From vending machines to champions: Eric Porres, Logitech's Head of AI, on why the best AI transformation starts by listening, not teaching

About this episode

Late 2024, Logitech surveyed their entire workforce about AI usage. Seven thousand employees. 46 countries. When Eric Porres saw the results, he stopped calling it an adoption problem.

Eric had spent the year running AI training sessions across Logitech—not as his official job, but as a second shift while leading innovation and software teams. 827 people over eight months. And in those sessions, he kept hearing the same story: people approached generative AI like they approached Google. Ask a question. Get an answer. Walk away unsatisfied. They didn't realize they could iterate, refine, and improve.

Then Eric discovered something remarkable: hidden in the survey data were 112 people doing exceptional work with AI. He started asking them to walk him through their process—not what they were building, but how they were thinking. And a pattern emerged around six elements.

In this episode of Humans of AI, Eric shares the framework that transformed Logitech's AI adoption—and why the biggest barriers to enterprise AI aren't technical. They're human.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why most people treat AI like a vending machine—and how to break that habit

• The 6-element DNA strand of effective AI prompting: role, context, task, output, boundaries, and reasoning

• How to identify and activate AI champions already hiding in your organization

• The two barriers that kill AI adoption: friction and institutional amnesia

• Why leadership modeling matters more than training programs

• How one question at every leadership meeting can transform your AI culture

• The discipline required to make AI transformation permanent—not just another pilot program

About Eric Porres:

Eric Porres is the Head of AI at Logitech, where he leads enterprise AI strategy and adoption. A fifth-degree black belt with 20 years of ninjutsu training, Eric brings the same discipline and pattern recognition to AI transformation that he learned in the dojo. Before joining Logitech full-time, he founded a company to fix broken meeting culture—analyzing how organizations burn payroll dollars on ineffective collaboration—and sold it to Logitech in 2022. When Logitech created the Head of AI role in 2025, Eric had already done the groundwork: he had the data, the champions, and a framework that scaled.

🎧 Listen now and discover how to move from 1% adoption to organization-wide AI transformation.

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