CEO of Logitech: AI should be in every board meeting

Hanneke Faber, CEO of Logitech, now has another set of debatable tech predictions, suggesting that every board meeting should include an AI bot — and perhaps, soon, the bots might even take over the entire board.

Faber took the helm at Logitech on the tail end of 2023, coming from the British giant, Unilever. Since joining the Swiss peripheral maker, she was quickly known for her unorthodox views on the future of personal technology.

Faber’s most famous idea is her “Forever Mouse” proposal, a product based on durable hardware combined with continuously updated firmware features. Under her vision, customers would purchase the mouse once and then pay monthly or yearly subscriptions for software upgrades. That idea created a lot of buzz, but Logitech has yet to reveal any product or concrete plans for it.

At the “Most Powerful Women Summit,” held in Washington last week, Faber envisioned a different technological future, suggesting that AI agents should participate in every company board meeting to boost overall efficiency and productivity. “We already use AI agents in almost every meeting,” she said at the event, confirming that her company is already experimenting with the technology.

Apparently, Logitech’s current use of agentic AI is mostly an advanced note-taking assistant, capable of summarizing discussions and generating ideas. But from Faber’s perspective, the possibilities are limitless as she believes these tools will soon develop into fully autonomous systems able to make and execute decisions on their own. “You have to be sure that you really want that bot to act,” she cautioned.

Recently, Agentic AI has become the new rallying cry for many tech leaders. Companies like Microsoft are especially enthusiastic, predicting (through one of their engineers) that bots could replace the mouse and keyboard in Windows by 2030. However, some remain unconvinced, arguing that AI agents are still mostly hype at this point.

As Faber imagines, the boardroom AI agents would have access to all corporate data. Insisting that powerful AI systems need open access to information to work effectively, she didn’t express concern about the security and privacy implications of such access.

Faber was not the only one showing optimism about agentic AI at the summit. Others also joined in, with Andrea Calise, president of Teneo (a PR and consulting company), saying that her company is developing “synthetic stakeholders” to better understand human behavior. On a different note, Tracey Massey, COO of NIQ (a consumer intelligence company), underscored the need for high-quality data in training such bots, emphasizing that meaningful insights depend on a strong analytical foundation.