Dell Exec Says Consumers Aren’t Buying New PCs “Based on AI”

With Windows 10 reaching end of support last year, Microsoft and its PC partners have been banging the “AI PC” drum to push consumers to upgrade their devices. However, Dell just said at CES this week that consumers aren’t actually too excited about these new AI PCs.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Dell’s head of product Kevin Terwilliger admitted that the company came to CES this year with a marketing strategy. “One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” Terwilliger said. “So, a bit of a shift from a year ago, where we were all about the AI PC.”

This is quite a bold thing to say at a time when many companies are trying to ride the AI wave and “play where the puck is going to be,” to quote Wayne Gretzky. Dell may be all-in on AI PCs, just like its competitors, but Terwilliger admitted that consumers don’t really care about AI, for now at least.

“We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact, everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it—but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” Terwilliger said. “In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”

It probably doesn’t help that “AI PCs” aren’t exactly the same thing as “Copilot+ PCs.” There are stricter hardware requirements for the latter, including a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of 40+ trillion operations per second (TOPS).

A bigger issue with the definition of AI PCs may be the overreliance on NPUs, which seems quite arbitrary. An “old” PC with a powerful GPU may be just as capable of running AI workloads and new AI features on Windows 11, yet it won’t qualify as an “AI PC” in the eyes of Microsoft.