Sonos CEO Tom Conrad has spoken about how he steered the company back from the crisis triggered by its botched 2024 app redesign, which badly damaged customer trust and threatened the brand's reputation. Conrad, a board member at the time, took over as interim chief executive during the fallout before being made permanent CEO around a year ago, and he now says the company has moved fully past that turbulent period into a new phase built around a major product and platform launch called Sonos 27.

In the interview, Conrad explains that his central diagnosis was that Sonos had been behaving as a purely hardware company when it is, in fact, equally reliant on software, and that failing at either discipline causes serious damage. Sonos 27 is framed as a new foundational platform designed to make all Sonos products function together as one cohesive system rather than standalone devices, incorporating ideas such as AI assistants working across the ecosystem and a mesh network of networked "computers" disguised as speakers. The conversation also touches on Sonos's strained relationship with Google, which has kept Gemini off its devices, and broader smart home industry standards.