Where the First Wave of AI + Hardware Innovators Is Taking Us
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When we launched Hardware Is the New Salt, we expected strong opinions about AI in product design and engineering. What we didn’t expect was the consistency—seasoned product leaders, innovators, founders, designers, and executives from different domains all describing the same shift. Not hype. Not fear. But curiosity and openness to how AI will change product development and the products we build. AI is not replacing human innovation—it’s accelerating our thinking, internal processes, tasks that previously took significant time, while democratizing who can participate, and changing what is possible in the end products.
The transition isn’t smooth. It’s full of contradictions. Yet the majority of the product innovators featured in Hardware is New Salt are embracing AI and its potential. And that’s what makes this moment exciting. Here are the key themes covered across the following pages:
The New Acceleration Paradox
Every contributor described the same tension: AI lets teams move faster than ever, at the exact moment when moving fast has never been riskier. More people can create—but you still need people who can tell the difference between something that looks right and something that is right.
More is Not the Goal—Better Products Are
A misconception outside this community is that innovators are using AI to make more things. The interviews reveal the opposite. The most sophisticated teams use AI to make fewer things—but better ones, and to do it faster.
The transition isn’t smooth. It’s full of contradictions. Yet the majority of the product innovators featured in Hardware is New Salt are embracing AI and its potential. And that’s what makes this moment exciting.
AI Doesn’t Replace Imagination—It Augments It
Across disciplines, the belief was unanimous: AI cannot yet originate the breakthrough idea. Deciding to put a camera on a phone. Or to build dignity into adaptive mobility products. Those sparks remain human. What AI does is help eliminate friction between inspiration and execution.
Democratization with New Roles for Experts
AI invites more people into the design conversation, and that’s genuinely exciting. Now, everyone, including marketing, sales reps, and others, can produce concept renderings. However, with the ability for more people to participate in hardware product innovation, new risks are introduced because AI isn’t always correct. The future isn’t expert-exclusive: it’s user + team + AI-powered, and expert-approved.
Trust is Paramount
Everyone acknowledged the same risk: without trust, they cannot rely on AI tools or outputs. Data privacy and IP protection are paramount. AI outputs can be confident and wrong—and the more convincing they appear, the more problematic they become.
The leaders who are furthest ahead aren’t those using AI everywhere—they’re the ones building guardrails to help build trust while they innovate.
Deciding to put a camera on a phone. Or to build dignity into adaptive mobility products. Those sparks remain human. What AI does is help eliminate friction between inspiration and execution.
The Road Ahead
As one participant shared, “AI is still in its infancy. But its learning curve is exponential. And that’s where our responsibility must lie: guiding it carefully, while it’s still building capacity to walk, as one day, we’ll need to trust it to run.”
A competitive shift is already happening. We’re seeing AI commoditizing software, and an increased focus on hardware for value creation and differentiation. It’s not a coincidence that eight of the world’s ten most valuable companies at the time of this publication make hardware. And we are already seeing AI embedded in products we use every day.
The product innovators in these pages aren’t designing a world where machines replace creativity. They’re designing a world where:
Humans decide what deserves to exist,
AI clears the path from idea to impact,
And hardware transforms intelligence into new experiences.
The next decade will be defined by what humans finally get to build because of AI.
Editor's Insight
