Treating AI like a board member

HANNEKE FABER: Every Monday, I review with my leadership team where they’re getting breakthroughs. Our own people have built almost 2,000 AI agents by now. There are so many different areas where we’re seeing major improvements. We’re no longer piloting or concepting. This is part of the vast majority of our people’s daily workflows.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Hanneke Faber, CEO of Logitech. Hanneke made waves recently when she talked about adding an AI agent to her board of directors. Hanneke isn’t a technologist, and Logitech’s products aren’t obviously AI-forward: computer peripherals, video teleconferencing gear, and products for gamers. But that hasn’t limited her AI aggressiveness. Hanneke’s choices provide a window into the opportunities and challenges of being AI-first. We also talk about her competitive diving career, how she’s handled Trump tariffs, and her 48-hour crash course in video gaming. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Hanneke Faber, CEO of Logitech. Hanneke, thanks for joining us.

FABER: Great. Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkWhy a hardware company is going all in on AI

SAFIAN: Logitech is known by many people for its computer mouse. “The mouse built this house,” I think you said once, a nice nod to Disney. But in recent months, the conversation about Logitech has been around AI, the cutting edge of technology. It’s kind of a neat trick for a business with a reputation for a not-necessarily-sexy piece of hardware.

FABER: Well, of course, we do think that mice are very sexy. But that aside, we’re not just a place that builds mice. In the age of AI, hardware is definitely sexy again. AI needs hands, needs eyes, needs ears. So that’s where we come in, and we’re building AI-enabled products at scale, which is exciting.

SAFIAN: You spoke at a Fortune conference last fall. There was a lot of attention around adding an AI agent to your board of directors. Any progress with that?

FABER: Yes. I wouldn’t say we have an actual AI agent that’s formally a board member, but we’re using AI very fundamentally in our board meetings and in the preparation for our board meetings. I think we’re lucky. My board members are AI-savvy, all of them. We offered them the same training that we offer to all of our employees. And in preparation for our board meetings, we run the materials through an AI gem that we’ve built. So you get really great feedback, actually, from an AI board member up front. And that helps shape the discussion when we go into the meeting.

SAFIAN: And this is your proprietary agent. You’re not sending this out into the world so that Anthropic or OpenAI or someone else can sort of peek in on it?

FABER: No. That obviously wouldn’t be smart because the data that’s in there is very confidential. So yes, it’s proprietary.

Copy LinkHow a consumer goods leader approached a tech turnaround

SAFIAN: How much do you consider yourself a technologist? Your background is largely in consumer products at Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

FABER: Sometimes I have to pinch myself. A little over two years ago, I was selling mayonnaise, literally. So it is a different industry, but there are also a lot of things that you learn in consumer goods, and I also spent time in retail, that is very applicable here. In the end, we sell products for people, for users. So understanding that consumer, that customer, starting from there and designing products that will delight that user is critically important. And that’s no different whether you’re selling mayonnaise and ice cream or mice and cameras.

SAFIAN: Now, when you came on board, it was clear that Logitech needed a bit of a turnaround. Is that something that particularly appealed to you? I’ve heard from others that sometimes that’s where the opportunities are for a first-time CEO role.

FABER: Yes. And I think the waters were troubled, but not deeply troubled. It’s just that we had come off that COVID sugar high. Therefore, eight quarters in a row, the business had declined. So confidence was low and things were hard when I came in, but it was clear to me from the start that it wasn’t a foundational issue. The guts were good. It just needed a little bit of a refresh and a reinjection of energy and strategy, honestly. And that’s what we’ve done. So we’re now on our eighth quarter of top- and bottom-line growth.

SAFIAN: And you just had to dive in, I guess. That’s my dad joke, because you were an accomplished diver in your youth, a seven-time Dutch national champion. Is that right?

FABER: That’s right. Back in the Stone Age.

SAFIAN: No, it’s very impressive. Is leading a new business in a new industry like trying a new dive?

FABER: I do often say, when people ask what you learn from your sporting days, that diving especially is a sport where you have to take risks. So you’re up on a 10-meter platform, 33 feet in the air, and you have to do flips and turns, and it is really scary. And it’s always scary. It’s not just scary the first time. Every time, it’s kind of scary. So when people ask me, “Was this a scary move? Are you scared to present? Are you scared to do a podcast? Are you scared to move industries?” I’m like, “You know what? A back two-and-a-half off the 10-meter, that is scary.” Compared with that, very few other things are truly scary.

SAFIAN: As you describe it, it sounds like you kind of have to get used to being scared when you’re jumping off that board because, as you say, it’s scary every time. Is that the same way in business, that you just have to get used to the uncertainty, the instability, whatever’s going to happen next?

