AI PCs were supposed to buoy the computer hardware market going into 2025 but sales have proven lacklustre. Why?
Intel believes AI PCs are the ‘biggest change in personal computing in 20 years.’ The fading chipmaker wants to sell 100 million of the things by 2025 – and it’s not alone. Nearly every PC and chip manufacturer is touting the hardware as the next revolution in computing, with AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, and NVIDIA all announcing AI PC innovations at CES this year.
AI PCs purport to house more capable hardware that supports AI technologies on the device itself instead of the cloud, offering better security, battery life, personalisation and improved performance. But if they are a reformation akin to the smartphone or Wi-Fi, right now it’s one defined more by the marketing literature than sales numbers. According to Gartner data, AI PC shipments will reach 43m units in 2024. If that sounds a lot, that would only be equivalent to 17% of the total number of PCs – some 241.89m – shipped last year, and an impressively large total at that considering that it would mean a jump in sales of almost 100%.
“This has been very much a supply-side push,” says Ranjit Atwal, a research director in Gartner’s Quantitative Innovation team. “It’s the manufacturers pushing this, as opposed to businesses wanting it – which explains the muted response.”
Manufacturers are hoping businesses will pay a premium for AI PCs – the average cost of one is 5-15% higher than traditional models, according to some estimates – but enterprises are averse. The value proposition, explains Atwal, simply isn’t clear when most normal PCs can run AI easily enough in the cloud. “Right now, this hardware is interesting but not interesting enough to find the budget for the technology,” he says. In this sense, says Atwal, AI PCs arrived ‘12 months too early’ when the technology is still in the ‘piloting phase’ among many businesses.
What, then, is the point of an AI PC? Forrester’s Andrew Hewitt is asking the same question. “Most customers today are trying to figure out what the benefits are for their organisation,” says Hewitt. “What types of users and roles are going to benefit most from an AI PC? How is this going to impact overall costs? We’re very much at the beginning stages.”
Heidi Vella 