Dive Brief:
- Sonos’ efforts over the past year to reinstitute a reliable experience and win back customer trust are paying off, and the company is making progress to return to growth, executives said on a Q1 2026 earnings call Tuesday.
- The company rolled out 10 software upgrades to improve reliability and system performance, leading to higher customer satisfaction across all channels and measures, according to CEO Tom Conrad.
- “We spent a good chunk of last year making material progress around improving the core experience of Sonos performance, reliability, just customer service experiences, honestly, just doing the hard work of winning back our customers as our advocates,” Conrad said on the earnings call. “And I'm so proud of the progress that the team has made and so grateful for the patience that our customers showed us through what had been a very difficult chapter.”
Dive Insight:
Sonos is ready to turn the corner.
The sound company spent a tumultuous 2025 rebuilding reliability via software upgrades following a disastrous app release in May 2024 that led to the departure of its former CEO. Sonos said it restored the quality of its software last quarter and is making progress toward return to growth.
In Q1 2026, revenue fell 1% year over year to $546 million. The company expects revenue to remain flat in the first half of the year. That would mark an improvement from the first half of fiscal 2025, which saw a 6% year-over-year decline, and the second half of fiscal 2025, which saw a 3% year-over-year decline, according to CFO Saori Casey.
The company is keeping its hardware and software roadmaps tightly connected with a simple goal: “products that work better together, unlock more use cases and make the system more powerful with every addition,” Conrad said.
Sonos is back to introducing new products in 2026 and unveiled Sonos Amp Multi last week.
“For the past year, as we focus on software performance and reliability, we've been operating without new products to bring new customers into the system or spark repurchase,” Conrad said. “That changes in the back half of the year.”
With these changes, the company is now focused on customer advocacy.
“The second growth dimension is a return to customer advocacy built on excellence in performance, reliability, ease of use and customer service alongside a broader and more coherent software platform,” Conrad said. “When the system works well, customers trust it, expand it and recommend it. System reliability is not just a quality metric for us, it's a growth driver.”
Its pursuit of reliability doesn’t mean Sonos isn’t focused on emerging trends, including conversational AI, however.
On the earnings call Tuesday, Conrad expanded on his goal of Sonos becoming the center of “AI personalities.”
Sonos is in a strong position to bring conversational AI to homes, with the scale and breadth of its installed base, he said. The technology can help improve the home experience by anticipating customers’ needs.
“Second of all, I think artificial intelligence techniques are incredibly powerful, not just for conversations, but for anticipatory design, system features that just anticipate your needs and serve you exactly the right content in exactly the right setting with the smallest amount of input from you as a user,” Conrad said. “So in that world, AI can just make the Sonos system smarter, more personal and even easier to use long before you even get to conversation.”
