Hasbro's CEO lets AI Peppa Pig help design toys

March 9, 2026·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Hasbro's CEO lets AI Peppa Pig help design toys, transforming how they pitch products in weeks.

Hasbro comes back with a different context. Nilay Patel sets up Chris Cox's return by comparing this version of the company with the one Cox described three years earlier. Some bets did not age well. The cold open says Cox laughs about being wrong on NFTs, which thankfully did not become the whole story. The rest of the conversation has bigger problems to chew on. Tariffs, supply chain strain, AI, and video game industry chaos all press on the same operating question: what is Hasbro now? The buyer has changed too. Patel points to a market where more toys and games are made for adults with money, and that changes the business math. Cox puts customer insight at the center, not one brand or one product line. His acronym is GEMSquared: gamified, entertainment driven, multipurpose, multi purchase, and multigenerational. He calls that the power core of play. Patel keeps pulling the answer back to the machinery. If Hasbro owns Transformers, My Little Pony, Monopoly, Magic, and Dungeons and Dragons, how does that IP move through the company? Cox splits it into lanes. Games run through Wizards of the Coast and the board game portfolio, including Monopoly, Clue, and The Game of Life. Licensing and entertainment is another lane, where Hasbro pushes brands into categories, entertainment, location based experiences, publishing, toys, and soft goods when partners have better expertise or distribution. The tone stays dry in a useful way. Patel keeps testing whether licensing is the company now. Cox will not flatten it that far. His answer is more like this: find where passion and purchasing power already exist, then build products and partnerships around a lifetime of play.

As heard by us

A useful Decoder interview on Hasbro's post-NFT reset, AI pressure, licensing strategy, and the adult-fan economics reshaping toys.

Nilay Patel uses Chris Cox's return to Decoder to check in on a company that has had to rethink its future after data bets, spin-off talk, collectibles hype, and NFTs aged unevenly.

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Why you'd press play

Hasbro's CEO returned to Decoder to laugh about his NFT predictions and explain what actually changed.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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