beyond the PC. It’s a real competitive advantage for Logitech to have this range of partnerships and not just be in bed with any one of them.
Are there things you’d like to build or ideas you’ve heard that are being blocked by the various rules that the mobile platforms have in place?
No. Again, it’s been seven months so this may change, but from what I’ve seen, we can talk about everything, including with the very big boys. I love that and I think that will lead to some really great innovation going forward.
But if you wanted to have the AI button on a keyboard connected to an iPad that brought up your overlay and Options Plus to create a prompt, Apple would simply not let you do that on iPadOS in the way that you can on Windows and macOS.
Yeah, and again, I’m not sure that’s something we would die on our sword for.
Makes sense. The other piece of the puzzle here is basically everybody at some point tells me that they won’t die on their sword to continue connecting to Apple, but it just seems very obvious to me that comparison to retail falls apart because there are so many more retailers.
Yeah, although Walmart, don’t underestimate the size of Walmart, certainly in the US.
Fair enough. The other world Logitech lives in is the world of standards. There’s USB for however much you’re going to play in the smart home. There’s Matter. There’s Bluetooth. Every time we do an episode on standards, we discover it’s intensely political and almost not technical in a very specific way. Has that come up for you — “Boy, we need to make sure that the next version of the USB standard can do all the things we want it to do”? Or are you saying, “We’re going to let the platforms figure that out”?
We’re really active in all of the industry forums and associations that talk about standards because it is really important for us, not just for the platforms. I would say the most important thing is that there is a standard because, when there isn’t, that just creates complexity and cost for everyone. We’re active and always trying to go for a standard.
I think we’ll have to go to some new standards as well. One of the things I’m quite proud of at Logitech is that we carbon-label our products with a really solid methodology. It shows that your mouse is 1.5 in terms of emissions and your keyboard is 15 and your video conference, I don’t know by heart, but it’s a lot more. What would be super interesting is if we could get to an industry standard for carbon labeling so that consumers and corporate consumers can make a choice on a product that has lower emissions. That’s one of the things we’re trying to work with some industry associations and groups on. But in general, standardization is important for the industry, and we’ll push that as hard as we can.
Did you open a door in some office at Logitech and find the people who have to work with the standards board and it’s just a group of sad lawyers?
They’re really exciting. They’re great.
I’m dying to know.
There’s not a lot of them. There’s like one, but they’re super active.
You’ve talked about climate and sustainability several times now. Let’s talk about it in the context of AI. A bunch of the big companies, in particular companies investing in data centers and foundation models, they’re blowing their climate goals out of the water because they’re spending so much more in energy to power these AI systems. Those things are obviously in tension. You’re in on AI. You have Options Plus. You have the buttons on the mice. Then you’re also talking about being sustainable. How are you managing that tension?
Clearly we’re not building LLMs ourselves, so the impact of our stuff is very modest. It’s on the edge. In the context of our total footprint, we don’t expect that to have a significant impact. Our impact sits in materials and components, in PCBs and plastics, and it sits in the circularity, or the lack thereof. Because we sell stuff, hardware, and that’s a huge part of our footprint.
So that is not where I’m concerned, but clearly, as an industry, we should be super concerned about the fact that pretty much every player has goals to be carbon neutral by 2040 or 2050, but right now the numbers are only going up and up and up. That is very concerning. We’re a relatively small player, but I hope we can be a pioneer and show the way on taking real climate action rather than just buying offsets.
Some of your goals are using more than 70 percent recycled plastic in manufacturing. Can you get to 100 percent? Is that feasible?
We should be able to get very close. The first priority for us on our glide path to a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 is to expand what we already know how to do. I’m really proud that Logitech is already at 75 percent of products using recycled plastic. That is huge. Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, they’re like 20 percent. This is huge on a large number of products every year. We also know what to do in terms of low-carbon aluminum, low-carbon some other things. We’ve got to scale what we already know how to do, and I think we can get very close to 100 percent.
Then we have to use renewable energy wherever we can because that is a big part of our footprint. And then third and fourth, we have to innovate and we have to drive circularity. The last one is probably the hardest innovation to come. PCBs are a big focus for innovation. They’re a big part of our footprint as well, and they’re very carbon-intensive. We know what the four pillars are: We have to scale. We have to use renewable energy. We have to innovate, and we have to go for circularity. And then I think we have a fighting chance to actually be minus 50 percent and again grow the business because that’s the tricky thing here and that’s what Google and Microsoft are really struggling with right now.
Can you quickly define circularity?
The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.
Let’s end on the forever mouse because I’m fascinated by this concept: the idea that you would have a mouse and you’d buy it once and then you’d maybe pay some fees for software upgrades or you’d trade it in and get a newer one, and that would be a recurring revenue source for you. That all depends on a vision of what the mouse software should do besides just move the cursor around. But whenever we do episodes with anything to do with AI, our audience is like, “We don’t want this.” In a very direct way, sometimes they’re like, “We don’t want this and we especially don’t want it here.”
We might want it when we want it. I might want to use generative fill in Photoshop on my terms, but I don’t need it to follow me around the computer. And even if you’re saying the climate impact is minimal, I certainly don’t want to feel like there’s any climate impact of using my mouse and expanding the range of places where you might go ask OpenAI for inference. That’s one problem. The second problem is you’re still competing with OpenAI and Google and Apple to be the primary interface for their backend services, right? You’re not training your own model.
The question for me is really twofold. It’s one: is there a vision beyond “the software will do more for you” than just drive your mouse around? And the second part is: even if it can do more, can you realistically compete against the giants that have every incentive to make sure that you never look anywhere else?
On the second piece, this company has been a human-technology interface for its entire existence. And while the mouse built this house and maybe there won’t be mice forever — although I think there’ll be mice for a long time to come — we’ve always been that human-technology interface. There were always people who said, “Well, Google and Microsoft won’t want you to be.” In fact, they often come to us and say, “We want an interface.” So, that MX Ink, it’s not that we were pushing Meta really hard. It was Meta saying, “Oh, we’d love for you to do something like this,” and us saying, “Well, we think we can.”
I think the big players will continue to want to work with players like us who have the luxury of focus. For us, a $40 million idea is 1 percent growth. Whereas, for Microsoft or Google, that’s nothing. That luxury of focus is important, and I think we’ll continue to be a human-technology interface in that way. Should the mouse do more than just move the cursor? Absolutely. And it does that today, and I think similarly about being more productive with shortcuts to the large language models and all kinds of other things. The guy that I met at a barbecue over the weekend who has programmed 120 shortcuts on his mouse, that’s the kind of stuff that can extend human potential in ways that are healthier.
This idea — that Logitech sits at a machine-human interface — right now, it’s expressed in Options Plus. Your software that has AI in it is essentially prompt engineering, right? You’re guiding people through the process of making a prompt, which is, for better or worse, how we are all talking to AI right now.
Yeah, totally.
Is that it? Is that the vision? Is there a different vision? Is that just the stopping point right now?
No, I think we’re at the beginning of AI, and [with time], it will become multimodal and we won’t even need to build prompts because it will know what prompts we need. Things will evolve exactly how that will evolve. Who knows? But I think the human is going to be a limiting factor. Human hands, the human brain. I suspect we’ll still need human-technology interfaces. They may not look exactly like what Logitech sells today, but I think the future for human-technology interfaces is really, really bright.
The danger there is that’s also what Apple and Microsoft and Google see. I talked to Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, and they happily tell me that AI is a platform shift. And what they mean is that it’s an interface shift, that we’re going to get the phone out of your hand or you’re going to deal with something else that is not Apple’s phone. That’s very much what they mean.
What they’re talking about is, “Okay, you’re going to talk to the computer. It’s going to do stuff for you.” Or, “You’re going to issue a set of commands, and the computer will figure out how to do whatever task you want it to.” You can already see they’re getting there. You can see some of the demos of the concepts. Do you worry about that disintermediating Logitech?
Yeah, but again, there’s still going to be technology, whether that’s an AI button or something else. I think Logitech did a really fine job surviving the shift from PC to phone and still being a fabulous interface. I’m pretty sure that with the fabulous engineers and designers we have, we’ll also be an interface to whatever’s next.
Well, that’s a great place to end it. Hanneke, tell the people what you think is next for Logitech. You’ve been there for seven months. What’s the stuff you’re looking forward to now that you’ve figured it out?
We’ve got a great bunch of innovations coming up. I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. [Laughs.] As we go toward the end of your holidays, I think we have a really bright fiscal year ahead, and then we’ll continue to extend human potential in work and play.
I love it. Well, the mouse built this house. This is amazing. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.
Alright, it is so nice to see you, Nilay.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Logitech

The new head of Logitech discusses the company’s return to growth and plans to reduce its carbon footprint by half.

Today, I’m talking with Hanneke Faber, the CEO of Logitech. Hanneke’s still pretty new to the role: she joined the company last October, after the former CEO, Bracken Darrell, left.

You might remember Bracken — he was on Decoder back in 2021, basically at the height of the covid-19 pandemic-era boom in home office sales, when Logitech was selling mice, keyboards, and webcams as fast as it could make them.

Obviously, things have changed since then. Logitech, like so many companies that saw huge pandemic booms, very abruptly saw that growth slow down when the world began to normalize. Bracken left Logitech last June to go to the company that owns Vans and Supreme, and Logitech brought on Hanneke, a longtime executive with an extensive background in consumer goods at conglomerates like Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

Hanneke and I talked about the structural changes she’s already making at Logitech and the changes she intends to make in the future. It sounds like some Logitech products, like its smart home doorbells and cameras, are not long for this world.

Hanneke says that people often say “the mouse built this house” inside Logitech, which is a delightful catchphrase I’d never heard before. From there, we talked about how new interface paradigms like voice and AI might upend mice and keyboards and how she’s thinking about the company’s long-term future in a world where traditional PC sales might go down.

Of course, we talked about whether anyone wants their mouse to be anything more than a mouse — Logitech is adding AI features and even AI buttons to some of its products, and I wanted to know if that’s working.

You’ll hear Hanneke talk about a concept called the “forever mouse,” or a mouse you buy once and upgrade over time with new software features — features that, of course, might carry a subscription fee. Subscription mice! It’s a lot.

You’ll also hear Hanneke talk about how she plans to grow the business and hit an ambitious carbon footprint reduction milestone by the end of the decade as well as where she thinks the company needs to go next. There’s a lot in this one.

Okay, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanneke Faber, you are the new-ish CEO of Logitech. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you so much.

I am really excited to talk to you. You have been on the job as CEO for seven months now?

Seven months. I started on December 1st.

So you’re in. You’re settled. You know where the bathrooms are, which is step one.

Yeah, for sure. Although today’s my first day actually in the office in California. I’ve been in Switzerland so far, so you catch me on day one.

Well, I’m just going to ask you where different things are in that office for the rest of the hour.

[Laughs]

Logitech is a fascinating company. It’s one of those companies that I think is undercover. When we started Decoder, one of our first ideas was that we should talk to more than five CEOs, and Logitech is one of those companies that is just ever-present in the world of technology. It is a partner to the big companies. It’s in everyone’s office. It’s in lots of people’s homes. It’s basically a core fixture of gaming. You play in a lot of spaces.

I talked to your predecessor, Bracken Darrell, in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic in 2021, when everything was a lot different. Sales were skyrocketing, and he changed his strategy a little bit. Bracken recently left. He now runs Supreme and Vans, which was a shift. We’ll talk to him about that. You have a background in consumer goods at Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Why jump to Logitech when the job opened up?

Actually, Bracken came from P&G as well, so that’s not so different. But I’ve been really fortunate throughout my career of working in different industries. I worked mostly in beauty at P&G. I actually worked in tech for four years at Ahold Delhaize. I ran their e-commerce business when it was almost nonexistent. We built a really cool online grocery business. And then, for the last six years, I ran Unilever’s global food business.

So [despite being] different businesses, I think there are some themes that apply to Logitech: a focus on the user and the consumer first; a focus on innovation and product. And then, finally, really global footprints in every job I’ve worked in and a mix of B2B and B2C. All of those things do translate. Of course, this is a new industry and a new company for me, but it’s great to bring a whole bunch of things that I have experience with and learn a few new things as well.

One of the things that’s really interesting to me about Logitech is that people tend to think of its core products — mice, keyboards, headsets, webcams — as commodities, but they’re still technology products. There’s a lot of innovation left in those spaces. Logitech has driven some of that innovation, but then you see other weird things blossom into cultures unto themselves — mechanical keyboards, for example. There are webcam startups again, which is really interesting. That was not a thing that was happening pre-covid.

Do you view the opportunity here as an operational opportunity, as an innovation opportunity, as a “find new categories and make them grow” opportunity? What is your macro view of the situation?

There are three main tailwinds on our core business. The first one is new ways of working, hybrid working. That’s good for our personal workspace business, the traditional mice and keyboards, because everyone needs multiple setups. And obviously it’s good for our video conferencing business. So the new ways of working post-covid are a real tailwind for us.

Second is gaming. Gaming, just as a space, continues to grow, and especially with new demographics. Almost half of gamers are now women, which is amazing. And older people game. It’s no longer just teenage boys. We see the market continue to grow.

Wait, can I ask you one question about older people in that context?

Yeah. Sorry, older than teenage boys?

Sure. Is it that a set of teenage boys who were gamers 15 years ago got older, or is it older people are becoming new gamers?

I think we’re seeing a little bit of both, although it’s probably the first trend that is the biggest one. The teenage boys of 15 years ago are now in their 30s and 40s, so that just extends the demographic. New teenage boys are still coming in, and girls, so that’s good. But we’re also seeing older cohorts coming in mostly through mobile, through Candy Crush but also Wordle and Connections. Those are entry points into gaming that make them more comfortable with gaming and may take them to PC and console gaming as well.

You said there was a third thing. What was the third thing?

The third thing… of course you can’t do an interview for three minutes and not say AI, but AI is a real tailwind for us as well.

How do you think AI is a tailwind for Logitech in particular?

In three ways. First, like for any other company, is internal productivity. We’re seeing it on the software engineering side, where coding and testing have clearly become more efficient, but we’re also seeing it on the creative and brand-building side, again, where things are getting more efficient but also sometimes more creative.

More importantly, on the product side, there are two ways in which AI will be a tailwind. First of all, we’ve always been a human-to-technology interface company, and we’re starting to be an interface to the large language models. A couple of months ago, we launched the Logi AI Prompt Builder, which is basically a shortcut in our software to ChatGPT. It has millions of unique users already, and it’s just a simpler way for people to use ChatGPT and not get out of their flow when they use all of our mice and keyboards in English-speaking countries. There will be much more to follow in terms of being that human-technology interface.

There’s a third area that is big on AI, which is in audio and video. We have a big video conferencing business, a headphones business. That’s really machine learning and large data models, and the company’s been at those for a number of years, but we’re seeing the quality of things like two-way noise cancellation or video conferencing equipment that actually knows when to zoom in on you when you’re speaking and not when you’re opening a packet of crisps. Those kinds of things are really important, and I foresee massive quality improvements thanks to machine learning in the years ahead.

I want to come back to the AI question because I think there’s a lot to unpack there, and there are a lot of obvious opportunities, like you said, in audio and video. And then there are some opportunities that, I think, deserve a little more time around AI prompt building and that sort of thing.

But I want to stay focused for a second on you. You’re the new CEO. So covid, work from home, created a massive opportunity for Logitech. I bought a black market webcam at the end of 2020. It was Chinese. It wasn’t even meant for this market.

I love it.

The previous administration really ramped production. They saw huge growth. Then there was an enterprise push as more and more companies embraced hybrid and remote and refitted all their conference rooms. That all crashed back to earth, and there were a couple of years when the growth was falling. Logitech’s fourth quarter earnings released back in April marked your first quarter of sales growth in over two years. You also reported growth in your most recent quarter. What is bringing that growth back?

