HP: AI Will Transform the PC Into a Personal Companion

At its first-ever HP Imagine event today, HP put forward a vision in which AI transforms the PC in ways not seen since the advent of the Internet.

“AI will transform the PC,” HP president and CEO Enrique Lores said at the top of the vent. “There will be new PCs and new experiences. So far, AI has all been in the cloud, but this will change, and we will experience those same capabilities on our PCs next year. This is a tremendous change that will transform the PC into a personal companion.”

Lores then laid out the three fundamental changes that will enable this transformation. By bringing AI capabilities into the PC, it will be roughly 80 percent less expensive, it will reduce latency, which is important for both games and applications, and it will offer significant advantages for data and privacy protection because data won’t have to traverse between the device and the cloud.

HP president Alex Cho offered a bit more information about AI and the PC, noting that we have just entered a new era of personal computing that will require innovation across all PC form factors. HP has offered a few clues about new form factors with its Spectre Fold folding PC and Envy Move, a portable all-in-one desktop PC with a 24-inch display and integrated battery. But more is on the way, including new families of Omen and Poly peripherals that will address content creators across gaming and hybrid work.

On the software end, HP envisions AI making our work and personal lives more efficient and enjoyable via what Cho called local inferencing, where meetings aren’t just summarized but are also personalized to the individual user’s needs. He promised more news on this front in the coming year.

HP is also making similar pushes in the office, where it will address related hybrid work challenges. This will happen locally, in meeting rooms, and remotely, via conferencing solutions that make those not there physically a more integrated part of hybrid meetings. “The vision is simple, but also grand,” HP president Dave Shull said. “All of our customers say the same thing, that work has changed forever. We want to help them make employees more productive and engaged and do their best work.”

To this end, HP announced that its Workforce Central service, which combines the data from cross-ecosystem telemetry with AI to lower support costs, will be free to commercial customers. This system anticipates problems so that IT can act proactively to solve them before they disrupt work.

Of course, what I’m most interested in here is the future of the PC. And while HP never uttered the term “NPU,” it’s clear that this coming hardware advance is what that transformation is all about. And I assume we’ll hear more about new devices as soon as CES in January. It can’t happen quickly enough.