The announcement of this new PC feels like an effort by HP to alleviate the skepticism surrounding AI laptops and whether they can actually do anything beyond typical web-based systems.
“All the talk about AI PCs has been about ambition and opportunity,” Cho told me, “and now people are asking us, 'So what can it do?'”
At an event for journalists, analysts and industry partners in New York last week, Cho and other HP executives reiterated their “we want to make AI real” message — a message echoed in marketing materials for the new PCs — and showed off how apps like Zoom and AI-powered DJ software benefit from the tech upgrade.
I had a short hands-on with one of the new AI-powered laptops and found it to have some handy working features, such as the ability to create custom libraries. Realistically, though, these tools will likely only be used in conjunction with a cloud-based system. When I contacted HP's AI companion chatbot on the device, it also had the option to call up Microsoft's Copilot bot, which could search the web.
All of this creates a sense that we’re heading towards a future of work where we’ll have to juggle a wide variety of bots with different capabilities, datasets, and access to the internet.
“We think it's going to be a hybrid environment,” Cho said.
Another benefit of localized AI is security, Cho noted, noting that law firms wanting to query sensitive documents or people analyzing medical records would prefer not to have to upload that information to a cloud-based AI system first.