Product innovation and markets that are stabilizing a little bit post-covid [are contributing to that growth]. I have to say, this company should be very proud of what it did during covid under Bracken. It did a really great job, but obviously it was a bit of a sugar high. That said, the company is 50 percent bigger today than it was pre-covid, so it hasn’t all come crashing down to earth.

I think what we’ve done is we’ve really been focusing on great execution and on things that we can control. There are some things that we can’t control: inflation, consumer confidence, corporate IT budgets for our video conferencing business. But within those constraints, we’ve been growing our share. That was one of the drivers of us getting back to growth in Q4. We’ve been delivering really exciting innovation, and we’ll continue to do those things.

You called it a sugar high. I feel like the broad story of tech in particular is the sugar high of overinvestment during covid, of competing to hire every single person that existed in the world who could write code and then assuming that those trends would be permanent and we would all stay inside and live our lives mediated through screens on the internet forever. Many companies did not survive that sugar high. Is it that simple, that Logitech just weathered the covid highs and the trends and is back to a stable place now?

We’re not back to where we were in 2019. Again, we’re 50 percent bigger as a company, and the way people work is so different today versus 2019. Virtually every company that I speak to, and I speak to many of them because they’re all our customers, wants to be hybrid. They want their people to come into the office two or three days a week, but they also want to offer the flexibility of working from home or working from anywhere. That is obviously very different from in 2019. We pride ourselves on being a model for ways of working because we sell this stuff, so I think we’re very well positioned to help our corporate customers give people a great experience both in the office and at home.

You mentioned that you are in the California office today, and it’s your first day there. You moved to Switzerland when you got this job. How are you structuring your time between remote, hybrid, and in person? How’s that working for you?

Sadly, I live on an airplane, it feels like. Logitech is very special in that it is a super global company. We’re on the ground in more than 100 countries, and we have great capabilities around the world. I spend probably 60 percent of my time in offices that are not my own. When I’m in California, or I spent these first seven months [on the job] in our Swiss office, I try to be in the office. But I might also, if I start early — like today, I started at 6AM — go back home at 1PM and get some exercise and then work more later on. That’s a level of flexibility that I don’t think we necessarily had pre-covid, which is great.

Do you ever find yourself in that horrible situation of being alone in a conference room on a video call?

That’s just ridiculous, right?

That’s my nightmare. If I go to the office and I’m the only one there and everyone else is on a video call, I wonder why we even have an office.

[Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have this concept of gravity days at Logitech. On the gravity days, everyone’s there so you’re not by yourself.

What are the gravity days?

It depends on the teams. My gravity days here are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I’ll see most of the leadership team. But different teams have different gravity days that they pick themselves.

And then are you living on a plane just to be in person wherever you need to be?

Yes, and part of that is because I’m new — and I’m not just new to the company; I’m also new to the industry. I need to meet people, our own people, but very much also suppliers, customers, consumers, investors. There are just a lot of people to meet, and certainly a first meeting, I think, is still best done in person.

This brings us very neatly to what I think of as the Decoder questions. I was listening to the first fireside chat you had for your investors five days into the job, and I heard you say that your style is to be as close to the customer and as close to the people doing the work as possible because they know best. That’s you on planes. But ultimately, you have to make a lot of decisions. What kind of decisions do you want to be making? What’s your framework for making them?

I think company strategy is a great way to set that decision framework. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months, first listening, then co-creating that strategy, and then setting the strategy and setting the bar high. If I unpack that a little bit, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know and that we all don’t know, so listening was first. Then we sat down with the leadership team first to really make choices. What’s our goal? For 2031, because that’s when Logitech will be 50 years old, we set a goal of doubling the business and reducing our carbon footprint by 50 percent while retaining really attractive margins.

We set a mission, which we’ve said is extending human potential in work and in play. We had a good mission, but it was three pages long, so I really wanted to simplify that. And “extending human potential,” those words are carefully chosen. So “extending” is obviously a riff on the mouse. The mouse built this house. It extends your arm, so we want to extend—

You say, “The mouse built this house”?

Yeah, that’s what they say here — and I say it. I like it.

That should be the whole mission, I got to be honest with you. I think it’s a strong contender.

That’s right. But we extend human potential in this age of AI, this age of [Zoom CEO] Eric Yuan saying there are digital twins of all of us coming to meetings. It’s really important that we extend human potential because we can make humans better. We can help you win that game. We can help you be more productive. We can help you connect better when you’re in that conference room by yourself. If we can do that in ways that are also healthier for people on the planet, then extending human potential is really worth waking up for every morning.

And what else is there in life but work and play? We do that in work and play today, but I believe, with my leadership team, that those areas are actually much bigger than where Logitech plays today. Today, we’re mostly focused on work. We focus on office workers. Most people in the world don’t work in an office. They work in retail, healthcare, education, construction, you name it. And we can play there, too. And in gaming, we’re mostly focused on PC gaming. Today, there’s a lot more play out there than just PC gaming. That broadens our TAM, our total addressable market, for the future, which is an opportunity to deliver that growth.

That’s a long-winded way of saying what we’re doing. That is our framework for decision-making. We’ve then made some pretty clear choices where to play and how to win below that, and now that that is in place, as a leader, I can circle back and say, “Okay, I listened. We co-create it and we set the bar high.” Now, I circle back and I listen again. I go back and I listen to people and say, “What do they need? What obstacles do I need to take away so that they can deliver on doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half?”

What kind of obstacles have you removed so far?

Well, we’re in the process [of doing this]. I think some of those obstacles might be the result of that sugar high. We got a little complicated in our organization because we had a lot of people, and that usually makes things a little more complicated. So we’re about to do some simplifications and also invest some more money in areas where we’re maybe not quite as good as we need to be.

Historically, we’re a fantastic B2C company. We sell our stuff to Amazon, to Best Buy, to MediaMarkt. That’s who we are. B2B is much newer. And again, Bracken and the team did a great job of building a B2B business from scratch with a really disruptive video conferencing product. But we’re like teenagers in that space. I wouldn’t call us babies, but we’re like teenagers. If you compare our capabilities, especially on the go-to-market side, to some of the more legacy players in B2B, we’re just newer. That’s a place where we will be investing, and that’s been an obstacle.

You have brought up changing the org chart, which is bait for the show. That’s what Decoder is all about. When I talked to Bracken last, I will never forget it, he described one of the most complicated org charts I’ve ever heard. It seemed to be working. He seemed to be happy with it. He told me, and I went and looked it up, he had 23 direct reports. Most of the teams across the company were set up to be almost completely independent, and he was totally fine with duplicated efforts and resources.

So if two teams were both going to do microphones, that was fine as long as they were both going to market and the teams independently were profitable or successful in their own way. I think he told me there were something like 20 or 30 product teams just running under the various brands. That feels like the thing you’re about to change. Is that what you’re changing?

Yeah, and again, I don’t want to blame previous setups because they were working for their time. The track record of value creation here at Logitech is fantastic. But I think now what I’m hearing from our people and what we’re seeing in some of the results over the past few years is that we do need to simplify because things have gotten a little bit too complicated.

Part of that, by the way, is the brand story. Logitech tried to become a multi-brand company, but today, 97 percent of our sales are in the Logitech brand, Logitech and Logitech G, and I consider those one brand, really. So it’s important that we make sure that 97 percent of our resources are focused on that brand and that we don’t get too scattered around the company. That’s one of the other strategic choices that we’ve made: we will build one fantastic iconic Logitech brand, and that’s our focus.

A lot of the other brands you’re describing are the result of acquisitions. There’s Ultimate Ears, Jaybird, Blue Microphones, Streamlabs — and the list goes on. There have been a lot of acquisitions and there are a lot of new products. Then there are attempts to be more consumer with the Logi brand. Is all of that stuff going to come in under Logitech, or are you going to leave those alone?

Well, again, it’s the tail wagging the dog, right? It’s very, very small. And some of it has already been folded in successfully under the Logitech brand. If you look at Astro, which was a really good acquisition, it’s now part of Logitech. That makes a lot of sense. And it absolutely doesn’t mean we won’t do acquisitions in the future, but again, when they can be folded in, they probably should.

There are much, much bigger companies with much bigger brands that don’t rely on a whole stable of brands. So I’m excited about that. And then you also mentioned product development and engineering, which, of course, is the heart of this company. Again, there’s probably room for a little bit more synergy, and this is, by the way, not about cost-cutting. It’s just about getting more out of the resources that we have if we talk to each other a little bit more.

I’m assuming you’re not going to stick with 23 direct reports and a bunch of basically startup founders everywhere.

I already haven’t, that I know.

To your point, it worked.

Absolutely.

I remember talking to Bracken. I was like, “That sounds pretty fun,” and he seemed like he was having a good time. But you need to change it now. How are you doing that? What’s the structure now?

I’m already down to 12 or 13 direct reports, so it’s already streamlined in that way. I think running the company along the lines of three big businesses — personal workspace, gaming, and Logitech for enterprise — is a really important way of going forward, and that’s what we’ll be doing.

Again, historically, we’re very much a consumer company, so across [personal workspace solutions] and gaming, we’ll be focused on the end user to consumer, the customer, Amazon, Walmart, Gigabyte, MediaMarkt, etc. And B2B is a different kettle of fish where we still have to build significant capability, which is a huge opportunity because, again, we’ve got fabulous products for corporate customers, and our penetration is still very low. So I’m really excited about the growth potential of our B2B business.

Inside of that structure, which feels like a go-to-market structure, you’ve got the three big consumer segments, and you’ve got products that might move between them. You do still have some brands that people love. Ultimate Ears is a brand that I love. That was my first fancy pair of headphones. You have Blue Microphones, where half or a quarter of the podcasts in the world are on fancy Blue Microphones, and they’re a fixture of all the studios. Are you going to leave some of those to their high-end customers?

Yeah, absolutely, and we retain a small Ultimate Ears team who are doing great stuff. They just launched the new Wonderboom, which is a super cool product. The same is true for Blue. Absolutely, those little teams, again, we’re super sufficient and scrappy on those, but they’re great products and they’ll stay in place and they’re as loved as the big dogs.

When you were going through and saying, “Okay, I have to fold some into the three big buckets and I’m going to leave some of these alone,” what was the framework you used? What was the marker for you to say, “Okay, we’re going to set Blue aside, but this one we have to fold into the main consumer Logitech brand”?

I think the framework is a framework of growth. So if we want to double the business by 2031, then you work back and you say, “Okay, what do we need to do?” Well, we need to grow organically, mid-single digits, and we want to do some M&A. What are the spaces that we’ll play in? It will be work and play and it will be B2B and B2C. Then, when you look at the building blocks, the big chunks will be in B2B video conferencing and personal workspace products, in gaming and in PWS products.

So then, underneath that, yes, you have to fit in some of these smaller pieces, and that’s totally fine. I’ve always found throughout my career that it’s actually fun to work on some of these smaller pieces because you have a little more freedom. If you do well, people think you’re fantastic. If you don’t do well, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s a nice place to be in.

One of the other things you said in that investor call, which is also just pure Decoder bait and I thank you for it, is that one of your core beliefs is that companies are perfectly designed to get the results that they are getting. Whatever result you get you can just run right back to the structure of the company. Explain that in more depth.

The results that we got last quarter, which we’re actually pleased with because we were back to growth and we had really good margins, are the result of the structure that we had then. Now, I’m a big believer that you have to make a few changes if you want to get, in our case, even better results, a little faster growth with the same margins, and not unimportantly, reduce that carbon footprint by 50 percent. If you expect the same results, then it’s fine to stay with that same organization. If you expect results that are a little different, you need to make some tweaks. Again, I don’t think Logitech is a disaster turnaround story at all. This is a good-to-great story. But if we want to be great, then we have to make some tweaks.

As you think about changing the structure, you talked about your process here tonight. You talked to everybody. You listened. You co-created some ideas. There are some goals here. You’re saying, “I’m designing a structure to get to some very explicit, probably measurable goals.” Do those look mostly like growth? Does it look like product innovation? Does it look like flipping the apple cart over and inventing the next iPhone?

This is a product and innovation company at its heart. So that’s the way we grow, with great, fantastic products that our users love. But that’s the what and the how. In terms of the outcome, yes, it’s about growth. So we’ve said we want to double the business by 2031 and reduce our carbon footprint because that’s something the company committed to well before I got here, which is not so easy to do when you double your business because each one of those mice and keyboards emits more carbon. Then, of course, we want to create great value for investors. So gross margins and operating income margins are important, and we’ve guided for some really attractive levels.

You’re the new CEO. You got hired by a board of directors. Some of that board of directors is leaving. You’re going to have some new members that the shareholders can vote for. You’d like them to vote for you to be added to the board of directors.

When you set that goal and you say, “I’m changing the structure of the company,” or even when you’re interviewing for the job, did you come in and say, “Look, I think we should double the size of the company by 2031”? Was that the pitch? Was it, “I think there’s a new vision”? Now, when you’re actually executing and saying these things out loud, do you feel the pressure to grow from your investors or your board members? Where does that come from?

I would say, first of all, on the process to get this role, kudos to the board of Logitech. I thought they did a really great job in the interviewing process, where, I’ll spill the beans, but they asked each of the candidates to do a 15- to 20-minute presentation on what they thought the company should be. Now, of course, as an external candidate, you do that not knowing a whole lot.

So, while some of the themes I talked about have come back in my actual strategy, some of the things have changed because obviously I know a lot more now than I did before I joined. But that was helpful because it allows the board to see where the candidate wants to take the company. But you’d be surprised that not all boards do that.

So that was the hiring process. You didn’t walk in saying, “I’m going to double the size of the company.” But now is when you’re saying that?

Yes.

And is that a decision that is coming from the board in service to its investors?

No. Again, this is listening, co-creating, and then engaging with the board deeply on “does this make sense — these goals, this vision?” And then these “where to play” and “how to win” choices, do those make sense? The board was a really important stakeholder, obviously, in finalizing that. But so were the people of Logitech. I’m a big believer in co-creation, and that’s not just co-creation with the leadership team.

We actually invited all 7,000 employees to come to co-creation sessions around the world where we shared with them an MVP of our strategy. But then we said, “Tell us three things you’d like and three things you want to add or change.” We had great feedback on that, and that really shaped the final strategy.

What was the biggest thing that you added or changed or the biggest thing that people really liked?

What they really liked is the continued focus on products and innovation. Again, that is our lifeblood, and we have so many fantastic engineers and designers, so that came out very, very clearly. I think what surprised me was actually the passion for sustainability. There’s a huge passion around the world for what we can do to lead in tech on reducing the carbon footprint where there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of increasing carbon footprints, unfortunately, in the age of AI. There was more passion for that topic than I had expected. So again, it’s important in our strategy going forward.

Let’s talk about the products. They are the lifeblood of the company. I’m going to say “the mouse built this house” all the time. It’s very good. I can’t believe I never knew that before. It’s a pretty sprawling product lineup. You’re in a million categories. How did you acquaint yourself with all of it?

There are three big ones.

Well, sure, but everything from smart home doorbells to mice to headphones, it’s a lot of things.

I think those are pretty much gone.

So wait, you’re going to leave the smart home?

No, there’s our timing. I need to double-check, but I’m not even sure those are still being sold. It’s really personal workspace, video conferencing, and gaming.

What about all the customers you sold smart home cameras to who have cloud service dependencies?

We’ll continue to support, of course, what we’ve sold for some time.

I’m always curious because every new category now has some sort of ongoing service dependency, which feels very risky. Our audience is constantly telling us that one reason they go back to big companies over and over again and won’t buy products from challengers or startups is that they don’t want their products to disappear. And then big companies like Google have broken that trust anyway. This is a really ongoing conversation with The Verge audience. It must be new for you. When you were at Procter & Gamble, I’m assuming people didn’t buy shampoo and then worry you were going to stop selling shampoo.

That’s so true, and it’s such an interesting topic. Actually, at Procter & Gamble, we did get lots of people calling when you took their lipstick shade out, but that’s a little different. There’s no software inside.

