InfoComm 2024: Gary Kayye Interviews Logitech COO Prakash Arunkundrum About Its Leadership in UCC

Thank you, thank you. I love that product. It's one of the best, probably one of the most creative products our industry has seen in probably five years.

Sure. We are trying to transform the workplace experience, which means, as you know, there are more and more demands on it. Actually, the users in every company want the same experience they had during COVID, but now they're back in the office and they want the tools to work for them. So we're so happy to be part of this, what I call the future of work at the workplace, and really making that happen with more AI, more productivity, you know, the works.

Yes. Look, Logitech is a 40-plus-year-old company, as you probably know, and we really started with putting the human in the middle of everything that we do. So we're all about human-centric design, which means you, as an employee, are actually first a user, right? You're a human. So we really design everything around the human, and it wants to also standardize. So when we thought about this, we came into the AV industry with a view to simplify, remove all the friction that exists whether you're an Apple user, a PC user, you're on Zoom, Google, Microsoft, whatever. How do you make your user experience seamless, frictionless? How do we make the job of IT simpler? That's really what we've been focused on all these years. And our enterprise focus is essentially built on that consumer DNA, built on that human-centric design DNA, and really thinking about it from our core values that we have.

Great question, because everybody's talking about AI, and we have a role to play. I think just because we are a human-centric company, we have a role to play. If you just very simply think about AI in the context of there's a bunch of input, then you have data models that run, and then there's a bunch of output. Right? We generate the input. We allow you to capture the audio, the video, the mouse click, the keyboard click. That's our role at the edge, actually making that intelligence happen. Then it goes to the cloud providers where they do some processing, we do some processing. You probably saw some of our devices, we do things like smart switching and a lot of those things, and we do that in harmony with the cloud provider. So you want to make sure the user experience in a meeting room, at a desk, on the go, is as perfect as it can be. That requires a happy marriage between what's on the edge and what's on the cloud, and that's our role in the ecosystem.

First of all, thank you for asking that question, because I've been championing some of our efforts since... Collective Logitech effort, but actually I would say it's an ecosystem effort. If you think about e-waste, it's the fastest growing waste category in the world. It's growing 25 percent plus every year. So we really started thinking about how do you make things more circular. That's why we put a recycled plastic program in place. We took back e-waste, created resin with it, and made new parts. All our collaboration devices, two-thirds of our products globally, actually mouse, keyboards, everything actually use recycled plastics. And that's just one example. What we're really doing is designing for sustainability, really thinking about the product trade-off choices. That can be materials like plastics, it is also energy use. So when you go into a conference room, we're dimming the lights, turning off the displays, things of that sort. And it's actually also working with ecosystem partners because we don't make displays; we work with the display guys, we work with Zoom and Microsoft. How do you actually make that whole interplay work better? That's what we focused on. And I think you probably know about our carbon labeling mission. I do. So we put the footprint of all our products right on the packaging, so you don't have to go somewhere look at a website or anything like that. The reason we're doing that is that we want to be firstly accountable for the footprint we generate, and secondly inform all of our users and enterprise. This is a big, huge topic for them. How do you make sure that they understand the impact they are creating and what can they do about it?

I think it's twofold. One is our needs, but actually what I'm really after and what we at Logitech are after is to change the ecosystem thinking on this. Right? I think you're a driver of that because you're a big brand. Yeah. And look, we've opened up some of our methodology. So if somebody wants to carbon label, we've actually opened up for them. If they want to use our recycled plastics, we know how to help them do that. That's a big part of what we're doing. And it doesn't matter if they're competitors, peers, we want to do this because we only have one planet.

Okay, well, I'm going to pick two. Like every morning I wake up, I have a meeting. You mentioned it, Logi Dock greets me every morning. I love it. Single touch, it's a single touch. And then when I go into the office, a Rally Bar is like a workhorse. You know, I don't have to think about is the camera good, is the audio good. I'm just in the flow, it does its job. You know, we really believe in frictionless interface. So you shouldn't have to think about the device. When we are at our best, the device should do what it's supposed to do. These are two that I love.