‘You can really unleash a lot of creativity’: Philips Hue founder George Yianni explains why its AI upgrades will be genuinely useful and 'a bit of a game changer'

George Yianni is excited about the future of smart lighting, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

As the Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Philips Hue, Yianni has seen smart home tech move from niche to mainstream — and he has a clear vision for how you'll be lighting your home in years to come.

On September 2, Philips Hue held its annual showcase event in Berlin, just around the corner from the IFA tech expo.

There, Yianni and other senior figures took to the stage to show off the brand's latest hardware (including some particularly artistic new lights and more affordable syncing devices), and to explain how new software developments will change how we all interact with lighting in the coming months.

After the event I had the opportunity to speak with Yianni, and to delve deeper into how Hue (and its parent company SIgnify) has identified practical uses for AI that aren't just a gimmick.

"There’s a push for AI for the sake of it, and we’ve really tried to shy away from that," he told me.

"AI large language models are really good at processing the unstructured information and turning it into something structured, and vice versa, and that’s really where we applied it." The first example he gave was SpatialAware — a feature that launched last year, which creates lighting scenes and applies them based on the position of lights in your room.

There’s a push for AI for the sake of it, and we’ve really tried to shy away from that George Yianni "We’re applying AI as a tool to deliver functionality," Yianni explained.

"So what we launched last year is, we spent quite some time with our lighting designers to produce the right set of rules, tools, and training towards a large language model to codify and scale the lighting design process." "So it can take all the unstructured information of where lights are in space, lighting design rules, and what colors look complementary, and then expose that to the user in a general way, so they can describe anything they want, and it uses its world knowledge and this lighting design skill set we’ve given it to generate new lighting design scenes for them.

It’s really not something you could have done any other way." Yianni doesn't want to bring AI into your home just for the sake of it — only when it's the right tool to solve a problem (Image credit: Signify) The second example, which debuted at this year's event, is Custom AI Behaviors .

This lets you use natural language to describe how you want your Philips Hue lights to behave.

For example, you can ask them to behave differently on weekends and weekdays, or change scenes automatically at sunset — all without fiddling around with complex settings.