Yeah, you weren’t breaking all the existing lipsticks that had been sold.

Exactly. Again, this is a space that’s somewhat newer for Logitech, but it’s incredibly strategic. We don’t do just pure hardware. We do design-led, software-enabled hardware, and that software component in the age of AI is more important every day. The services that we provide to our corporate customers are actually a nicely growing part of the business that didn’t exist a few years ago because Logitech was new to B2B and wasn’t charging for its services. Now we are.

I think we deliver great software services to our B2B customers, but we are learning. On the consumer side as well, through Logitech Options Plus, the software, it’s very important to deliver superior products for our users. We now have more software engineers than hardware engineers, which is a big milestone.

This comes up in surprising ways on Decoder. The CTO of John Deere once told me that John Deere has more software engineers than hardware engineers because it has to support the ongoing service and cloud capabilities of the tractor. This makes a little more sense for Logitech, but really what we’re talking about is an ongoing cost. You sell me the keyboard once. It’s got Options Plus. It has an AI button. I push the button, and someone has to make sure the software still works. Someone probably has to pay ChatGPT for access to the service. Where is that going to come from? Are you baking that into the margin of the keyboard or the mouse?

Absolutely. We’re baking that in, and I’m not particularly worried about that. What I’m actually hoping is that this will contribute to the longevity of our products, that we’ll have more premium products but products that last longer because they’re superior and because we can continue to update them over time. And again, I talked about doubling the business and reducing the carbon footprint by half. The longevity piece is really important.

I’m very intrigued. The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.

What made the mouse a forever mouse?

It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.

But, again, I just come back to the cost. You sell me the mouse once. Maybe I’ll pay 200 bucks for it.

The business model obviously is the challenge there. So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model? In our video conferencing business, that is now a very important part of the model, the services, and it’s critical for corporate customers.

Let’s come to that in a second because that makes sense to me. You sell managed services to enterprises. You price support contracts for cameras and whatever. That’s an ongoing need businesses have. I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”

Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.

But Rolex has to employ software engineers to ship me over-the-air updates forever.

But the artifact is like your Rolex, and then given that we know the technology that we attach to changes, it’s not going to be like your Rolex in that it doesn’t have to ever change. Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.

It certainly will help with sustainability. There are two ways people have traditionally proposed monetizing hardware over time. It’s subscription fees and it’s advertising. Is there a third way that I don’t know about that you’re thinking of?

No. The third way is the traditional model of “we innovate and we have you upgrade.” That’s the current model. And we’re pretty damn good at that model because we have pretty damn good innovators around the company who do come up with fabulous products.

That is definitely the model today. It’s not a bad model at all, especially since we’re continuing to design for more sustainable products. We’re continuing to recycle and refurbish products. All of that is good. But that said, I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that.

I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?

Possibly.

And that would be the forever mouse?

Yeah.

So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.

Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.

But it’s a mouse.

But it’s a mouse, yeah.

I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.

[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.

You mentioned AI earlier. You have rolled out some of the AI features in the new versions of Options Plus. There is a mouse with an AI button.

Actually, sorry, Nilay. I am going to give you just a little piece of information. So the mouse built this house. Is that a traditional category? Will it go away? Is it old and tired? We don’t believe so because only about 50 percent of people use a mouse and a keyboard today, a separate keyboard.

Some only have a mouse or only a keyboard, but many of them have both. But the thing that shocked me was that the average spend on that globally is $26, which is really so low. This is stuff you use every day, that sits on your desk every day, that you look at every day. That’s like the price of four coffees at Starbucks or less than a Nike running shirt. There is so much room to create more value in that space as we make people more productive — to extend human potential.

Do you think the growth comes from going from 50 to 55 percent, or does it come from selling the 50 percent more expensive products?

Both. Absolutely both. That’s why this is still an exciting category.

One of the things about keyboards in particular is that they have become lifestyle items. You see influencers on TikTok talk about their setups. We run photos of people’s setups. People have deep abiding attachments to their key switches in their keyboards. I’m assuming this is new to you, unless you were a diehard mechanical keyboard fan before, which would be amazing. You’re looking at it from a background in consumer products. What’s your view of that, of the keyboard as a lifestyle product?

I definitely think it’s an important lifestyle product. Obviously, on the gaming side, it’s a really important lifestyle product, and again, it’s a real growth opportunity for us for many years to come. On the work side, what I’m intrigued by is that the needs of different people are very different when it comes to keyboards and mice. So we have done a nice job of growing this business by targeting different groups.

You have advanced users: a software engineer; a financial analyst who is in Excel all day. They need our MX line where you can do tons of shortcuts. I met someone over the weekend who — I didn’t even know this was possible — had done 120 shortcuts on one of our mice. I’m like, “What? I’m proud I have four.” But anyway, these are super advanced users, and we make MX products for them.

Then you have people who have some wellness issues because they’re also typing all day, but they’re sitting at the kitchen table or on an airplane like me, and they’re screwing up their arms. So the Ergo line — also very premium, very beautiful — is really made for them. I use an Ergo keyboard. It’s fantastic. It really helps on the shoulder and the arm. Then you have more lifestyle, younger people, especially in China, who want the pink mouse or who want the mouse that goes with the latest game. So these are really different groups, and I think we have opportunities to go even deeper on those consumer needs to build exactly the right products for them.

That differentiation between gaming and professional and lifestyle, you can pull them apart. I think a lot of companies try to pull them apart. But I think, from my view, they’re getting mashed together. The needs of a gamer and the needs of the Excel macro fanatic, they’re more the same than different in some cases. And then the high-design lifestyle category and gaming as a lifestyle are also the same in very important ways. How do you pull those apart? What’s your approach to that, especially because you have a view from the outside?

Absolutely. It’s funny. It’s an “and, and.” In some cases, you’re absolutely right, things are blurring. In China, we’re seeing a lot of people working with our gaming stuff, but then there’s also complete bifurcation. Our top-of-the-line gaming mouse is the Pro Light, which is the most simplistic-looking from the outside: a super light, thin thing with a lot of exciting software inside. Whereas our top-of-the-line MX mouse for advanced users is not at all minimalistic because it has 18 buttons and scrollers and whatever. You’ll see the same guy who’s a software engineer by day and a gamer by night use both. So it’s a “yes, and.” And again, it’s really important we understand all of those users and that we build fabulous products for them.

The really interesting thing about keyboards and mice is that they’re tied to desktop computing as a paradigm, particularly mice. You can plug a mouse into an iPad, but why? You can buy the case, and Apple has a lot of decisions to make about the future of the iPad, but really what we’re talking about is desktop computers: macOS, Windows, Linux, big monitors maybe.

There’s an endless prediction that this will go away, that mobile will take over everything. That prediction does not appear to have borne out. When you’re thinking about Logitech’s markets, how do you evaluate that? Is it that eventually everyone will just have a phone and the laptop will go away? Even if the evidence doesn’t seem to bear it out, it is a permanent prediction in the tech industry.

It’s definitely a permanent prediction. As I onboarded at the company, I had a few history lessons. I went through historical documents, and this same thing came up 20–25 years ago: the PC is imminently disappearing. That has not happened, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t absolutely be paranoid. One of our innovation streams is called “Beyond the PC,” and we’re dedicating significant resources to innovating beyond the PC.

Of course, some of what we sell today, quite a good amount of what we sell today, video conferencing, is already beyond the PC. That’s important. If you look at one of our recent innovations, we announced two weeks ago the MX Ink, which is a stylus for the Meta Quest. That’s definitely beyond the PC. So hopefully you get a sense of what we’ll need to do more of in this space, but we know how to do it. I like this example a lot, the MX Ink stylus for Meta, because it’s beyond the PC but also helps us think about work beyond the office. Who’s going to use that stylus? It’s creative people, it’s doctors. It’s not your traditional office worker.

One thing that’s really difficult about going beyond the PC is that there are vastly more gatekeepers once you leave the realm of Mac and Windows. It’s Apple and Google in particular. There are things that they will simply not allow you to do with their devices. There’s software you can’t ship. There are drivers you can’t load. There are peripherals that won’t attach, all the way down the line. Has that been a bit of a wake-up call?

Well, it’s been an area where I’m actually very impressed. Logitech, I think, has the best set of partnerships in the industry, and it’s proud of it and it nurtures those partnerships. Whether it’s Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Zoom, we work closely with all of them, and we’re able to develop products with and for them, including Apple, which is fantastic but a little secretive at times, which is their right and they’re amazing.

We just came out with a Combo Touch for the new iPads, which is a beautiful product, and we work with Apple with Berlin walls around [those products]. So it’s kind of funny. My team in Taiwan who works on that, they were wearing T-shirts when I came that said, “My work is so secretive, I don’t even know what I’m working on.”

[Laughs] That’s very good.

But that’s a really close collaboration with a fabulous company, Apple. MX Ink is an example of Meta. And obviously we’re very close in our video conferencing business and beyond to Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. It’s a unique set of partnerships. This company was born as an American and Swiss company. That neutrality of working with all these partners is where the Swissness comes to life best.

Let me ask you to compare more directly. A lot of times in the tech world when people complain about app store policies or restrictions on what the OS will let you do or the Apple tax, the immediate comparison is, “Well, Walmart controls what goes in its stores,” or, “Target controls what goes in its stores.” You used to work on Head & Shoulders, and if you wanted the end cap at Walmart for Head & Shoulders, you had to pay them some extra money for additional marketing. The analogy is there. It comes up all the time.

You’re a very unique person to ask this question of, because I have always thought, well, Walmart has competition. If you’re not getting a favorable rate to put the shampoo in Walmart, you can go to Target or the grocery store or Walgreens or wherever else. The platforms do not have that in that way. Have you felt that yet in your seven months?

You’re right that they don’t in that way. If I use video conferencing as an example, there is competition. Microsoft is obviously very large, but there is Google and there is Zoom. We do work really well with all three of them and we value all three of them and we put significant resources against all three of them, and they do the same with us. It’s not like there’s only one. And that’s true when it comes to virtual reality as well as beyond the PC. It’s a real competitive advantage for Logitech to have this range of partnerships and not just be in bed with any one of them.

Are there things you’d like to build or ideas you’ve heard that are being blocked by the various rules that the mobile platforms have in place?

No. Again, it’s been seven months so this may change, but from what I’ve seen, we can talk about everything, including with the very big boys. I love that and I think that will lead to some really great innovation going forward.

But if you wanted to have the AI button on a keyboard connected to an iPad that brought up your overlay and Options Plus to create a prompt, Apple would simply not let you do that on iPadOS in the way that you can on Windows and macOS.

Yeah, and again, I’m not sure that’s something we would die on our sword for.

Makes sense. The other piece of the puzzle here is basically everybody at some point tells me that they won’t die on their sword to continue connecting to Apple, but it just seems very obvious to me that comparison to retail falls apart because there are so many more retailers.

Yeah, although Walmart, don’t underestimate the size of Walmart, certainly in the US.

Fair enough. The other world Logitech lives in is the world of standards. There’s USB for however much you’re going to play in the smart home. There’s Matter. There’s Bluetooth. Every time we do an episode on standards, we discover it’s intensely political and almost not technical in a very specific way. Has that come up for you — “Boy, we need to make sure that the next version of the USB standard can do all the things we want it to do”? Or are you saying, “We’re going to let the platforms figure that out”?

We’re really active in all of the industry forums and associations that talk about standards because it is really important for us, not just for the platforms. I would say the most important thing is that there is a standard because, when there isn’t, that just creates complexity and cost for everyone. We’re active and always trying to go for a standard.

I think we’ll have to go to some new standards as well. One of the things I’m quite proud of at Logitech is that we carbon-label our products with a really solid methodology. It shows that your mouse is 1.5 in terms of emissions and your keyboard is 15 and your video conference, I don’t know by heart, but it’s a lot more. What would be super interesting is if we could get to an industry standard for carbon labeling so that consumers and corporate consumers can make a choice on a product that has lower emissions. That’s one of the things we’re trying to work with some industry associations and groups on. But in general, standardization is important for the industry, and we’ll push that as hard as we can.

Did you open a door in some office at Logitech and find the people who have to work with the standards board and it’s just a group of sad lawyers?

They’re really exciting. They’re great.

I’m dying to know.

There’s not a lot of them. There’s like one, but they’re super active.

You’ve talked about climate and sustainability several times now. Let’s talk about it in the context of AI. A bunch of the big companies, in particular companies investing in data centers and foundation models, they’re blowing their climate goals out of the water because they’re spending so much more in energy to power these AI systems. Those things are obviously in tension. You’re in on AI. You have Options Plus. You have the buttons on the mice. Then you’re also talking about being sustainable. How are you managing that tension?

Clearly we’re not building LLMs ourselves, so the impact of our stuff is very modest. It’s on the edge. In the context of our total footprint, we don’t expect that to have a significant impact. Our impact sits in materials and components, in PCBs and plastics, and it sits in the circularity, or the lack thereof. Because we sell stuff, hardware, and that’s a huge part of our footprint.

So that is not where I’m concerned, but clearly, as an industry, we should be super concerned about the fact that pretty much every player has goals to be carbon neutral by 2040 or 2050, but right now the numbers are only going up and up and up. That is very concerning. We’re a relatively small player, but I hope we can be a pioneer and show the way on taking real climate action rather than just buying offsets.

Some of your goals are using more than 70 percent recycled plastic in manufacturing. Can you get to 100 percent? Is that feasible?

We should be able to get very close. The first priority for us on our glide path to a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 is to expand what we already know how to do. I’m really proud that Logitech is already at 75 percent of products using recycled plastic. That is huge. Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, they’re like 20 percent. This is huge on a large number of products every year. We also know what to do in terms of low-carbon aluminum, low-carbon some other things. We’ve got to scale what we already know how to do, and I think we can get very close to 100 percent.

Then we have to use renewable energy wherever we can because that is a big part of our footprint. And then third and fourth, we have to innovate and we have to drive circularity. The last one is probably the hardest innovation to come. PCBs are a big focus for innovation. They’re a big part of our footprint as well, and they’re very carbon-intensive. We know what the four pillars are: We have to scale. We have to use renewable energy. We have to innovate, and we have to go for circularity. And then I think we have a fighting chance to actually be minus 50 percent and again grow the business because that’s the tricky thing here and that’s what Google and Microsoft are really struggling with right now.

Can you quickly define circularity?

The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.

Let’s end on the forever mouse because I’m fascinated by this concept: the idea that you would have a mouse and you’d buy it once and then you’d maybe pay some fees for software upgrades or you’d trade it in and get a newer one, and that would be a recurring revenue source for you. That all depends on a vision of what the mouse software should do besides just move the cursor around. But whenever we do episodes with anything to do with AI, our audience is like, “We don’t want this.” In a very direct way, sometimes they’re like, “We don’t want this and we especially don’t want it here.”

We might want it when we want it. I might want to use generative fill in Photoshop on my terms, but I don’t need it to follow me around the computer. And even if you’re saying the climate impact is minimal, I certainly don’t want to feel like there’s any climate impact of using my mouse and expanding the range of places where you might go ask OpenAI for inference. That’s one problem. The second problem is you’re still competing with OpenAI and Google and Apple to be the primary interface for their backend services, right? You’re not training your own model.

The question for me is really twofold. It’s one: is there a vision beyond “the software will do more for you” than just drive your mouse around? And the second part is: even if it can do more, can you realistically compete against the giants that have every incentive to make sure that you never look anywhere else?

On the second piece, this company has been a human-technology interface for its entire existence. And while the mouse built this house and maybe there won’t be mice forever — although I think there’ll be mice for a long time to come — we’ve always been that human-technology interface. There were always people who said, “Well, Google and Microsoft won’t want you to be.” In fact, they often come to us and say, “We want an interface.” So, that MX Ink, it’s not that we were pushing Meta really hard. It was Meta saying, “Oh, we’d love for you to do something like this,” and us saying, “Well, we think we can.”

