IT pros see place for AI PCs in enterprise

As companies ruminate about refreshing their Covid-era computers, industry practitioners expect AI PCs to get consideration—even if orgs don’t quite know how to use them yet.

IT pros who spoke with IT Brew see the appeal of AI-equipped computers in their enterprise, following Microsoft’s announcement of Copilot+ PCs, which provide localized AI processing and aim to help employees handle their day–to-day data, from email to health records.

“I really do think that clients that refresh and don’t do an AI PC…are going to be regretting it and wanting to replace them in a shorter term than their standard life-cycle,” Megan Amdahl, senior vice president of client experience and North America COO at the solutions integrator Insight Enterprises, told IT Brew.

A favorite time-saving feature found in the newly announced PC line, according to Amdahl: Copilot’s summarization of long email threads.

Insight, a Microsoft partner, announced it will be among the first to adopt Windows-based AI PCs, which feature dedicated neural processing units (NPU) powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors.

At its annual developer conference beginning on May 20, Microsoft revealed its Copilot+ PCs, including a Surface Laptop and Surface Pro.

Microsoft team members also announced:

• The 40-plus on-device AI models run locally on the device, powered by the new NPU that Microsoft Executive VP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi told the crowd runs at 40 trillion operations a second.
• Recall—a photographic-memory-like feature, according to Mehdi—helps track down “virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC.”
• A “live captions with live translation” feature quickly converts languages into written subtitles.

“We estimate over 50 million AI PCs will be purchased just in the next 12 months alone,” Mehdi told the audience. (The company’s Copilot+ PC models will begin at $999.)

Microsoft’s presentations follow other big tech AI unveilings: OpenAI’s GPT-4o model (which Mehdi said will “soon be available” in Copilot), Google’s upgraded Gemini chatbot, and Meta’s Llama-3 AI assistant.

Some analysts and enterprises alike have shown hesitance in AI PC adoption, as IT Brew reported in May—given a lack of, well, clear reasons to use it.

Gartner analysts, however, saw 2023 as “the worst year in PC history,” with PC shipment declining 14.8% in 2023, when compared to 2022. But the PC market has reached its low point, the market-intelligence firm reported in January 2024.

Jason Wong, Gartner’s distinguished VP analyst, told IT Brew that companies who refreshed their PCs during Covid are arriving on another five-year refresh cycle, and AI capabilities will drive adoption decisions. Wong sees Microsoft’s Recall feature benefiting teams like sales or lawyers, for example, who need to pull from previous conversations. A visiting nurse can use a laptop to process forms without having to connect to the internet or wait for processing back from the cloud.

“There’s a strong desire for organizations to really transform, really think with a clean slate on how they can rearchitect their business processes or how they can approach collecting data and feeding it to AI,” Wong said.