FABER: Yes, I think that’s a great insight. Some people say it’s not a marathon, or it’s a series of sprints, or something. But yes, it’s a series of new situations where you don’t always know what to expect that can be a little scary. And I think you have to find a way to enjoy that to keep going.

Copy LinkHow Logitech was impacted by Trump’s tariffs

SAFIAN: Not to overdo this analogy, but just as you’re implementing your new plans at Logitech, which by all indications are working, you’re hit with a new challenge when the Trump tariffs come down. It’s like being scared on the next dive, I guess. Something like 40% of your products for the U.S. market were made in China. Was there a moment you remember hearing about tariffs where you were like, “Oh no, not this”?

FABER: It was certainly a tough day, Liberation Day, April 1, 2025. For almost everyone in our industry, we produce our products around the world, but not necessarily in the United States, and the United States is a big market for us. But we quickly figured out that we actually were in a position of competitive strength. Only 30% of our business is in the United States. Seventy percent of our business is not, so it was not affected by tariffs. We have a very diverse manufacturing footprint, and this is all my predecessor’s work. I take zero credit for that. Yes, 40% came from China, but we also make in five other countries. So we were able to move things around, and by the end of the calendar year, only 10% of our products for the U.S. came from China. We have a strong brand, which gives you loyalty and gives you some pricing power, and we needed that.

SAFIAN: You raised prices pretty quickly, by around 10%.

FABER: And I don’t like raising prices, but in this case, it absolutely was the responsible thing to do. And if you decide you’re going to do it, I always think it’s better to rip the Band-Aid off right away. So we did it very quickly. I think that gave us the advantage that by the time the holiday season came around, in October and November, we were through the pricing pain, and that was really important. Taking pricing, especially in consumer markets, just takes a while. You have to convince customers that’s the right thing to do and get it reflected on the shelf. Again, I thought that was a competitive advantage.

SAFIAN: So when the bigger bulk of your consumer revenue was coming through, people had sort of accepted it by then.

FABER: Exactly.

SAFIAN: How much do you worry about new Trump-related disruptions? At the World Economic Forum last month, I saw Trump said that the former Swiss president rubbed him the wrong way as an explanation for tariffs on Switzerland, which is where Logitech is registered, right?

FABER: I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it. It’s a really dynamic world. I often say to my team, “Today is the slowest day of the rest of your lives.” And there is a lot happening, not just in the U.S. and with the U.S. administration. There’s a lot happening around the world. So we roll with the punches. Of course, we do risk assessments, and we think through what could happen and how we mitigate that. Manufacturing diversification is a critical part of that. It just makes us more resilient when we don’t manufacture in one place. So we absolutely look at what might happen around the world and how we mitigate that, but we can’t lose sleep over that every day because then we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.

Copy LinkWhy gaming offers a blueprint for AI-powered hardware

SAFIAN: People spend more time playing video games than watching movies and TV combined, although it’s not always talked about that way. How do you stay connected in that market, to that community? And how important is that sector likely to be in Logitech’s tomorrow, in your future?

FABER: Very important. Gaming is the world’s largest form of entertainment. It’s where people, and not just 15-year-olds, spend their time. So it’s great for us to be a leader in that space. I have to admit, before I joined Logitech, I was not much of a gamer, and I still would not call myself a gamer. I don’t think Wordle and Connections necessarily count. But how do you stay connected? A bit like what you do in consumer goods. You try to spend a lot of time with gamers and watch them game and ask them questions. In fact, the weekend before I joined Logitech, I’m fortunate that my oldest is a 25-year-old son, and of course he does game. So I spent a weekend with him at his apartment, and I went through a 48-hour gaming boot camp with him.

SAFIAN: What were you playing?

FABER: Everything, because I needed to be introduced to everything, very poorly, obviously. But Valorant, League of Legends, and also some more strategy games. I’m never going to be a great gamer because, by the way, great gaming is absolutely a sport, and it takes 10,000 hours to be great at it. I will never, ever be even near that. But understanding the needs of gamers, I try as best as I can. And then, of course, we have a team that is deeply embedded in that ecosystem, from designers to engineers to marketers, and that’s critical in gaming.

SAFIAN: To what extent is gaming a market for AI products? You’ve said that Logitech is building the eyes, the ears, and the hands of AI, which sounds a lot like it applies to gamers.

FABER: It’s a great question, and there are a lot of different discussions around AI in games especially. We don’t make games. We make your gear. And clearly, you want to avoid cheating because it is a sport. So there’s a thin line there. But we have some good examples of where we’re already using AI. We worked with Nvidia on an AI tool that helps you stream while you game. That’s another big thing. A lot of good gamers are streaming, and that’s their income while they’re gaming. But it’s hard to play a game at a high level and also have a great stream. So we built an AI streaming agent with Nvidia that actually streams for you, and you can set it in six different modes, snarky or smart or whatever. And that’s a really useful tool for gamers.