I think the big players will continue to want to work with players like us who have the luxury of focus. For us, a $40 million idea is 1 percent growth. Whereas, for Microsoft or Google, that’s nothing. That luxury of focus is important, and I think we’ll continue to be a human-technology interface in that way. Should the mouse do more than just move the cursor? Absolutely. And it does that today, and I think similarly about being more productive with shortcuts to the large language models and all kinds of other things. The guy that I met at a barbecue over the weekend who has programmed 120 shortcuts on his mouse, that’s the kind of stuff that can extend human potential in ways that are healthier.

This idea — that Logitech sits at a machine-human interface — right now, it’s expressed in Options Plus. Your software that has AI in it is essentially prompt engineering, right? You’re guiding people through the process of making a prompt, which is, for better or worse, how we are all talking to AI right now.

Yeah, totally.

Is that it? Is that the vision? Is there a different vision? Is that just the stopping point right now?

No, I think we’re at the beginning of AI, and [with time], it will become multimodal and we won’t even need to build prompts because it will know what prompts we need. Things will evolve exactly how that will evolve. Who knows? But I think the human is going to be a limiting factor. Human hands, the human brain. I suspect we’ll still need human-technology interfaces. They may not look exactly like what Logitech sells today, but I think the future for human-technology interfaces is really, really bright.

The danger there is that’s also what Apple and Microsoft and Google see. I talked to Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, and they happily tell me that AI is a platform shift. And what they mean is that it’s an interface shift, that we’re going to get the phone out of your hand or you’re going to deal with something else that is not Apple’s phone. That’s very much what they mean.

What they’re talking about is, “Okay, you’re going to talk to the computer. It’s going to do stuff for you.” Or, “You’re going to issue a set of commands, and the computer will figure out how to do whatever task you want it to.” You can already see they’re getting there. You can see some of the demos of the concepts. Do you worry about that disintermediating Logitech?

Yeah, but again, there’s still going to be technology, whether that’s an AI button or something else. I think Logitech did a really fine job surviving the shift from PC to phone and still being a fabulous interface. I’m pretty sure that with the fabulous engineers and designers we have, we’ll also be an interface to whatever’s next.

Well, that’s a great place to end it. Hanneke, tell the people what you think is next for Logitech. You’ve been there for seven months. What’s the stuff you’re looking forward to now that you’ve figured it out?

We’ve got a great bunch of innovations coming up. I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. [Laughs.] As we go toward the end of your holidays, I think we have a really bright fiscal year ahead, and then we’ll continue to extend human potential in work and play.

I love it. Well, the mouse built this house. This is amazing. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.

Alright, it is so nice to see you, Nilay.

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When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured.
But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system.
In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation.
But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases.
The JSS wasn’t necessary to evaluate the value of Biles’ vault in Antwerp. Her performance on that vault was too emphatic to be borderline. Still, the cameras positioned at the corners of the vault podium captured her 3D likeness as they did for all of the other athletes who competed through the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships. The technology distilled the legendary athlete and her performance down to straight lines and sharp angles; it showed the distance and height she traveled in numbers. The awe and wonder one feels when watching Biles perform could now be recognized by a computer — understood, though not exactly appreciated.

Fujitsu and FIG announced JSS back in 2017 with the goal of having the system up and running by the Summer Olympics in 2021. A home Games in Tokyo would have been an ideal opportunity for the Japanese-based tech conglomerate to showcase this kind of technology, and it would’ve been a noteworthy achievement for Morinari Watanabe, the first Japanese president of the Lausanne-based FIG. But the JSS wasn’t ready; in fact, it would take another four years of work. At the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, the JSS was finally ready to go on all 10 artistic gymnastics apparatuses — six for the men and four for the women.
This was all part of the “dream,” as Watanabe put it in the joint press conference hosted by FIG and Fujitsu heralding the technological breakthrough. “Today is a day of liberation in sports,” he proclaimed to the media and other gymnastics officials who showed up for the explainer that was held shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. “The day has come when all athletes, not just gymnasts, will receive fair and transparent scoring.”
This proclamation was a bit hyperbolic, especially given that this is not AI’s first foray into judging athletic competition. It has already been successfully applied in sporting contexts, often with approval from athletes and coaches themselves. Hawk-Eye Live, the electronic line-calling system, is used in lieu of line judges in tennis at two of the majors, and its calls are generally considered reliable.
But in tennis, Hawk-Eye is being tasked with answering a yes / no question — is the ball in, or is it out? The JSS is being asked to perform a much more complicated task: it needs to be able to identify hundreds of skills in the Code of Points, and the ranges in which they’re done, across the whole span of gymnast body types — a complex undertaking, and one that changes regularly, as the FIG is updating its rules every four years. In a sport where the difference between first and fifth can be a mere tenth of a point, and when global rankings can mean the difference between being funded by your national federation or not, getting the score right is very important.
The appeal to a technological solution to judging feels practically inevitable. Humans are fallible. That’s why deductions exist in the first place: to quantify the mistakes that the gymnasts make. But we’d never replace the human athletes with machines, regardless of how advanced Boston Dynamics’ back-flipping robot gets. The draw of gymnastics is watching mere mortals push the limits of athleticism. But the performance of the judges is a means to an end, not the end itself. For more than a century, human judgment was the only option, no matter how much this might’ve discomfited us, given the stakes. Now, there’s a potential technological solution that shows promise. But can AI judge human excellence better than a human?

The JSS started, according to Watanabe and Hidenori Fujiwara, as a joke. It was late in 2015, about a year before Watanabe won his first FIG presidential election, making him the first non-European to helm the international federation since its inception in 1881. He suggested that Fujitsu should develop robots to judge gymnastics.
Fujiwara, head of Fujitsu’s sports business development division, took the challenge seriously. “We developed a prototype system,” Fujiwara said, which he then showed to Watanabe, who was surprised by the progress. Watanabe clarified that what he’d said about robots had only been a joke, and yet here they were.
This origin story for the JSS was emphasized during the press conference I attended in Antwerp shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. There was, of course, a PowerPoint. An early slide in the presentation showed a comic with robots holding up score placards, as a male gymnast swings into a scissor-like movement on the pommel horse. The caption above the image read: “Joke come true!” (I didn’t get why it was funny; I guess you had to be there.)
It’s a “joke” that Fujitsu has spent untold amounts of money, time, and energy on. Though the company wouldn’t disclose the cost of this whole undertaking, it’s hard to fathom, after strolling through their offices in the annals of the Sportpaleis and seeing the arena setup of the technology in the field of play — and off to the side — that it was anything short of a tremendously expensive and resource-intensive endeavor. But I couldn’t help but feel like it was a lot of effort for technology that, at least as pitched by Watanabe, would only ever amount to a slightly better version of judge-assisted video replay.
Even ignoring the years of investing in R&D, the physical footprint of JSS appears expensive. During the competition, I glimpsed the backroom where there was a row of servers and another of monitors, a cluster of power packs, and tons of cable. Like so much of AI, its “magic” obscures copious amounts of energy-intensive hardware.
Out on the floor, the JSS cameras were subtle, but a lot of human effort went into calibrating them. Before the start of the day’s competition and frequently in between sessions, you could watch as technicians took to the floor, placing large orange balls similar to exercise balls you’d find at the gym, mounted to tripod-like devices, at strategic spots on or near the equipment to make sure that the cameras were properly aligned. Sometimes, they waved these balls like wands around the apparatuses. And throughout the competition, several technicians monitored the event from behind six computer screens near the media box. Nothing about this can be done cheaply.
The entire history of judging had created tragedies, Watanabe explained somewhat dramatically. But even if his remark to Fujiwara had been made in jest, the fact that FIG has doggedly pursued this venture with Fujitsu going on six years suggests that the joke hinted at something critical and true (as jokes often do): that he felt that there was something amiss in judging in the sport of gymnastics, and maybe technology could fix it.
Watanabe didn’t specify any particular instance of judging malfeasance or error that created these personal tragedies. But he didn’t really have to. The conventional wisdom around the judged aesthetic sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating, is that there are and always have been issues with the scoring. During the Cold War, when both the US and the Soviet Union fought for the top spot in the Olympic medal rankings, there was fairly widespread cheating and collusion in gymnastics judging. Back in 1988, after former University of Utah gymnastics head coach Greg Marsden’s brief foray into international elite gymnastics, he let slip to the media that, at the previous year’s world championships, there was judging collusion between the US and Romania, with the coaches exchanging scores before their athletes took to the mat. And in the years since the Cold War ended and the old judging alliances started to break down, the issues became more mundane but no less consequential. It was mostly human error, confusing rules and processes, with a dash of bias — racial, national, or both — that created most of the problems.
Elements of subjectivity can be found in most sports, and these judgment calls can end up having major consequences when it comes to competitive outcomes. In basketball, for example, a referee might make a bad call that affects the outcome of the entire game, like this year’s Women’s Final Four matchup between UConn and Iowa that featured a controversial offensive foul call in the final seconds of the game. But in general, the way of amassing points is fairly straightforward and has remained consistent over many years. The lines on the court, except in the case of the free throw, determine the point value of any given shot, and this didn’t change when Stephen Curry started nailing deep three-pointers. A shot from well behind the three-point line is objectively more difficult — and impressive — than one made closer to the basket. But the NBA hasn’t painted another line on the court to reward the higher difficulty level of shots taken from well behind the arc. Nor did the league change the rules to make Curry’s threes harder. Players simply learned to shoot from further back.

This is not how gymnastics operates. As gymnasts introduce new elements, the FIG has to assess them for their difficulty value, and there is no upward limit, at least in theory, as there is with basketball shots. In gymnastics, a half-court shot isn’t worth the same as one from right behind the arc. Skill valuations can change from one Olympic cycle to the next; requirement groups can be added or removed. A bad score in one cycle might be a good one in the next. The rules are not stable as they are in other sports, and it can be baffling, without highly specialized knowledge, to understand the difference in difficulty from one skill to the next.
The most significant change to the rules came in 2006 when the FIG scrapped the Perfect 10 scoring paradigm in favor of an open-ended approach that gives the gymnasts two marks that are added together — the difficulty score, which starts at zero and builds, depending on the fulfillment of requirements and the skills the athlete performs; and an execution one that starts at 10 and is reduced as the judges apply deductions for mistakes the athlete makes.
The immediate catalyst for this particular change was the scoring controversies of the 2004 Olympics, particularly the miscalculated start value of Yang Tae-young. The South Korean gymnast was erroneously docked a tenth of a point, which led to him missing out on the gold medal in the men’s all-around. This mistake has meant that Yang, who is now a coach, doesn’t receive a gold medalist’s pension from the South Korean government. Watanabe was not wrong about how errors in judging can have serious ramifications for athletes, even years after the fact.
Judges still make mistakes on the D-score, which is the updated name for start value. But, unlike with the execution mark (aka the “how well you did it” score), a gymnast or coach has the right to appeal the difficulty calculation. This is where JSS can help. Like in the earlier iterations of Hawk-Eye in tennis (and still at Wimbledon), players can challenge the call of a line judge, and the computer will override any human error. Fujitsu’s system enables something similar, albeit much slower and more bureaucratic.
Several times over the course of the world championships in Antwerp, I heard an announcement over the PA that an inquiry had been submitted for one gymnast’s beam score or a different athlete’s bars mark. The large scoreboard to my back would show the athlete’s name and “under review” right next to it. Judges would consult video replay and the new JSS system, though it was unclear under which conditions the JSS, rather than video review, was used. Often, inquiries were only a few minutes, though, in an already long competition, it felt like a drag waiting for the eventual resolution to be announced. In most cases, the gymnast’s score remained unchanged. If AI was used in these inquiries, it functioned solely to validate the work of the human judges.

When I sat down with the Fujitsu technicians in Antwerp in a room somewhere in the bowels of the Sportpaleis, I got to see just how precise the JSS can be. I was shown recordings of the switch ring leap, a skill that was also highlighted during the press conference the day before. This element is notoriously tricky to perform and to judge. The gymnast has a lot of boxes to tick: split of the legs, the position of the back leg relative to the crown of the head (they have to be at roughly the same level), the arch of the back, and the head release. The judge has to be able to register all of that in the split second the skill appears before them on the balance beam.
JSS looked a lot like video replay, except that the gymnast is transformed into an unclothed mannequin performing the elements. The apparatus is there, but all of the trappings of the gymnasium are gone; the rendering is set against what looks like the holodeck set on Star Trek before the computer program fills in the details, a black space, with white lines running parallel and perpendicular. To the side, you can see key measurements, such as angles, to help determine whether the gymnast met the demands of the element — all of the color and flare stripped out down to the nuts and bolts.
In the first clip, the gymnast did not fulfill the requirements. At the apex of the leap, her back foot didn’t line up with the crown of her head. The technician applied one tool, a blue horizontal plane, which made it quite clear that her back leg wasn’t high enough. “It’s minus 40 centimeters,” she said, pointing her cursor at the upper right corner of the screen.
Next, she played a recording of another switch ring, at normal speed. “What do you think?” she asked. I responded that I thought it was performed within acceptable parameters. Turns out I was right. Don’t give me too much credit here, though; the reason I could see it easily is because the gymnast had performed it exceptionally well. Her split was oversplit; her back foot went so high that it was well above the crown of her head.
As much fun as I had playing around with the system — and talking about the finer points of gymnastics with the experts — I wasn’t entirely convinced that the JSS, at its current stage of development, had made a compelling case for its necessity as a decision support system. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.
Steve Butcher, former head of the men’s technical committee and technical coordinator for FIG, said initially he shared my same skepticism. He knows better than most people how hard judging can be, having spent 40 years doing it. But Butcher said he was won over quickly. All it took was a short demonstration showing a gymnast doing an iron cross, a static strength hold, gripping the rings with their arms extended to the sides so they’re completely parallel to the floor. Ideally, the athlete will create a perfectly straight line across, from wrist to wrist.
“They showed me one arm, he has three degrees of deviation. And the other arm, he has one degree of deviation,” Butcher said, noting it was not perceptible by the human eye. Since that demo, he has worked with Fujitsu on behalf of FIG to help the company address the gymnastics needs and has remained a consultant on the project even though he left his full-time position with the gymnastics federation in 2022.
But was this really an improvement over plain ol’ video review? How would seeing the angles of someone’s arms to this degree — a difference of two degrees, to be specific — actually improve the judging? In the example that Butcher cited, the knowledge that the JSS provided was interesting, but it wouldn’t have changed the valuation for the gymnast: he would’ve been credited the skill because he had performed it very close to the platonic ideal. At the top end of the performance, those minute flaws, if they rise to the deductible level, would be sorted out by the execution judges. The JSS isn’t up to that particular task yet.

