AI takes center stage at HP’s Amplify conference in Las Vegas

“When we look at AI, we believe that there is an opportunity to create personalized experiences that will provide employees with what they want and companies with what they need. We can develop tools that will increase productivity and create collaboration solutions that will enhance flexibility,” said Enrique Lores, CEO of HP, addressing a packed room of an audience full of 1,500 commercial, alliance, and distribution partners representing 95 countries.

Lores said the company’s next generation of AI PCs will run large language models locally, as it is more secure and less expensive to run them on the cloud. “Think about yourself as a creative professional, someone who needs to create and is going to be using AI to generate a new image or video. The speed advantage would be very significant if you run it on the device,” he said.

At its annual Amplify conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the PC giant said the company will integrate artificial intelligence into all its products, including personal computers and printers, starting in the summer.

For Lores, running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on the device will not only increase speed but also be cost-effective, providing greater security compared to running AI models on the cloud. Key to generative AI development are large language models, which power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. However, many of these applications run on the cloud and thus require the use of massive, expensive server farms that act as supercomputers to run them.

HP has been selling personal computers equipped to handle AI workloads, such as the Spectre x360, but the company wants to take one step further by designing an AI PC where AI plays an important role at the foundational level, complemented by the power of a CPU, GPU, and a neural processing unit (NPU).

PC companies like HP and its partners, including Microsoft and Qualcomm, believe that AI could be the new driver to sell computers to individual consumers as well as businesses. The pandemic saw the highest growth in PC sales since 2010, fueled by the shift to remote work and learning. However, shipments have seen a decline since the start of 2022, brought on by macroeconomic headwinds, weak retail, and commercial demand.

Experts say the boom in generative artificial intelligence, or Gen AI, that can churn out conversational answers to prompts based on training data, could boost PC sales as buyers actively look to integrate AI features that enhance productivity and improve experiences.

Generative AI may be a buzzword in tech, but AI has always powered PC features for years. Now, Gen AI is natively built into chips from Intel and Qualcomm, while Microsoft has been adding a Copilot chatbot to its Windows operating system.

HP has been ramping up the use of AI features in its PCs, and its existing efforts could provide a hint at the incoming era of true AI PCs. Nonetheless, more and more PC makers are making significant investments in AI in the hope that it will drive more excitement around personal computers.

During its Amplify conference, HP sent out a clear message to its thousands of channel partners that AI is its high-growth opportunity and strategy for the future. It launched a new AI training and certification program for channel partners, and it has teamed up with Nvidia to develop the initial courses. The other changes include the introduction of Amplify Growth Plays for areas like AI data science and digital services, as well as a “simplified” membership architecture.

Last year, the company announced that all its HP products, solutions, and distribution across its portfolio will be integrated into the HP Amplify program.

(The writer is attending the Amplify 2024 conference in Las Vegas at the invitation of HP India)