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We first started hearing about AI-enabled PCs (AIPCs) from Microsoft. As a platform, PCs may seem a mature and unpromising market, but add AI and some amazing things can happen. Quickly summarize a PowerPoint slide deck or a 30-page Word document. Automatically create a complex filter for an Excel table to then create an equally complex trend chart. All without needing to first spend hours researching methods and plodding through lengthy YouTube videos. This is what Microsoft suggests: an assistant to do all the research for us and to generate a condensed summary or the slides, macros or charts we need. That would be a real advance in personal productivity. But such a capability must be more application-aware than a general purpose chatbot and it must preserve privacy and security, all at very low power. Cloud-based AI is not an option; the AI hardware and software must sit on the PC. Which explains why PC-based AI hardware is growing fast.

Opportunity

The world is still waiting for proven productivity advantages from AI in broad business applications, but in AIPC development is moving much faster. Microsoft’s enthusiastic support for this direction, especially in their latest Surface Pro release building on their CoPilot AI platform is evidence of their commitment. Product releases have already been announced by Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus, and Foxconn is already offering manufacturing support. Qualcomm, Intel, AMD have released or announced AIPC SoCs. None of the big players wants to be late in this race.

This is not surprising. Needham estimates that shipments of AIPCs are expected to grow from 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million units by 2027. All for a product class most of us hadn’t known existed until this year! One analyst anticipates initial growth will be driven by high-end business users and content creators, encouraged by intelligent assistant advantages and GenAI image creation. It is not hard to imagine that as these platforms take off more users will want access to similar AI-enhanced capabilities.

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