To provide an example where the JSS could’ve potentially outperformed the judges — and certainly video review — Butcher brings me back to 2012, to the moment when the men’s team finals in London had medals on the line. It was the final rotation, last routine, last gymnast up. Kohei Uchimura, then the three-time world all-around champion, was on the pommel horse, the event where Butcher was the apparatus supervisor. Uchimura’s routine went off as planned, clean and smooth, until the dismount. As he swung up from the pommel to the handstand, his arms seemed to buckle, legs akimbo; he spun wildly and slipped off the apparatus, somehow landing on the mat on his feet, albeit chest down. He walked off the podium, seemingly bemused and confused as to what just happened.
This last mistake created a dilemma for the D judges: did Uchimura successfully reach a handstand — or get close enough to it — in order to receive credit for doing a dismount? If the judges didn’t give him credit for it, he would lose the value of the skill and miss a requirement group. The hit to his — and, by extension, Team Japan’s — overall score would be massive.
Butcher did not give credit for the handstand, nor did the other two D judges. Uchimura’s mark put Japan in fourth place, behind Great Britain and Ukraine. Both teams started celebrating medals they thought they had just won. The Japanese team, however, immediately submitted an inquiry.
The superior jury watched the video replay several times, in slow motion, frame by frame. The TV cameras hovered by the shoulders of the judges as they studied Uchimura’s routine. The action in the North Greenwich Arena had shifted from the athletes to a bunch of men in gray blazers, staring at a laptop.
Finally, the superior jury decided Uchimura was close enough to a handstand. The reversal of the D panel’s original call added seven-tenths to Uchimura’s score. Japan shot from fourth to second. Great Britain ended up with the bronze, and Ukraine, to their utter devastation, was bumped off the podium.
Butcher, however, still stands by what he and the two other D judges decided over 10 years ago. “We have to remember, they’re not looking at any exact angles. They’re looking at a foot here, a leg there, and looking in a video, freezing it, with no true measurements being applied,” Butcher pointed out. The decision to award credit or to withhold it was something of a very educated coin flip. “In that situation, I would have loved to have been able to have the Fujitsu system and be able to have that as the primary decision-maker,” he said.
When I watched the video of Uchimura’s London performance, I found myself agreeing with the original call. That was not a handstand. He never even managed to straighten his arms completely. But like the judges of the superior jury, I wasn’t working with any precise measurements. I was basing this strictly off of my gut. It was an aesthetic judgment as much as a technical one. But in gymnastics, there’s long been a feedback loop between the technical and aesthetic; what is technically sound is often most aesthetically pleasing, and vice versa.
Of course, none of this matters to AI. It doesn’t “know” things in the way that humans do. Facial and object recognition technology doesn’t recognize what a “labrador” is; it’s been shown millions of photos of that dog and has been told that this is, in fact, a labrador, or at least the sum average of a labrador.
Apply the same logic of what an AI “knows” to a handstand in gymnastics, and it recognizes what a handstand is based on a series of rules and parameters of what a handstand is supposed to be. At the same time, it knows when the articulations of a body aren’t doing a handstand. That distinction may seem trite, but it also turns the sport into the color-negative version of itself.
Which presents the weird irony of AI-assisted judging, a system that cannot understand or appreciate the beauty of the sport: Butcher and his panel could have used a system like JSS to back an aesthetic opinion with hard numbers.

In many industries, AI has been used as an excuse to cut down on labor expenses. That’s not the case here with JSS since its implementation is strictly to support human judges. Besides, judging gymnastics isn’t a full-time career for anyone, not even at the very highest levels, so that particular objection to AI doesn’t play. But the fact that judging gymnastics events is a sporadic activity points to another issue with the JSS’s application: there isn’t a lot of opportunity to use this expensive system. It will judge even less frequently than humans do. The majority of gymnastics events are decidedly low-tech affairs. Not every competition venue will have the necessary infrastructure to support the JSS. And all meets, except the biggest ones, are a couple of days long, if that, hardly worth the time, energy, and costs that go into the setup. Fujitsu said that it took about a dozen people to set up and run the JSS in Antwerp. When asked about the next competition this much-ballyhooed system will be used at, Fujitsu didn’t answer. They said it would be decided jointly by them and FIG.
Of course, it would be foolish to assume that it will always be this costly or difficult to set up the JSS in a competition format. The technology should improve over time and get cheaper, too. That opens up the possibility for what Butcher believes is its best use case: as a training aid. He told me that this was his first thought when Fujitsu first presented the JSS to him.
“Somebody’s doing a triple back off the high bar but you can see that their body’s slightly skewed in the air and you can measure that angle, you can see that they [are] landing heavier on one side of their body than the other.” Being slightly off like this in the air doesn’t change the valuation of the skill. It will still be regarded as a triple-back. But in the hands of the athlete and the coach, this kind of information can prevent an almost imperceptible defect from blooming into an injury. In this example, the JSS is merely a sophisticated measuring tool. Butcher said that some national federations have expressed interest in aligning the JSS with their pre-existing video systems, which Fujitsu confirmed, adding that they plan to unveil a version specifically for training in July. Throughout the week in Antwerp, and in follow-up calls with experts, this was the most persuasive use case that I came across.
Right after the Fujitsu press conference, I encountered Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s technical committee, who had been on the panel, along with her counterpart on the men’s side. She’s a compact woman, on the short side — but who isn’t in gymnastics? — with cropped hair, and speaks exuberantly, often standing to make her point and to demonstrate what she means by using her whole body.

Sacchi was very excited at the potential of the JSS but raised the specific issue that AI couldn’t intuitively understand things the way a person with gymnastics experience could.
A lot of work needed to be done — and continues to be done — to “parameterize” everything just so JSS could “see” things like a human, though not make errors like one.
Sacchi pointed to a couple of issues that the system has not yet been able to overcome. When we spoke again about a month after the world championships, Sacchi told me that the JSS cannot determine whether two skills done consecutively on the beam are actually connected in one continuous movement. This is one of the ways that gymnasts rack up tenths, linking different skills for connection bonus or value (CV). This is one of the most challenging aspects for human judges to evaluate since not all credited connections feature the transfer of speed and momentum from one skill into the next, which would make the connection easy to perceive. This is especially true if you change direction in a series or if you’re combining dance and acrobatic skills. There’s usually some sort of pause or hesitation, however slight. It’s up to the gymnast to move briskly between elements, even if the skills don’t lend themselves to seamless connections. If you’re going to have a system like the JSS around to help determine difficulty scores, it needs to be able to handle connections, especially since on an event like beam, they are the most contested part of the D-score, and isn’t that what the JSS is there to address, after all?
I asked Ayako Kawahito, a former gymnast and current judge who is working as a manager in the Human Digital Twin division of Fujitsu, about the beam connection problem. The issue, she said, is not about movement but about stillness. Kawahito pointed out that a person can appear to be completely still, according to the human eye, but if you subjected them to an MRI, their “joint coordinates are always moving around.” In order for the JSS to be able to assess connection value, Fujitsu and the FIG have to agree on the “(amount of) movement that can be considered a stop by a human judge,” she said.
Movement that can be considered a stop. Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it’s the kind of question that must be answered if the JSS will be able to help the judges in the places they need it the most.

If you were in Antwerp at the world championships and wandered into the Fujitsu booth, you’d be forgiven for temporarily forgetting you were at a gymnastics competition. There was very little inside to suggest that you were even at a sporting event of any kind. Monitors were hung on the bare white walls, but they didn’t show videos of gymnasts performing routines or even single elements, overlaid by JSS analysis. Instead, they showed how the technology behind the JSS could be used for fraud and theft prevention.
Though this might come as something of a surprise, it’s not really the left turn that some might imagine it to be. There’s a long tradition of the Games being used as a showcase for new surveillance and security technology. “The Olympics are often used to be kind of a showroom,” Dennis Pauschinger, a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, told me in 2019 when I was working on a story about the global anti-Olympic movement.
The Fujitsu booth experience began with a simplified version of the JSS that you could play around with. I stood in front of a camera, which projected my movements onto a large screen and labeled them appropriately. It would say which hand you raised and what it was doing. “The judging system is based on what we call ‘pose estimation,’” Mike Fournigault, a Fujitsu AI architect, explained to me. “With cameras, we are able to reconstruct the pose of the body of people and to understand where are the hands, where are the arms, what are they doing with their hands, with their arms, with their legs?”
This is the kind of technology that is used for self-driving cars, with incredibly mixed results. In 2018, Uber’s self-driving car could delineate between a person walking and a person riding a bike but could not reconcile the existence of a 49-year-old woman walking her bike in Tempe, Arizona; the vehicle struck and killed her. At least the stakes for JSS aren’t life and death — though, to the athletes, it can sometimes feel that way.

I was shocked how much of Fujitsu’s booth was dedicated to crimes — not of the sports judging variety, but actual chargeable offenses. The monitors showed how this pose estimation might be applied to situations outside of sports. One showed how it could help prevent car theft; the other demonstrated how it can discern whether people were getting up to no good in the self-checkout line, such as putting an item in their bag without first scanning it. In the press conference, there was also mention of its applications in healthcare and rehab settings, which is not hard to imagine with a technology that can measure body movements and angles as precisely as the JSS can.
“There has been increasingly this sense that we can’t just end with gymnastics because, you know, obviously it was a very expensive process to develop JSS,” Andrew Kane, then Fujitsu’s deputy head of international public relations, told me in Antwerp. Fujitsu’s end goal was never gymnastics.
Later, I follow up with Fujitsu and receive a somewhat evasive answer. “We demonstrated different solutions related to Human Motion Analytics (HMA), which were for more than just gymnastics/sports,” Yuka Hatagaki of Fujitsu’s global PR wrote in an email about the booth’s contents. “The HMA technology that can analyze human movement with high precision cultivated through JSS can be applied to various industries, such as healthcare, ergonomics, and entertainment besides monitoring and theft prevention.”
JSS was being developed as a means of capturing the body, to synthesize the great range of human motion into something that could be understood by a computer. What gymnastics offered was a massive set of training data to help train the AI. Fujitsu mentioned additional uses in follow-up correspondence, including applications for physical therapists to develop hyper-specific programs for patients and using gait analysis to detect early signs of dementia in the elderly, which sounds very promising, especially as someone with a mother in cognitive decline.
All of this technology is built on the back of what I was witnessing around me in Antwerp. The heights of athleticism — and the competition as a whole — were used to feed a system that is repurposed and resold as a tool of surveillance. A solution in search of profit.

On the morning of the final day of competition in Antwerp, I was allowed to sit in the beam judges seat while the JSS was being calibrated and the arena was being set up for the evening’s competition. The field of play was clean, not yet covered in a white, chalky film, as it would be later when the gymnasts arrived to warm up. Some athletes mark the beam with chalk as a cue for where to start their acrobatic series. All of them douse themselves in the white stuff to mop up sweat on their feet and hands, both of which they need to grip the apparatus. It’s even worse over at the uneven bars where the whole apparatus is covered in the stuff. At a gymnastics meet, magnesium is always in the air.
In person, the beam seems smaller than it does on TV. When you’re watching on television, the camera zooms in on the apparatus and athlete. It’s practically all you see. Live, the equipment and the gymnast are set against the massive arena. You don’t get a sense of that scale on your screen. Still, the action seems more impressive in person, even if everything and everyone appears smaller. The added dimension really makes a difference. And in some cases, so does the massive arena. There are gymnasts out there, like Simone Biles, who, despite her diminutive stature, seem to be able to truly fill the space.
As an exercise, I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually rigorously evaluate a routine, to look at it piece by piece, and find favor or fault with it when medals are on the line. Imagining that burden left me with a queasy anxiety. Years of watching and analyzing the sport, mostly from the comfort of my couch, qualified me to do exactly what I was in Antwerp to do — report on a gymnastics competition — and little more, my success at identifying the credited switch ring notwithstanding.
“You cannot duplicate [that pressure] when you sit in your chair and in front of you are the best gymnasts, maybe trying to qualify for the Olympic Games,” Sacchi told me. She said that even after all of her years as a judge, she is still nervous before big events. At least the JSS can’t experience anxiety.
I get why, with so much on the line, you’d reach for a technology that promises to overcome human limitations. What the JSS offers is not only the promise of accuracy but also consistency, across rounds of competition, across several days of competition. It will not tire after a 12-hour judging day the way that human judges are wont to do. Gymnasts and coaches don’t like competing in the earliest subdivisions for a reason: the judges are fresh, and their figurative pencils — they actually use tablets — are sharp, and as a result, the execution scores tend to be lower. (The JSS doesn’t yet address the execution score, but I imagine that this is the eventual goal for the technology and would make the system more useful in the long term.)
Some of the hopes that are being pinned on the JSS, such as increased transparency, which Watanabe mentioned in his opening remarks at the conference, seem misplaced. Yes, the JSS can provide a lot of detailed information, but that is not the same thing as transparency. The FBI collects lots of information on US citizens, often through high-tech means, but no one would accuse it of being transparent. (Any journalist that has tried to get info from the FBI knows that it’s actually a black hole.) The fact that the JSS is collecting all this data doesn’t mean it will be shared with the gymnastics community. Ultimately, transparency is not a question of technology but of policy.

The yearslong process that it took to create the JSS illuminated the complexity of the judging task, which simultaneously calls for technological intervention and impedes it at every turn. Some of that complexity is unavoidable, even desirable. It shows a sport that is constantly evolving, its athletes always innovating. And some of it points to opportunities to streamline and improve the rules.
Later that day, when I was back in the media section where I belonged, I watched the eight women who qualified for the beam final. Biles won the gold there, her performance clean and surefooted. Her pace was brisk, moving from one element to the next with only the most minor of adjustments. She competed with the nonchalance of someone who has been there many times before. In second was Chinese gymnast Zhou Yaqin, a newcomer who showed a lot of style and precision in her world championship debut. She was rewarded with a 14.7 for her efforts, just a tenth behind Biles. Zhou’s coach immediately filed an inquiry because they had been anticipating a higher D-score, based on what she had been previously awarded. It would all come down to the question of those frustrating connections, the ones that the JSS is not yet able to adjudicate.
After a few minutes, the announcer told the audience that there had been no change. Biles would remain in first, Zhou in second. From my seat, a few rows above the judges, this result seemed fair — though, if it had gone the other way and Zhou had received the additional tenth, tying Biles, I might’ve felt the same way. With so little separating gymnasts, who wins and who loses can, at times, feel more like a judgment call. Everything can be endlessly debated on social media. This can have the effect of making it feel like no results are ever truly final. One of the hopes for the JSS is to offer finality to the outcomes so that when an athlete looks back on their careers, the counterfactuals they might spin have nothing to do with the competency of the judges evaluating them that day.
“When I speak to coaches, judges, administrators, [I] say the job of the judge is to separate gymnasts,” Butcher said. The judges’ job is to slice finely, to find the difference between gymnasts, and rank them accordingly.
Judging and scoring in gymnastics can certainly be improved, and perhaps the JSS can help along that trajectory. But we’ll never escape human judgment altogether, no matter how discomfiting that thought might be.

When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured.

But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system.

In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation.

But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases.

The JSS wasn’t necessary to evaluate the value of Biles’ vault in Antwerp. Her performance on that vault was too emphatic to be borderline. Still, the cameras positioned at the corners of the vault podium captured her 3D likeness as they did for all of the other athletes who competed through the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships. The technology distilled the legendary athlete and her performance down to straight lines and sharp angles; it showed the distance and height she traveled in numbers. The awe and wonder one feels when watching Biles perform could now be recognized by a computer — understood, though not exactly appreciated.

Fujitsu and FIG announced JSS back in 2017 with the goal of having the system up and running by the Summer Olympics in 2021. A home Games in Tokyo would have been an ideal opportunity for the Japanese-based tech conglomerate to showcase this kind of technology, and it would’ve been a noteworthy achievement for Morinari Watanabe, the first Japanese president of the Lausanne-based FIG. But the JSS wasn’t ready; in fact, it would take another four years of work. At the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, the JSS was finally ready to go on all 10 artistic gymnastics apparatuses — six for the men and four for the women.

This was all part of the “dream,” as Watanabe put it in the joint press conference hosted by FIG and Fujitsu heralding the technological breakthrough. “Today is a day of liberation in sports,” he proclaimed to the media and other gymnastics officials who showed up for the explainer that was held shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. “The day has come when all athletes, not just gymnasts, will receive fair and transparent scoring.”

This proclamation was a bit hyperbolic, especially given that this is not AI’s first foray into judging athletic competition. It has already been successfully applied in sporting contexts, often with approval from athletes and coaches themselves. Hawk-Eye Live, the electronic line-calling system, is used in lieu of line judges in tennis at two of the majors, and its calls are generally considered reliable.

But in tennis, Hawk-Eye is being tasked with answering a yes / no question — is the ball in, or is it out? The JSS is being asked to perform a much more complicated task: it needs to be able to identify hundreds of skills in the Code of Points, and the ranges in which they’re done, across the whole span of gymnast body types — a complex undertaking, and one that changes regularly, as the FIG is updating its rules every four years. In a sport where the difference between first and fifth can be a mere tenth of a point, and when global rankings can mean the difference between being funded by your national federation or not, getting the score right is very important.

