Solution Providers Are Helping Customers Navigate Complex AI PC Landscape

AI PCs are garnering a lot of enthusiasm and support across the channel, and solution providers will be key to helping customers navigate a complex landscape.

Ever since the first AI PCs started shipping last year, major tech vendors ranging from Intel and AMD to Dell Technologies, HP Inc. and Lenovo have vowed that the new device category will represent an inflection point and a new vector of growth for the client computer market.

Many solution provider executives share in that optimism, including Future Tech Enterprise CEO Bob Venero, who believes the AI PC category represents a “very big opportunity” for the channel because it will eventually become the norm for personal computing.

“AI PCs are going to be the standard. Eventually, you’re not going to really have, in my opinion, a delineation between an AI PC and a non-AI PC because AI is going to be integrated into everything that companies are going to be doing,” he said.

[RELATED: CRN’s 2024 AI Special Issue]

The emergence of this new device category comes at a critical time: Devices purchased during the pandemic-induced buying flurry of 2020 and 2021 are nearing the end of their expected four-year life cycles, while Microsoft Windows 10 is sunsetting in roughly a year’s time, pushing many businesses to upgrade their PCs to support the beefier hardware requirements that Windows 11 brings.

Factor in the zeitgeist of this new age of AI and it’s no wonder AI PCs are garnering a lot of attention in the channel. But it’s still early days, and sales in this nascent market are more complex and a heavier lift than traditional PC sales as solution providers help customers sort out how AI PCs can best benefit them.

“The opportunity is there if partners get the nuance that you need to be focusing on what the business outcome of that AI PC is to your customer’s environment, and then if you can articulate that, you’ll be in good shape,” Venero said.

First-generation AI PCs have been available for several months, and a second wave of more capable machines are starting to hit the market.

While the industry has been creating buzz about AI PCs for roughly a year, analysts have predicted that sales of AI PCs would start to gain limited traction in the second half of this year before picking up steam in earnest in 2025.

AI PCs are only expected to “drive modest PC growth” in 2024, according to research firm IDC.

But with the PC market only just starting to make a comeback this year, the firm forecasts that AI PCs will go from representing one in five shipments in 2024 to nearly two in three PCs shipped in 2028, bringing higher average selling prices in tow.

Solution provider executives believe the AI PC category will become a game-changer for businesses, but they will need to help customers navigate issues that have tempered early adoption, whether it’s finding compelling use cases or justifying higher prices.

x86 Support, Availability Crucial For AI PC Traction

One issue that may have impacted the early adoption of AI PCs was Microsoft’s decision to launch its newly branded Copilot+ PCs in June with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X processors instead of x86 chips from Intel or AMD.

This added another layer of complexity into the product category because solution providers now have to scrutinize the underlying hardware more closely and help customers make a choice: go with the Arm-based Copilot+ PCs available now or wait for wider availability of new x86-based systems that feature chips from Intel and AMD and meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC performance requirement that AI PCs must have a neural processing unit that performs at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

The x86-based systems released earlier this year do not meet that mark.

“The normal message would be, ‘Hey, just future-proof your hardware. You’re going to buy the hardware today. You’ll be future-proofed,’” said an executive at a major U.S. distributor, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly about the challenges facing broader AI PC adoption.

“Then this Microsoft [Copilot+ PC definition] shows up, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, am I really future-proofed because my notebook won’t do a TOPS of 40?’”

Microsoft in a recent blog post said, “We have seen incredible energy and momentum for Copilot+ PCs, with customers telling us that the performance and battery life exceeds their expectations.”

As the new x86 chips hit the market, the question then becomes how many AI PCs will become broadly available in the commercial market in the near term, said Megan Amdahl, senior vice president of client experience and North America COO at Chandler, Ariz.-based Insight Enterprises. To date, according to Amdahl, allocations have been more focused on consumers.

“In the next month or two, it’ll be interesting to gain clarity on how much will get allocated to consumer versus enterprise,” she said.

Software Ecosystem Plays Key Role In AI PC Adoption

One of the biggest issues critical to early AI PC adoption has been the need to find compelling use cases, including applications that can unlock new capabilities using the new chip architectures that are powering these computers.

“One of the things that we’re just paying close attention to at Insight is what other software will be forthcoming that really requires the 40 TOPS for the performance. Because Copilot+ is awesome; it’s just, how many other [applications] will people be able to take advantage of [it for better productivity, collaboration or graphics]?” said Amdahl.

When vendors started talking about the concept of AI PCs last year, there were only a few demonstratable use cases and even fewer applications that people could use.

But over the past year, vendors like Intel and HP have been working to enable and showcase ISVs that are developing so-called killer apps.

Intel, for instance, has been working with more than 100 ISVs on over 300 AI-enabled features that will take advantage of its Core Ultra processors. The features include AI-powered anti-phishing by BufferZone, accelerated data analysis by Microsoft’s Power BI, AI-enhanced presentations by Canvid and AI-powered deepfake detection by McAfee.

At a summer event, HP highlighted several ISVs that are making AI PCs—in the company’s own words—“real and tangible” with apps that take advantage of the computer’s underlying chipset. Those apps include business intelligence platform Polymer, photo editor Luminar Neo and presentation maker Beautiful.ai.

The expanding software ecosystem underlines how AI PCs represent a “huge opportunity” for channel partners, according to Alex Cho, president of personal systems at Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP.

“This is not a device opportunity. This is a device/solution/software/service opportunity,” he said. “And so the fact that our partners are able to bring that solution to our customers, that’s an expanded shopping basket. That seems very transactional, mechanical, but it means they’re going to be able to bring a much broader set of the solution to our customers.”

Solution Providers Wait To See How Pricing, Security Issues Play Out

While AI PC use cases continue to grow, solution providers have also been watching how pricing evolves since many of the initial devices come with the need to justify higher price tags, Insight’s Amdahl said.

However, Amdahl said, she has already received indications that pricing could come down to make AI PCs an easier sell for a greater plurality of customers.

“To the extent that that actually comes to fruition, once OEMs do the manufacturing, then you [will] get a lot of IT teams saying, ‘Well, I’m future-proofing. If I’m choosing between [an AI PC and a regular PC], I could go with the AI PC,” she said.

To Michael Affeldt, senior vice president of sales at Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based ACP CreativIT, there is another hurdle solution providers have to help potential AI PC customers get over: concerns around data governance and security.

“Those are the things that are making people reluctant,” said Affeldt.

These concerns were underscored by Microsoft’s May reveal of Recall, which was supposed to be a key feature for Copilot+ PCs at launch, giving users the ability to search for things they’ve previously seen on their screen using natural language queries.

However, security and privacy experts quickly pointed out that because Recall searches are performed against a central database of screenshots taken of a user’s desktop every few seconds, the feature could allow threat actors to “automate scraping everything you’ve ever looked at within seconds,” as one expert laid out.

Days before the release of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft delayed Recall to improve the feature’s safety and privacy safeguards by making it opt-in, requiring customers to use Windows Hello authentication to access it and encrypt its search index database. The feature is now expected to be available for external testing in October.

“Security continues to be our top priority,” Microsoft said in a recent blog post about the issue.

As companies navigate the security implications of new AI features, Affeldt views the adoption of AI PCs as inevitable as the incoming PC refresh.

“You ever seen surfers out there beyond the break just kind of sitting on their board?” Affeldt said, recalling something he told his team recently. “That’s kind of where we are right now. The waves are coming, and those waves are Windows 11-capable devices, AI-capable devices and the [post-COVID] PC refresh.”