AI See: The CEO once known for proposing a "mouse-as-a-service" model is back with another round of questionable tech predictions. This time, she suggests that every board meeting should include an AI bot – and perhaps, in the not-so-distant future, replace the entire board with bots altogether.
Hanneke Faber became CEO of Logitech on December 1, 2023, after leaving her role as group president at Unilever. Since joining the Swiss peripheral manufacturer, Faber has attracted attention for her unconventional ideas about how personal technology should evolve – often with a focus on benefiting shareholders and companies first.
Faber is now best known for proposing the so-called "Forever Mouse" concept – a device with constantly evolving firmware features built on base hardware that customers would purchase only once. According to Faber, users would happily pay monthly or annual subscriptions to access these software-based upgrades. However, no concrete business plans have yet been announced to bring the idea to market.
Speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington this week, Faber introduced yet another radical tech idea that virtually no one had requested. The Logitech CEO suggested that AI agents should be present in every board meeting, claiming they could improve productivity to some extent.
"We already use AI agents in almost every meeting," Faber confirmed at the summit.
The current iteration of agentic AI technology used by Logitech is little more than a glorified note-taking bot capable of summarizing meetings and "generating" the occasional idea. Still, Faber is confident that future improvements will somehow elevate these assistants into autonomous entities able to manage and make decisions on their own.
"You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action," she said.
Agentic AI is being hailed as the next major leap in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Microsoft, for instance, is bullish on the idea that bots will replace the mouse, keyboard, and possibly even the user in Windows by 2030. Elsewhere, analysts warn that the concept is mostly hype for now, with only a tiny fraction of real-world enterprise implementations to point to.
In Faber's version of the agentic future, the boardroom bot would enjoy complete access to everything. Logitech's CEO expressed little concern for privacy, confidentiality, or other "minor details," arguing that powerful AIs require unrestricted data access to achieve their stated goals.
Other executives at the Summit joined Faber in praising the potential of agentic AI. According to Teneo President Andrea Calise, the global consultancy firm is already developing "synthetic stakeholders" to better understand their human counterparts. Meanwhile, NIQ COO Tracey Massey emphasized the importance of training bots on quality data, noting that strong analytics will only emerge from a solid agentic foundation.