The appeal to a technological solution to judging feels practically inevitable. Humans are fallible. That’s why deductions exist in the first place: to quantify the mistakes that the gymnasts make. But we’d never replace the human athletes with machines, regardless of how advanced Boston Dynamics’ back-flipping robot gets. The draw of gymnastics is watching mere mortals push the limits of athleticism. But the performance of the judges is a means to an end, not the end itself. For more than a century, human judgment was the only option, no matter how much this might’ve discomfited us, given the stakes. Now, there’s a potential technological solution that shows promise. But can AI judge human excellence better than a human?

The JSS started, according to Watanabe and Hidenori Fujiwara, as a joke. It was late in 2015, about a year before Watanabe won his first FIG presidential election, making him the first non-European to helm the international federation since its inception in 1881. He suggested that Fujitsu should develop robots to judge gymnastics.

Fujiwara, head of Fujitsu’s sports business development division, took the challenge seriously. “We developed a prototype system,” Fujiwara said, which he then showed to Watanabe, who was surprised by the progress. Watanabe clarified that what he’d said about robots had only been a joke, and yet here they were.

This origin story for the JSS was emphasized during the press conference I attended in Antwerp shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. There was, of course, a PowerPoint. An early slide in the presentation showed a comic with robots holding up score placards, as a male gymnast swings into a scissor-like movement on the pommel horse. The caption above the image read: “Joke come true!” (I didn’t get why it was funny; I guess you had to be there.)

It’s a “joke” that Fujitsu has spent untold amounts of money, time, and energy on. Though the company wouldn’t disclose the cost of this whole undertaking, it’s hard to fathom, after strolling through their offices in the annals of the Sportpaleis and seeing the arena setup of the technology in the field of play — and off to the side — that it was anything short of a tremendously expensive and resource-intensive endeavor. But I couldn’t help but feel like it was a lot of effort for technology that, at least as pitched by Watanabe, would only ever amount to a slightly better version of judge-assisted video replay.

Even ignoring the years of investing in R&D, the physical footprint of JSS appears expensive. During the competition, I glimpsed the backroom where there was a row of servers and another of monitors, a cluster of power packs, and tons of cable. Like so much of AI, its “magic” obscures copious amounts of energy-intensive hardware.

Out on the floor, the JSS cameras were subtle, but a lot of human effort went into calibrating them. Before the start of the day’s competition and frequently in between sessions, you could watch as technicians took to the floor, placing large orange balls similar to exercise balls you’d find at the gym, mounted to tripod-like devices, at strategic spots on or near the equipment to make sure that the cameras were properly aligned. Sometimes, they waved these balls like wands around the apparatuses. And throughout the competition, several technicians monitored the event from behind six computer screens near the media box. Nothing about this can be done cheaply.

The entire history of judging had created tragedies, Watanabe explained somewhat dramatically. But even if his remark to Fujiwara had been made in jest, the fact that FIG has doggedly pursued this venture with Fujitsu going on six years suggests that the joke hinted at something critical and true (as jokes often do): that he felt that there was something amiss in judging in the sport of gymnastics, and maybe technology could fix it.

Watanabe didn’t specify any particular instance of judging malfeasance or error that created these personal tragedies. But he didn’t really have to. The conventional wisdom around the judged aesthetic sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating, is that there are and always have been issues with the scoring. During the Cold War, when both the US and the Soviet Union fought for the top spot in the Olympic medal rankings, there was fairly widespread cheating and collusion in gymnastics judging. Back in 1988, after former University of Utah gymnastics head coach Greg Marsden’s brief foray into international elite gymnastics, he let slip to the media that, at the previous year’s world championships, there was judging collusion between the US and Romania, with the coaches exchanging scores before their athletes took to the mat. And in the years since the Cold War ended and the old judging alliances started to break down, the issues became more mundane but no less consequential. It was mostly human error, confusing rules and processes, with a dash of bias — racial, national, or both — that created most of the problems.

Elements of subjectivity can be found in most sports, and these judgment calls can end up having major consequences when it comes to competitive outcomes. In basketball, for example, a referee might make a bad call that affects the outcome of the entire game, like this year’s Women’s Final Four matchup between UConn and Iowa that featured a controversial offensive foul call in the final seconds of the game. But in general, the way of amassing points is fairly straightforward and has remained consistent over many years. The lines on the court, except in the case of the free throw, determine the point value of any given shot, and this didn’t change when Stephen Curry started nailing deep three-pointers. A shot from well behind the three-point line is objectively more difficult — and impressive — than one made closer to the basket. But the NBA hasn’t painted another line on the court to reward the higher difficulty level of shots taken from well behind the arc. Nor did the league change the rules to make Curry’s threes harder. Players simply learned to shoot from further back.

This is not how gymnastics operates. As gymnasts introduce new elements, the FIG has to assess them for their difficulty value, and there is no upward limit, at least in theory, as there is with basketball shots. In gymnastics, a half-court shot isn’t worth the same as one from right behind the arc. Skill valuations can change from one Olympic cycle to the next; requirement groups can be added or removed. A bad score in one cycle might be a good one in the next. The rules are not stable as they are in other sports, and it can be baffling, without highly specialized knowledge, to understand the difference in difficulty from one skill to the next.

The most significant change to the rules came in 2006 when the FIG scrapped the Perfect 10 scoring paradigm in favor of an open-ended approach that gives the gymnasts two marks that are added together — the difficulty score, which starts at zero and builds, depending on the fulfillment of requirements and the skills the athlete performs; and an execution one that starts at 10 and is reduced as the judges apply deductions for mistakes the athlete makes.

The immediate catalyst for this particular change was the scoring controversies of the 2004 Olympics, particularly the miscalculated start value of Yang Tae-young. The South Korean gymnast was erroneously docked a tenth of a point, which led to him missing out on the gold medal in the men’s all-around. This mistake has meant that Yang, who is now a coach, doesn’t receive a gold medalist’s pension from the South Korean government. Watanabe was not wrong about how errors in judging can have serious ramifications for athletes, even years after the fact.

Judges still make mistakes on the D-score, which is the updated name for start value. But, unlike with the execution mark (aka the “how well you did it” score), a gymnast or coach has the right to appeal the difficulty calculation. This is where JSS can help. Like in the earlier iterations of Hawk-Eye in tennis (and still at Wimbledon), players can challenge the call of a line judge, and the computer will override any human error. Fujitsu’s system enables something similar, albeit much slower and more bureaucratic.

Several times over the course of the world championships in Antwerp, I heard an announcement over the PA that an inquiry had been submitted for one gymnast’s beam score or a different athlete’s bars mark. The large scoreboard to my back would show the athlete’s name and “under review” right next to it. Judges would consult video replay and the new JSS system, though it was unclear under which conditions the JSS, rather than video review, was used. Often, inquiries were only a few minutes, though, in an already long competition, it felt like a drag waiting for the eventual resolution to be announced. In most cases, the gymnast’s score remained unchanged. If AI was used in these inquiries, it functioned solely to validate the work of the human judges.

When I sat down with the Fujitsu technicians in Antwerp in a room somewhere in the bowels of the Sportpaleis, I got to see just how precise the JSS can be. I was shown recordings of the switch ring leap, a skill that was also highlighted during the press conference the day before. This element is notoriously tricky to perform and to judge. The gymnast has a lot of boxes to tick: split of the legs, the position of the back leg relative to the crown of the head (they have to be at roughly the same level), the arch of the back, and the head release. The judge has to be able to register all of that in the split second the skill appears before them on the balance beam.

JSS looked a lot like video replay, except that the gymnast is transformed into an unclothed mannequin performing the elements. The apparatus is there, but all of the trappings of the gymnasium are gone; the rendering is set against what looks like the holodeck set on Star Trek before the computer program fills in the details, a black space, with white lines running parallel and perpendicular. To the side, you can see key measurements, such as angles, to help determine whether the gymnast met the demands of the element — all of the color and flare stripped out down to the nuts and bolts.

In the first clip, the gymnast did not fulfill the requirements. At the apex of the leap, her back foot didn’t line up with the crown of her head. The technician applied one tool, a blue horizontal plane, which made it quite clear that her back leg wasn’t high enough. “It’s minus 40 centimeters,” she said, pointing her cursor at the upper right corner of the screen.

Next, she played a recording of another switch ring, at normal speed. “What do you think?” she asked. I responded that I thought it was performed within acceptable parameters. Turns out I was right. Don’t give me too much credit here, though; the reason I could see it easily is because the gymnast had performed it exceptionally well. Her split was oversplit; her back foot went so high that it was well above the crown of her head.

As much fun as I had playing around with the system — and talking about the finer points of gymnastics with the experts — I wasn’t entirely convinced that the JSS, at its current stage of development, had made a compelling case for its necessity as a decision support system. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.

Steve Butcher, former head of the men’s technical committee and technical coordinator for FIG, said initially he shared my same skepticism. He knows better than most people how hard judging can be, having spent 40 years doing it. But Butcher said he was won over quickly. All it took was a short demonstration showing a gymnast doing an iron cross, a static strength hold, gripping the rings with their arms extended to the sides so they’re completely parallel to the floor. Ideally, the athlete will create a perfectly straight line across, from wrist to wrist.

“They showed me one arm, he has three degrees of deviation. And the other arm, he has one degree of deviation,” Butcher said, noting it was not perceptible by the human eye. Since that demo, he has worked with Fujitsu on behalf of FIG to help the company address the gymnastics needs and has remained a consultant on the project even though he left his full-time position with the gymnastics federation in 2022.

But was this really an improvement over plain ol’ video review? How would seeing the angles of someone’s arms to this degree — a difference of two degrees, to be specific — actually improve the judging? In the example that Butcher cited, the knowledge that the JSS provided was interesting, but it wouldn’t have changed the valuation for the gymnast: he would’ve been credited the skill because he had performed it very close to the platonic ideal. At the top end of the performance, those minute flaws, if they rise to the deductible level, would be sorted out by the execution judges. The JSS isn’t up to that particular task yet.

To provide an example where the JSS could’ve potentially outperformed the judges — and certainly video review — Butcher brings me back to 2012, to the moment when the men’s team finals in London had medals on the line. It was the final rotation, last routine, last gymnast up. Kohei Uchimura, then the three-time world all-around champion, was on the pommel horse, the event where Butcher was the apparatus supervisor. Uchimura’s routine went off as planned, clean and smooth, until the dismount. As he swung up from the pommel to the handstand, his arms seemed to buckle, legs akimbo; he spun wildly and slipped off the apparatus, somehow landing on the mat on his feet, albeit chest down. He walked off the podium, seemingly bemused and confused as to what just happened.

This last mistake created a dilemma for the D judges: did Uchimura successfully reach a handstand — or get close enough to it — in order to receive credit for doing a dismount? If the judges didn’t give him credit for it, he would lose the value of the skill and miss a requirement group. The hit to his — and, by extension, Team Japan’s — overall score would be massive.

Butcher did not give credit for the handstand, nor did the other two D judges. Uchimura’s mark put Japan in fourth place, behind Great Britain and Ukraine. Both teams started celebrating medals they thought they had just won. The Japanese team, however, immediately submitted an inquiry.

The superior jury watched the video replay several times, in slow motion, frame by frame. The TV cameras hovered by the shoulders of the judges as they studied Uchimura’s routine. The action in the North Greenwich Arena had shifted from the athletes to a bunch of men in gray blazers, staring at a laptop.

Finally, the superior jury decided Uchimura was close enough to a handstand. The reversal of the D panel’s original call added seven-tenths to Uchimura’s score. Japan shot from fourth to second. Great Britain ended up with the bronze, and Ukraine, to their utter devastation, was bumped off the podium.

Butcher, however, still stands by what he and the two other D judges decided over 10 years ago. “We have to remember, they’re not looking at any exact angles. They’re looking at a foot here, a leg there, and looking in a video, freezing it, with no true measurements being applied,” Butcher pointed out. The decision to award credit or to withhold it was something of a very educated coin flip. “In that situation, I would have loved to have been able to have the Fujitsu system and be able to have that as the primary decision-maker,” he said.

When I watched the video of Uchimura’s London performance, I found myself agreeing with the original call. That was not a handstand. He never even managed to straighten his arms completely. But like the judges of the superior jury, I wasn’t working with any precise measurements. I was basing this strictly off of my gut. It was an aesthetic judgment as much as a technical one. But in gymnastics, there’s long been a feedback loop between the technical and aesthetic; what is technically sound is often most aesthetically pleasing, and vice versa.

Of course, none of this matters to AI. It doesn’t “know” things in the way that humans do. Facial and object recognition technology doesn’t recognize what a “labrador” is; it’s been shown millions of photos of that dog and has been told that this is, in fact, a labrador, or at least the sum average of a labrador.

Apply the same logic of what an AI “knows” to a handstand in gymnastics, and it recognizes what a handstand is based on a series of rules and parameters of what a handstand is supposed to be. At the same time, it knows when the articulations of a body aren’t doing a handstand. That distinction may seem trite, but it also turns the sport into the color-negative version of itself.

Which presents the weird irony of AI-assisted judging, a system that cannot understand or appreciate the beauty of the sport: Butcher and his panel could have used a system like JSS to back an aesthetic opinion with hard numbers.

In many industries, AI has been used as an excuse to cut down on labor expenses. That’s not the case here with JSS since its implementation is strictly to support human judges. Besides, judging gymnastics isn’t a full-time career for anyone, not even at the very highest levels, so that particular objection to AI doesn’t play. But the fact that judging gymnastics events is a sporadic activity points to another issue with the JSS’s application: there isn’t a lot of opportunity to use this expensive system. It will judge even less frequently than humans do. The majority of gymnastics events are decidedly low-tech affairs. Not every competition venue will have the necessary infrastructure to support the JSS. And all meets, except the biggest ones, are a couple of days long, if that, hardly worth the time, energy, and costs that go into the setup. Fujitsu said that it took about a dozen people to set up and run the JSS in Antwerp. When asked about the next competition this much-ballyhooed system will be used at, Fujitsu didn’t answer. They said it would be decided jointly by them and FIG.

Of course, it would be foolish to assume that it will always be this costly or difficult to set up the JSS in a competition format. The technology should improve over time and get cheaper, too. That opens up the possibility for what Butcher believes is its best use case: as a training aid. He told me that this was his first thought when Fujitsu first presented the JSS to him.

“Somebody’s doing a triple back off the high bar but you can see that their body’s slightly skewed in the air and you can measure that angle, you can see that they [are] landing heavier on one side of their body than the other.” Being slightly off like this in the air doesn’t change the valuation of the skill. It will still be regarded as a triple-back. But in the hands of the athlete and the coach, this kind of information can prevent an almost imperceptible defect from blooming into an injury. In this example, the JSS is merely a sophisticated measuring tool. Butcher said that some national federations have expressed interest in aligning the JSS with their pre-existing video systems, which Fujitsu confirmed, adding that they plan to unveil a version specifically for training in July. Throughout the week in Antwerp, and in follow-up calls with experts, this was the most persuasive use case that I came across.

Right after the Fujitsu press conference, I encountered Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s technical committee, who had been on the panel, along with her counterpart on the men’s side. She’s a compact woman, on the short side — but who isn’t in gymnastics? — with cropped hair, and speaks exuberantly, often standing to make her point and to demonstrate what she means by using her whole body.

Sacchi was very excited at the potential of the JSS but raised the specific issue that AI couldn’t intuitively understand things the way a person with gymnastics experience could.

A lot of work needed to be done — and continues to be done — to “parameterize” everything just so JSS could “see” things like a human, though not make errors like one.