SAFIAN: I saw somewhere that you described some of the AI gadgets on the market these days as solutions looking for a problem. And I’m curious whether you have a theory, or Logitech has a philosophy, about what the ideal form factor for AI will be, the most compelling AI interface. Will it stay the mouse? Will it be something else?

FABER: I think it’s a really big question, and our designers are constantly looking at that. I don’t have the answer, and I think we just need to keep learning. Our products obviously attach to laptops, but they also attach to screens for video conferencing. They attach to phones. We launched some products last year that attach to the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest. But the important thing is that whatever form factor it becomes, it really does solve real problems people have. This weekend there was a big story in The New York Times. I think the headline was, “She’s 85 and Her Roommate’s a Robot,” a little robot that sits on your table. And this AI robot obviously is someone to talk to, but it also figured out things that this lady liked to do: games and stories. For the use case of the 85-year-old woman who’s living by herself, very interesting. So I think we’re going to learn over time. Always start from the problem you’re trying to solve for a human and then see if AI can really play a role there, rather than tech for tech’s sake.

SAFIAN: Tech for tech’s sake has been a hurdle with each new tech wave, and as Hanneke notes, AI is no different. So how is she helping her team find what’s meaningful in AI, and how different might her approach be if she were at a nontech brand? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Logitech’s Hanneke Faber talked about how AI and other disruptions have impacted her turnaround plans. Now she shares specifics about how she’s pushed her team’s AI proficiency and lessons from her consumer products background at Procter & Gamble and Unilever, plus why she’s trying as a leader to be a beekeeper rather than a shepherd. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHow Logitech made AI part of everyday work

You mentioned that with gaming, you spent a weekend with your son getting yourself up to speed. I’m curious if you’ve done things like that with AI and AI tools, and how you get up to speed with them, how you use them personally as a leader, and get other folks around you to use them.

FABER: We did a few things early on that were good. When ChatGPT came out, which is now almost two years ago, we immediately did a few things. We appointed a chief AI officer right away. We offered AI training to all 7,000 employees right away, a training called ProAI, which is very good. And we built LogiQ, which is a proprietary space where we put all our data, basically, and all our documents, and where our people can use all the large language models on both external and internal data. And the first thing is, we published responsible AI principles because we were a little worried about responsible use, and we published those externally on how we were going to use it. Then every Monday, I review with my leadership team. One of them presents what their breakthrough of the week or the month is. Every Monday, we review something from a group on where they’re getting breakthroughs, either in product or in productivity.

SAFIAN: And they share with each other from that, or they try to one-up each other? A little of both?

FABER: No, they share, because there are so many different areas where we’re seeing major improvements. So people get inspired by each other. And we’re now at a stage, because we do also measure, where 75% of our total employee population are heavy users and 85% of our R&D and designers are heavy users. So I would say that we’re no longer piloting or concepting. This is part of the vast majority of our people’s daily workflows.

SAFIAN: Some people are very controlling about how AI is utilized in their organization because there are concerns about different things, and other folks are kind of like, “Do whatever experiments you want. Let a thousand flowers bloom.” How do you navigate between those impulses?

FABER: If anything, more toward letting a thousand flowers bloom. Again, our own people have built almost 2,000 AI agents by now to optimize different processes. So we really are going fast. But as I said up front, we published the principles because it is important that once in a while we stop and say, “Is this really transparent enough? Are we keeping ourselves accountable? Is it fair in the way we use it?”

SAFIAN: Not everyone I talk to is seeing a full-on transformational impact from it. You talk to a CEO, and they sometimes feel like they’re getting pushed to use AI in ways that may not be the most effective or aren’t yet at the point where they can have the impact that’s promised. How much of that do you see? Or do you feel like, if there’s a little waste in what we’re using AI for, I don’t care because it’s more important for us to be fluent?

FABER: I think what makes us a little different from maybe my old industry is that we are building products with AI. Our latest RallyAI cameras are AI- and machine learning-enabled, and they would not be nearly as good without it. So that’s a little different from when you’re selling ice cream. It’s really a must for us. And I think that’s where we might be a little different. This is not an, “Oh my God, it’s the flavor du jour, and I must jump on this bandwagon.” Our products cannot be superior without it, which means our people must be super fluent.

SAFIAN: And if you were still at one of those places you’d been before, you wouldn’t necessarily be implementing AI quite the way you are.

FABER: I don’t think I could, honestly, because again, this is a company of engineers. You do need a little bit of engineering knowledge to be doing that, and interest as well. So that’s harder for companies that are more marketing or sales companies at heart, or service companies.

