In the period from May to August, the number of returns of the gadget with artificial intelligence AI Pin turned out to be higher than the number of its sales, The Verge reports, citing internal documents from Humane, the device’s manufacturer.
Image source: humane.com
By June, only 8,000 units of products had not been returned, said a resource source with access to information on sales and returns, and by now the number of devices in the hands of customers had decreased to 7,000. AI Pin received the overwhelming majority of negative reviews even when it went on sale . Now Humane is trying to stabilize the situation, as well as maintain trust among staff and potential buyers. In June it became known that HP was considering buying the company, and last week it was reported that Humane was in talks with its current investors about raising a loan that could later be converted into equity.
Over the entire period of sales, AI Pin gadgets and accessories brought Humane just over $9 million, but about a thousand purchases were canceled before being shipped to customers, and about $1 million were product returns. These figures, which have not previously been made public, objectively reflect the difficult situation in which Humane finds itself. The sales figure falls well short of the $200 million it raised from Silicon Valley executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The startup has shipped about 10,000 units of AI Pin and accessories so far, although it was aiming to sell about 100,000 units in the first year. The numbers cited are not accurate, “including financial data,” Humane spokeswoman Zoz Cuccias said. But when asked what exactly these inaccuracies were, she replied: “We have nothing more to provide – we do not comment on financial data and will pass it on to our legal counsel.”
Once the AI Pin is returned, the company has no way to restore it – the device becomes electronic waste, and the manufacturer cannot compensate for the damage by selling it again. The problem is related to the peculiarities of the work of the operator T-Mobile, which acts as Humane’s partner in this project. But it is believed that the company is keeping used copies of the device in the hope of solving this problem. When AI Pin went public, “we knew we were at the starting line, not the finish line,” and Humane has since released several software updates that “incorporate user feedback,” Cuccias said.
The company continues to lose employees. Last week, Customer Relations Director Tori Geiken disappeared from the Slack corporate messenger for internal correspondence at Humane – her subordinates did not receive official notification of their leader’s departure, and she herself refused to comment. Previously, Vice President of Engineering Jeremy Werner, CTO Patrick Gates and Head of Product Development Ken Kocienda also left the company. In January, before the release of AI Pin, Humane laid off four employees as a cost-cutting measure.
«We continue to build an incredibly talented and highly experienced team” and “are committed to ushering in a new era of external and contextual computing,” insists Cuccias, who took over as Humane’s chief engineer and chief strategy officer in June, Rubén Caballero. Last April, the company’s president and co-founder Imran Chaudhri caused a stir at a TED event when he demonstrated AI Pin for the first time – he and his wife Bethany Bongiorno previously worked at Apple, where they said they participated in development of Mac, iPod, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone. On the day the negative reviews began to pour in, Bongiorno wrote on social media X: “This is the starting point. No Gen 1 is perfect, and it is never the complete vision.”
Humane management itself ignored the warning signs of these negative reviews. Before AI Pin went on sale, the device was tested by a small group: parents and friends of the co-founders, some investors and employees – many of whom expressed concerns about the prospects of the product. One alpha tester contacted customer support, described the device as “disorienting” and “frustrating” and described numerous instances where he was unable to replicate the device’s capabilities as shown in the demo videos. The first reviews “pierced the company like a bullet,” a source admitted to The Verge, but AI Pin went on sale anyway.