Sacchi pointed to a couple of issues that the system has not yet been able to overcome. When we spoke again about a month after the world championships, Sacchi told me that the JSS cannot determine whether two skills done consecutively on the beam are actually connected in one continuous movement. This is one of the ways that gymnasts rack up tenths, linking different skills for connection bonus or value (CV). This is one of the most challenging aspects for human judges to evaluate since not all credited connections feature the transfer of speed and momentum from one skill into the next, which would make the connection easy to perceive. This is especially true if you change direction in a series or if you’re combining dance and acrobatic skills. There’s usually some sort of pause or hesitation, however slight. It’s up to the gymnast to move briskly between elements, even if the skills don’t lend themselves to seamless connections. If you’re going to have a system like the JSS around to help determine difficulty scores, it needs to be able to handle connections, especially since on an event like beam, they are the most contested part of the D-score, and isn’t that what the JSS is there to address, after all?

I asked Ayako Kawahito, a former gymnast and current judge who is working as a manager in the Human Digital Twin division of Fujitsu, about the beam connection problem. The issue, she said, is not about movement but about stillness. Kawahito pointed out that a person can appear to be completely still, according to the human eye, but if you subjected them to an MRI, their “joint coordinates are always moving around.” In order for the JSS to be able to assess connection value, Fujitsu and the FIG have to agree on the “(amount of) movement that can be considered a stop by a human judge,” she said.

Movement that can be considered a stop. Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it’s the kind of question that must be answered if the JSS will be able to help the judges in the places they need it the most.

If you were in Antwerp at the world championships and wandered into the Fujitsu booth, you’d be forgiven for temporarily forgetting you were at a gymnastics competition. There was very little inside to suggest that you were even at a sporting event of any kind. Monitors were hung on the bare white walls, but they didn’t show videos of gymnasts performing routines or even single elements, overlaid by JSS analysis. Instead, they showed how the technology behind the JSS could be used for fraud and theft prevention.

Though this might come as something of a surprise, it’s not really the left turn that some might imagine it to be. There’s a long tradition of the Games being used as a showcase for new surveillance and security technology. “The Olympics are often used to be kind of a showroom,” Dennis Pauschinger, a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, told me in 2019 when I was working on a story about the global anti-Olympic movement.

The Fujitsu booth experience began with a simplified version of the JSS that you could play around with. I stood in front of a camera, which projected my movements onto a large screen and labeled them appropriately. It would say which hand you raised and what it was doing. “The judging system is based on what we call ‘pose estimation,’” Mike Fournigault, a Fujitsu AI architect, explained to me. “With cameras, we are able to reconstruct the pose of the body of people and to understand where are the hands, where are the arms, what are they doing with their hands, with their arms, with their legs?”

This is the kind of technology that is used for self-driving cars, with incredibly mixed results. In 2018, Uber’s self-driving car could delineate between a person walking and a person riding a bike but could not reconcile the existence of a 49-year-old woman walking her bike in Tempe, Arizona; the vehicle struck and killed her. At least the stakes for JSS aren’t life and death — though, to the athletes, it can sometimes feel that way.

I was shocked how much of Fujitsu’s booth was dedicated to crimes — not of the sports judging variety, but actual chargeable offenses. The monitors showed how this pose estimation might be applied to situations outside of sports. One showed how it could help prevent car theft; the other demonstrated how it can discern whether people were getting up to no good in the self-checkout line, such as putting an item in their bag without first scanning it. In the press conference, there was also mention of its applications in healthcare and rehab settings, which is not hard to imagine with a technology that can measure body movements and angles as precisely as the JSS can.

“There has been increasingly this sense that we can’t just end with gymnastics because, you know, obviously it was a very expensive process to develop JSS,” Andrew Kane, then Fujitsu’s deputy head of international public relations, told me in Antwerp. Fujitsu’s end goal was never gymnastics.

Later, I follow up with Fujitsu and receive a somewhat evasive answer. “We demonstrated different solutions related to Human Motion Analytics (HMA), which were for more than just gymnastics/sports,” Yuka Hatagaki of Fujitsu’s global PR wrote in an email about the booth’s contents. “The HMA technology that can analyze human movement with high precision cultivated through JSS can be applied to various industries, such as healthcare, ergonomics, and entertainment besides monitoring and theft prevention.”

JSS was being developed as a means of capturing the body, to synthesize the great range of human motion into something that could be understood by a computer. What gymnastics offered was a massive set of training data to help train the AI. Fujitsu mentioned additional uses in follow-up correspondence, including applications for physical therapists to develop hyper-specific programs for patients and using gait analysis to detect early signs of dementia in the elderly, which sounds very promising, especially as someone with a mother in cognitive decline.

All of this technology is built on the back of what I was witnessing around me in Antwerp. The heights of athleticism — and the competition as a whole — were used to feed a system that is repurposed and resold as a tool of surveillance. A solution in search of profit.

On the morning of the final day of competition in Antwerp, I was allowed to sit in the beam judges seat while the JSS was being calibrated and the arena was being set up for the evening’s competition. The field of play was clean, not yet covered in a white, chalky film, as it would be later when the gymnasts arrived to warm up. Some athletes mark the beam with chalk as a cue for where to start their acrobatic series. All of them douse themselves in the white stuff to mop up sweat on their feet and hands, both of which they need to grip the apparatus. It’s even worse over at the uneven bars where the whole apparatus is covered in the stuff. At a gymnastics meet, magnesium is always in the air.

In person, the beam seems smaller than it does on TV. When you’re watching on television, the camera zooms in on the apparatus and athlete. It’s practically all you see. Live, the equipment and the gymnast are set against the massive arena. You don’t get a sense of that scale on your screen. Still, the action seems more impressive in person, even if everything and everyone appears smaller. The added dimension really makes a difference. And in some cases, so does the massive arena. There are gymnasts out there, like Simone Biles, who, despite her diminutive stature, seem to be able to truly fill the space.

As an exercise, I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually rigorously evaluate a routine, to look at it piece by piece, and find favor or fault with it when medals are on the line. Imagining that burden left me with a queasy anxiety. Years of watching and analyzing the sport, mostly from the comfort of my couch, qualified me to do exactly what I was in Antwerp to do — report on a gymnastics competition — and little more, my success at identifying the credited switch ring notwithstanding.

“You cannot duplicate [that pressure] when you sit in your chair and in front of you are the best gymnasts, maybe trying to qualify for the Olympic Games,” Sacchi told me. She said that even after all of her years as a judge, she is still nervous before big events. At least the JSS can’t experience anxiety.

I get why, with so much on the line, you’d reach for a technology that promises to overcome human limitations. What the JSS offers is not only the promise of accuracy but also consistency, across rounds of competition, across several days of competition. It will not tire after a 12-hour judging day the way that human judges are wont to do. Gymnasts and coaches don’t like competing in the earliest subdivisions for a reason: the judges are fresh, and their figurative pencils — they actually use tablets — are sharp, and as a result, the execution scores tend to be lower. (The JSS doesn’t yet address the execution score, but I imagine that this is the eventual goal for the technology and would make the system more useful in the long term.)

Some of the hopes that are being pinned on the JSS, such as increased transparency, which Watanabe mentioned in his opening remarks at the conference, seem misplaced. Yes, the JSS can provide a lot of detailed information, but that is not the same thing as transparency. The FBI collects lots of information on US citizens, often through high-tech means, but no one would accuse it of being transparent. (Any journalist that has tried to get info from the FBI knows that it’s actually a black hole.) The fact that the JSS is collecting all this data doesn’t mean it will be shared with the gymnastics community. Ultimately, transparency is not a question of technology but of policy.

The yearslong process that it took to create the JSS illuminated the complexity of the judging task, which simultaneously calls for technological intervention and impedes it at every turn. Some of that complexity is unavoidable, even desirable. It shows a sport that is constantly evolving, its athletes always innovating. And some of it points to opportunities to streamline and improve the rules.

Later that day, when I was back in the media section where I belonged, I watched the eight women who qualified for the beam final. Biles won the gold there, her performance clean and surefooted. Her pace was brisk, moving from one element to the next with only the most minor of adjustments. She competed with the nonchalance of someone who has been there many times before. In second was Chinese gymnast Zhou Yaqin, a newcomer who showed a lot of style and precision in her world championship debut. She was rewarded with a 14.7 for her efforts, just a tenth behind Biles. Zhou’s coach immediately filed an inquiry because they had been anticipating a higher D-score, based on what she had been previously awarded. It would all come down to the question of those frustrating connections, the ones that the JSS is not yet able to adjudicate.

After a few minutes, the announcer told the audience that there had been no change. Biles would remain in first, Zhou in second. From my seat, a few rows above the judges, this result seemed fair — though, if it had gone the other way and Zhou had received the additional tenth, tying Biles, I might’ve felt the same way. With so little separating gymnasts, who wins and who loses can, at times, feel more like a judgment call. Everything can be endlessly debated on social media. This can have the effect of making it feel like no results are ever truly final. One of the hopes for the JSS is to offer finality to the outcomes so that when an athlete looks back on their careers, the counterfactuals they might spin have nothing to do with the competency of the judges evaluating them that day.

“When I speak to coaches, judges, administrators, [I] say the job of the judge is to separate gymnasts,” Butcher said. The judges’ job is to slice finely, to find the difference between gymnasts, and rank them accordingly.

Judging and scoring in gymnastics can certainly be improved, and perhaps the JSS can help along that trajectory. But we’ll never escape human judgment altogether, no matter how discomfiting that thought might be.

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Image: MysteryLupin (X)

Google appears to be preparing to launch a fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Details on the thermostat first leaked last week, and now the same leaker has posted more documents on X that show this new model will have a customizable home screen, a new “Dynamic Farsight” feature, and a “borderless” display.
The leaks detail a “high-res borderless display” which looks like it will allow the UI of the Nest Learning Thermostat to extend into the area that was typically a black bezel on existing third generation units. Other leaked images show UI elements that appear much closer to the bezels of the display, too.

Image: MysteryLupin (X)
The leaked specs of the fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat.

Dynamic Farsight is mentioned, but the leak doesn’t show how this new feature works. Farsight on existing Nest models allows the unit to wake up when you walk up to it, to show information like weather, the time, or room temperature. I’m hoping the dynamic mention means the fourth generation can show a mixture of information this time, rather than being limited to certain options.
Google’s leaked documents also mention “natural heating and cooling” and a customizable home screen for the fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. It’s not clear how the natural heating and cooling works, nor just how customizable the new home screen is.

Image: MysteryLupin (X)
Some of the UI on the new Nest Learning Thermostat.

The fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat will come with an oval-shape trim plate in the box, alongside the usual thermostat base, a rear steel plate, and a second-generation Nest Temperature Sensor. Google only has very basic integration of its third generation Nest Learning Thermostat into the Google Home app, but this new model has a full UI within the app that allows you to change all the settings and control schedules without having to switch over to the Nest app.
There’s no mention of hardware upgrades beyond the display changes, but I’m hoping Google has greatly improved the internals here after nearly 10 years. Third-generation Learning Thermostats are notorious for having Wi-Fi chip issues, where the units will die and have to be replaced. I’ve personally had to replace my Nest Learning Thermostat twice because of the Wi-Fi problems.
The leaker also suggests this new fourth generation model will be priced at $279, making it the most expensive Nest thermostat yet. The new Nest temperature sensors are said to be $39 each, or three for $99. We might get official launch dates and pricing during the “made by Google” hardware event on August 13th.

Image: MysteryLupin (X)

Google appears to be preparing to launch a fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Details on the thermostat first leaked last week, and now the same leaker has posted more documents on X that show this new model will have a customizable home screen, a new “Dynamic Farsight” feature, and a “borderless” display.

The leaks detail a “high-res borderless display” which looks like it will allow the UI of the Nest Learning Thermostat to extend into the area that was typically a black bezel on existing third generation units. Other leaked images show UI elements that appear much closer to the bezels of the display, too.

Image: MysteryLupin (X)
The leaked specs of the fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat.

Dynamic Farsight is mentioned, but the leak doesn’t show how this new feature works. Farsight on existing Nest models allows the unit to wake up when you walk up to it, to show information like weather, the time, or room temperature. I’m hoping the dynamic mention means the fourth generation can show a mixture of information this time, rather than being limited to certain options.

Google’s leaked documents also mention “natural heating and cooling” and a customizable home screen for the fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. It’s not clear how the natural heating and cooling works, nor just how customizable the new home screen is.

Image: MysteryLupin (X)
Some of the UI on the new Nest Learning Thermostat.

The fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat will come with an oval-shape trim plate in the box, alongside the usual thermostat base, a rear steel plate, and a second-generation Nest Temperature Sensor. Google only has very basic integration of its third generation Nest Learning Thermostat into the Google Home app, but this new model has a full UI within the app that allows you to change all the settings and control schedules without having to switch over to the Nest app.

There’s no mention of hardware upgrades beyond the display changes, but I’m hoping Google has greatly improved the internals here after nearly 10 years. Third-generation Learning Thermostats are notorious for having Wi-Fi chip issues, where the units will die and have to be replaced. I’ve personally had to replace my Nest Learning Thermostat twice because of the Wi-Fi problems.

The leaker also suggests this new fourth generation model will be priced at $279, making it the most expensive Nest thermostat yet. The new Nest temperature sensors are said to be $39 each, or three for $99. We might get official launch dates and pricing during the “made by Google” hardware event on August 13th.

Read More 

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

It’s one of the most common low-stakes annoyances in modern life: you flop down on the couch at the end of the day, finally with a few minutes to watch one of the dozens of incredible shows or movies you have access to thanks to the peak TV era and the advent of streaming, and you start scrolling. Instead of actually watching anything, you spend an interminable evening opening apps, aimlessly scrolling through endless rows of same-looking tiles. You eventually give up and watch The Office again.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we look at why TV and movie recommendations are so complicated, and whether AI might be able to make them better. If Spotify can build infinite playlists of music you’ll like, and YouTube and TikTok always seem to have the perfect thing ready to go, why can’t Netflix or Hulu or Max seem to get it right?
AI, it turns out, can help at least a little. Because models from OpenAI, Google, and others have ingested so much information about movies and shows — not just their title and genre, but all the synopses, reviews, recaps, and more from all over the web — they can synthesize that information and find connections between titles that were previously hard to find. And as context windows get larger, these models can actually ingest and understand an entire film at once, which opens up entirely new ways of understanding them.
Ultimately, though, recommendations are a human problem. Because we’re all human. What you want to watch, and why you like what you like, are far more complicated — and vary far more widely — than even the best model can understand. As a result, the idea of sitting down, opening Netflix, and having the exact right title appear immediately, isn’t coming true anytime soon. So instead of hoping for the best, we investigate the ways to use AI tools right now to get to your content at least a little faster. Because watching movies great; scrolling through too many of them is seriously overrated.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

Movievanders
Reelgood
The internet is a constant recommendations machine — but it needs you to make it work
Netflix’s Greg Peters on a new culture memo and where ads, AI, and games fit in
From Scientific America: How Recommendation Algorithms Work—And Why They May Miss the Mark

From Google: Multimodal prompting with a 44-minute movie

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

It’s one of the most common low-stakes annoyances in modern life: you flop down on the couch at the end of the day, finally with a few minutes to watch one of the dozens of incredible shows or movies you have access to thanks to the peak TV era and the advent of streaming, and you start scrolling. Instead of actually watching anything, you spend an interminable evening opening apps, aimlessly scrolling through endless rows of same-looking tiles. You eventually give up and watch The Office again.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we look at why TV and movie recommendations are so complicated, and whether AI might be able to make them better. If Spotify can build infinite playlists of music you’ll like, and YouTube and TikTok always seem to have the perfect thing ready to go, why can’t Netflix or Hulu or Max seem to get it right?

AI, it turns out, can help at least a little. Because models from OpenAI, Google, and others have ingested so much information about movies and shows — not just their title and genre, but all the synopses, reviews, recaps, and more from all over the web — they can synthesize that information and find connections between titles that were previously hard to find. And as context windows get larger, these models can actually ingest and understand an entire film at once, which opens up entirely new ways of understanding them.