SAFIAN: One of the things I reflect on sometimes is that these tools are terrific for engineering, for coding. So folks in Silicon Valley who are engineers and coders say, “Oh, and if it can do this, it can do anything.” Because, of course, what we do is the hardest thing. But it doesn’t necessarily apply to every part of every job quite the same way, at least not yet.

FABER: We do a lot of brand building and marketing where you still have to appeal to the human, and I haven’t really seen huge AI help there yet. But on the transactional side of marketing and selling, absolutely, AI is a big productivity help. But when you really want to get to a human’s heart, you still need events and partnerships and creative actions.

Copy LinkWhy great leaders act more like beekeepers than shepherds

SAFIAN: As a leader, you said that as you moved to running larger organizations, your style had to change from being a shepherd to a beekeeper. Can you explain that?

FABER: Yes, shepherd to beekeeper. I think when I was younger, I was much more of a shepherd. So what does a shepherd do? The shepherd wakes up in the morning, opens the door to the pen, tells the sheep to come out, tells the sheep where to go. He’s got a dog, middle management, to help him out. In the evening, he takes them all back. Very directive. A beekeeper, you can’t tell bees what to do. Bees know what to do. They’ve got to make honey, and they know exactly how to do it. And what a beekeeper can do is try and listen to the bees and see, are they in the right place? Is there the right flora around them? And I think as a leader, I have had to become more of a beekeeper, also because I’m, again, in a new industry. It would be very dangerous if I just told all my engineers what to do because that would be somewhat clueless at times. So I have to listen and make sure I create the right environment for them. I try to be the beekeeper.

Copy LinkExperimenting fast without betting the farm

SAFIAN: Right at the beginning, after ChatGPT came out and you instituted all these new things, how did you know that that was what you should do? Everyone was sort of uncertain in the moment. You weren’t necessarily uncertain?

FABER: No, I think we were all uncertain, but we didn’t bet the farm either. None of this was a huge investment. There was some investment, but we knew that if it wasn’t the right investment, we could pull back and try something else. And I’m glad we did it. Again, not everything has worked. Of the almost 2,000 agents we’ve built, some of them are duds. That’s OK, because we didn’t bet the farm on each agent in terms of investment. It’s part of the way we work and part of how we invest as we grow.

SAFIAN: I talked to the CEO of a tech company early on, and he said, “As soon as OpenAI opened up its API, I took a week off, and I did nothing but coding because I wanted to understand how it works.” And I was like, great, I can’t do that. How do I actually understand this? And I guess from your perspective, it’s like you have to listen to the people who are in it.

FABER: Absolutely. But I’m really impressed by some of our finance people, our HR people, our marketers, and how they have found great ways to use AI to extend their own potential. So definitely not just the engineers.

SAFIAN: We can all get that engineering mindset into us a little bit. What does courage mean to you as a business leader right now?

FABER: I think a lot about courage is about sticking to your values, and that’s your personal values and your company’s values. And one of the reasons, again, that I feel fortunate to be at Logitech is that the company has had strong values for more than 40 years. And the very first value of Logitech is equality and environment. And that is maybe not as popular these days as it was a few years ago, but we’re sticking to those because they’re good for business. So I think the courage to stick by the values that you live by is an important form of courage.

SAFIAN: You may not talk about them quite as much, but that doesn’t mean you move away from them.

FABER: Absolutely.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for Logitech right now?

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Logitech right now?

FABER: If you look at video conferencing, less than 20% of the world’s conference rooms are video-conference-enabled. So much opportunity for growth, and we’re the market leader. Even on mice and keyboards, you’d be surprised, but of the billions of PCs out there in the world, less than 50% even use a mouse, and less than 30% use an external keyboard. Over the years, we have grown that market. We are the market leader, but there’s still so much opportunity. And then there’s gaming, where every younger cohort games more, and we are the best at providing the best gear for gaming. So boy, we’re in great neighborhoods, I guess, is what I’m saying, and there’s a lot of future growth opportunity for us out there, which is exciting.

SAFIAN: You sound like you’re having fun.

FABER: Life’s too short not to have fun. So I feel really fortunate, again, to be in a company with great guts, great values, great people, and lots of opportunity for growth.

SAFIAN: Well, Hanneke, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it. It’s great to chat with you.

FABER: Thank you, Bob.

SAFIAN: I’ve never stepped out onto a 30-meter diving board, let alone tried to do a flip or twist while jumping off. So I don’t have Hanneke’s frame of reference when it comes to courageous maneuvers. But when it comes to AI, all of us are a bit up in the air. I’m thinking back to her observation that fear was part of each dive she took. We all have to get comfortable being a little unsettled in an AI world. We can both embrace AI and resist losing human connection. Yes, we’re going to get wet. We don’t always know how we’re going to land. But one thing’s for sure: We will make a splash. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.