Ultimately, though, recommendations are a human problem. Because we’re all human. What you want to watch, and why you like what you like, are far more complicated — and vary far more widely — than even the best model can understand. As a result, the idea of sitting down, opening Netflix, and having the exact right title appear immediately, isn’t coming true anytime soon. So instead of hoping for the best, we investigate the ways to use AI tools right now to get to your content at least a little faster. Because watching movies great; scrolling through too many of them is seriously overrated.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

Movievanders
Reelgood
The internet is a constant recommendations machine — but it needs you to make it work
Netflix’s Greg Peters on a new culture memo and where ads, AI, and games fit in
From Scientific America: How Recommendation Algorithms Work—And Why They May Miss the Mark

From Google: Multimodal prompting with a 44-minute movie

Read More 

The smaller sibling to UE’s Epicboom offers plenty of punch for its size. But it’s a little thin on features to justify $250. The Ultimate Ears speaker lineup is getting quite crowded, having now reached six products with the recent introduction of the $249.99 Everboom. This speaker is a smaller, more portable take on the Epicboom that I reviewed late last year. And its core appeal is the same as any other UE speaker: you’re getting a rugged, waterproof speaker that’s cut out for both indoor and poolside parties. You can link the Everboom up with other UE speakers in party mode to play music in sync across all of them. The controls are easy to use — especially the company’s signature, oversized volume buttons.
So what makes the Everboom different? You get a fully customizable EQ, which not all of the company’s speakers offer. Like the Epicboom, there’s an outdoor mode that layers some extra volume and power onto the sound when needed. And UE includes a carabiner, which makes it easier to carry the Everboom on your bag or hang it in creative ways.

Both the Epicboom and Everboom dial up the overall audio fidelity compared to UE’s cylindrical speakers. Like those, they output 360-degree sound, so you don’t have to worry about hearing them from a certain sweet spot — in theory, anyway.
As it turns out, the Everboom is often most clear when you’ve got either the left or right side of the speaker directly facing you. Straight on, vocals can lack crispness and detail since the drivers seem to be side-firing — though the stereo separation is impressive as a result. For indoor listening, I typically kept the volume level between 30 and 40 percent, and that was plenty loud. Outside you can crank it further, though the speaker starts to strain and sound overly compressed once you’re at the 70 percent mark.

The Everboom is considerably smaller than last year’s Epicboom.

I don’t think the Everboom’s sound performance lifts it very far above established (and more affordable) competition like the JBL Charge 5, Bose SoundLink Flex, or even the recently released Beats Pill. I’d rank it higher than something like the Sonos Move for sound quality, but there are endless alternatives that are worth eyeing before you fork over $250.
That said, the Everboom met the moment when I brought it upstate for a brief lake cabin getaway. Listening to Zach Bryan’s new album, the Everboom did a good job separating John Mayer’s guitar licks on “Better Days” from the bulk of the mix. Nathaniel Rateliff’s South of Here was also a pleasant listen, though I again found myself pointing one of the speaker’s left / right sides towards me for the best clarity.
But some genres can prove a little much for it. The Hold Steady’s The Price of Progress sounded more muffled than I’d like. This is where the larger Epicboom fares better, since it’s got larger drivers (and more bass growl) to work with. But on the flip side, the Everboom is far easier to take on the go since it’s lighter and considerably smaller. Battery life is more than adequate at 20 hours of continuous playback.

The controls up top are identical; pressing the tree activates outdoor mode.

This time UE includes a carabiner instead of the magnetic carrying strap.

That said, I don’t know if anyone’s buying UE speakers for critical listening. The brand has a good reputation for making durable products that can last many years. (And now, mercifully, the whole lineup has finally switched to USB-C.) The Everboom has IP67 dust and water resistance, and it’ll float if you drop it into a pool — and keep the music going afterward.
But don’t expect any exciting bonus features. The Everboom does at least include multipoint, so you can pair two phones to the speaker at once. And it’s got NFC support for very quick pairing. Still, I can’t help but feel Ultimate Ears is resting on its laurels when other companies give you more. For example, the Beats Pill offers lossless USB-C input, and JBL is starting to embrace forward-looking Bluetooth technologies like Auracast. Meanwhile, the Everboom can’t even be used as a speakerphone. UE’s app has a new megaphone feature that lets you speak into your phone and broadcast that to your Boom speakers, but how often will that be useful?
The Everboom isn’t a terrible purchase; none of UE’s products are if all you’re seeking is a decent-sounding and very dependable speaker. But we’re firmly in an era where I’m expecting more than “Yeah, that sounds pretty nice” from a $250 wireless speaker. The Everboom doesn’t deliver enough to warrant that kind of price, and I’d wager most people will stick with the company’s better-known Boom 4. It provides many of the same strengths for less money.
Photography by Chris Welch

The smaller sibling to UE’s Epicboom offers plenty of punch for its size. But it’s a little thin on features to justify $250.

The Ultimate Ears speaker lineup is getting quite crowded, having now reached six products with the recent introduction of the $249.99 Everboom. This speaker is a smaller, more portable take on the Epicboom that I reviewed late last year. And its core appeal is the same as any other UE speaker: you’re getting a rugged, waterproof speaker that’s cut out for both indoor and poolside parties. You can link the Everboom up with other UE speakers in party mode to play music in sync across all of them. The controls are easy to use — especially the company’s signature, oversized volume buttons.

So what makes the Everboom different? You get a fully customizable EQ, which not all of the company’s speakers offer. Like the Epicboom, there’s an outdoor mode that layers some extra volume and power onto the sound when needed. And UE includes a carabiner, which makes it easier to carry the Everboom on your bag or hang it in creative ways.

Both the Epicboom and Everboom dial up the overall audio fidelity compared to UE’s cylindrical speakers. Like those, they output 360-degree sound, so you don’t have to worry about hearing them from a certain sweet spot — in theory, anyway.

As it turns out, the Everboom is often most clear when you’ve got either the left or right side of the speaker directly facing you. Straight on, vocals can lack crispness and detail since the drivers seem to be side-firing — though the stereo separation is impressive as a result. For indoor listening, I typically kept the volume level between 30 and 40 percent, and that was plenty loud. Outside you can crank it further, though the speaker starts to strain and sound overly compressed once you’re at the 70 percent mark.

I don’t think the Everboom’s sound performance lifts it very far above established (and more affordable) competition like the JBL Charge 5, Bose SoundLink Flex, or even the recently released Beats Pill. I’d rank it higher than something like the Sonos Move for sound quality, but there are endless alternatives that are worth eyeing before you fork over $250.

That said, the Everboom met the moment when I brought it upstate for a brief lake cabin getaway. Listening to Zach Bryan’s new album, the Everboom did a good job separating John Mayer’s guitar licks on “Better Days” from the bulk of the mix. Nathaniel Rateliff’s South of Here was also a pleasant listen, though I again found myself pointing one of the speaker’s left / right sides towards me for the best clarity.

But some genres can prove a little much for it. The Hold Steady’s The Price of Progress sounded more muffled than I’d like. This is where the larger Epicboom fares better, since it’s got larger drivers (and more bass growl) to work with. But on the flip side, the Everboom is far easier to take on the go since it’s lighter and considerably smaller. Battery life is more than adequate at 20 hours of continuous playback.

That said, I don’t know if anyone’s buying UE speakers for critical listening. The brand has a good reputation for making durable products that can last many years. (And now, mercifully, the whole lineup has finally switched to USB-C.) The Everboom has IP67 dust and water resistance, and it’ll float if you drop it into a pool — and keep the music going afterward.

But don’t expect any exciting bonus features. The Everboom does at least include multipoint, so you can pair two phones to the speaker at once. And it’s got NFC support for very quick pairing. Still, I can’t help but feel Ultimate Ears is resting on its laurels when other companies give you more. For example, the Beats Pill offers lossless USB-C input, and JBL is starting to embrace forward-looking Bluetooth technologies like Auracast. Meanwhile, the Everboom can’t even be used as a speakerphone. UE’s app has a new megaphone feature that lets you speak into your phone and broadcast that to your Boom speakers, but how often will that be useful?

The Everboom isn’t a terrible purchase; none of UE’s products are if all you’re seeking is a decent-sounding and very dependable speaker. But we’re firmly in an era where I’m expecting more than “Yeah, that sounds pretty nice” from a $250 wireless speaker. The Everboom doesn’t deliver enough to warrant that kind of price, and I’d wager most people will stick with the company’s better-known Boom 4. It provides many of the same strengths for less money.

Photography by Chris Welch

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Did I mention it’s only $56?!

It doesn’t do anything other than track steps, but that’s all I want it to do. And at this price? I ain’t complaining. When I was in high school, all I wanted was a Baby-G Casio watch — partly because it came in fun colors, partly because all the cool kids had one. When I finally convinced my mom to get me one, I loved it to pieces until its battery died ages later. It’s been over 20 years since then, but as Y2K fashion invades my TikTok algorithm, I think a lot about how my watches used to just be watches that looked nice. Sometimes I feel like I want to go back to those days… then I remember that the main reason I got into smarter watches was for step tracking.
And then I found out about the Casio WS-B1000, which costs a mere $55.95, syncs with your phone for the time, and tracks steps. What!?
It’s not unfathomable that today’s Casio watches could be more than the analog watches of my youth. And yet it hadn’t occurred to me to check. Never mind that I reviewed a more rugged Casio Wear OS watch a few years ago — that was a chunky multisport watch at a time when the Wear OS struggle bus had a perpetual flat tire. But after a bit of digging, it turns out that Casio has modernized a few of its watches to have a bit more fitness tracking functionality while keeping that classic Casio design.

I appreciate that it doesn’t overpower my wrist.

The WS-B1000 is one such watch, though it keeps things very simple. There’s no optical heart rate monitor, OLED display, fancy health sensors, contactless payments, or LTE connectivity. This device has Bluetooth to connect with your phone, an accelerometer to track steps, your classic stopwatch and timer functions, alarms, move reminders, and an LCD screen with a backlight button. In other words, just enough smarts to count as a fitness tracker — but barely.
A few years ago, that feature set probably wouldn’t have appealed to me. But these days, I’m at a point in my fitness journey where I’m recovering from mental and physical burnout from prolonged overtraining. It is a frustratingly long process, and to my surprise, the thing that’s kept me going are devices and apps that prioritize rest and simplicity over “going hard.” Many current smartwatches hurl active minutes, standing goals, calorie burn goals, and other targets at you — so many goals for you to hit daily that it can be overwhelming. So the fact that the WS-B1000 can only track steps or work as a stopwatch? That’s a plus.

The Y2K vibes are immaculate.

And you know what? The three weeks I tested the WS-B1000 were delightful. I’d forgotten how nice it is to set a simple step goal and try to meet it. With this watch, I could just look down and say, “Uh-oh! It’s 4PM and I’m at 2,000 steps. Time to go for a walk.” If I wanted to check my history, I could go to the Casio app and view a rough log. There was nothing fancy, and that’s just how I wanted it. Accuracy-wise, I was generally within 500–1,000 steps of my Apple Watch Ultra — which is a fair margin of error given they were worn on different arms and I talk with my hands. But if you’re opting for something like this, the general goal is to simply move more, and this is just fine for that.
There were other little things I appreciated, too. Because the watch doesn’t need the sensors, chips, and giant battery of a smartwatch, it’s remarkably light to wear. It only weighs 36 grams, and for once, I didn’t look like I had a giant hockey puck strapped to my wrist. I also never had to worry about charging the dang thing, either — it runs on a CR2016 coin cell battery that lasts approximately two years.
The neat part about the Casio app is that it automatically syncs the time so you don’t have to sit there fiddling with buttons to reset the time or set alarms. (I’m terrible at that on older watches; I can never remember how to do it or into which drawer I stuffed the user manual.) That stuff you can program from your phone.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be the watch for folks who want the most out of their smartwatch. But if, like me, you would like an occasional break from the fitness tech grind or the ideal of chill, low-tech fitness appeals to you, this is an excellent option. And might I remind you that it’s just $56?! Most basic trackers in this range tend to be fitness bands, whereas this is a cute, retro-chic Casio watch.
Alas, I only have two wrists, and as a wearables reviewer, I have to rotate out the Casio for the next smartwatch in my testing queue. But I have a pretty good feeling that, in between products, this is the watch I’ll be reaching for.

Did I mention it’s only $56?!

It doesn’t do anything other than track steps, but that’s all I want it to do. And at this price? I ain’t complaining.

When I was in high school, all I wanted was a Baby-G Casio watch — partly because it came in fun colors, partly because all the cool kids had one. When I finally convinced my mom to get me one, I loved it to pieces until its battery died ages later. It’s been over 20 years since then, but as Y2K fashion invades my TikTok algorithm, I think a lot about how my watches used to just be watches that looked nice. Sometimes I feel like I want to go back to those days… then I remember that the main reason I got into smarter watches was for step tracking.

And then I found out about the Casio WS-B1000, which costs a mere $55.95, syncs with your phone for the time, and tracks steps. What!?

It’s not unfathomable that today’s Casio watches could be more than the analog watches of my youth. And yet it hadn’t occurred to me to check. Never mind that I reviewed a more rugged Casio Wear OS watch a few years ago — that was a chunky multisport watch at a time when the Wear OS struggle bus had a perpetual flat tire. But after a bit of digging, it turns out that Casio has modernized a few of its watches to have a bit more fitness tracking functionality while keeping that classic Casio design.

I appreciate that it doesn’t overpower my wrist.

The WS-B1000 is one such watch, though it keeps things very simple. There’s no optical heart rate monitor, OLED display, fancy health sensors, contactless payments, or LTE connectivity. This device has Bluetooth to connect with your phone, an accelerometer to track steps, your classic stopwatch and timer functions, alarms, move reminders, and an LCD screen with a backlight button. In other words, just enough smarts to count as a fitness tracker — but barely.

A few years ago, that feature set probably wouldn’t have appealed to me. But these days, I’m at a point in my fitness journey where I’m recovering from mental and physical burnout from prolonged overtraining. It is a frustratingly long process, and to my surprise, the thing that’s kept me going are devices and apps that prioritize rest and simplicity over “going hard.” Many current smartwatches hurl active minutes, standing goals, calorie burn goals, and other targets at you — so many goals for you to hit daily that it can be overwhelming. So the fact that the WS-B1000 can only track steps or work as a stopwatch? That’s a plus.

The Y2K vibes are immaculate.

And you know what? The three weeks I tested the WS-B1000 were delightful. I’d forgotten how nice it is to set a simple step goal and try to meet it. With this watch, I could just look down and say, “Uh-oh! It’s 4PM and I’m at 2,000 steps. Time to go for a walk.” If I wanted to check my history, I could go to the Casio app and view a rough log. There was nothing fancy, and that’s just how I wanted it. Accuracy-wise, I was generally within 500–1,000 steps of my Apple Watch Ultra — which is a fair margin of error given they were worn on different arms and I talk with my hands. But if you’re opting for something like this, the general goal is to simply move more, and this is just fine for that.

There were other little things I appreciated, too. Because the watch doesn’t need the sensors, chips, and giant battery of a smartwatch, it’s remarkably light to wear. It only weighs 36 grams, and for once, I didn’t look like I had a giant hockey puck strapped to my wrist. I also never had to worry about charging the dang thing, either — it runs on a CR2016 coin cell battery that lasts approximately two years.

The neat part about the Casio app is that it automatically syncs the time so you don’t have to sit there fiddling with buttons to reset the time or set alarms. (I’m terrible at that on older watches; I can never remember how to do it or into which drawer I stuffed the user manual.) That stuff you can program from your phone.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be the watch for folks who want the most out of their smartwatch. But if, like me, you would like an occasional break from the fitness tech grind or the ideal of chill, low-tech fitness appeals to you, this is an excellent option. And might I remind you that it’s just $56?! Most basic trackers in this range tend to be fitness bands, whereas this is a cute, retro-chic Casio watch.

Alas, I only have two wrists, and as a wearables reviewer, I have to rotate out the Casio for the next smartwatch in my testing queue. But I have a pretty good feeling that, in between products, this is the watch I’ll be reaching for.

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