The AI PC Revolution: How AI-Enabled Laptops Are Transformed Industries
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is transforming industries and reshaping work. Now, it’s setting its sights on a long-overlooked tool: your work laptop.
The Power of AI Models
For instance, HCLTech, a consulting firm, worked with one of the largest end-to-end healthcare providers in the US to help implement a user-friendly, compliant AI clinical advisor. The clinical advisor, trained using one of the world’s largest clinical libraries, allows medical professionals to conversationally ask for the information they need to consult without spending time digging for it.
Running AI Models Locally
According to Alan Flower, EVP and head of AI & Cloud Native Labs at HCLTech, running the models locally on the device was key to effectively implementing this model.
Benefits of Running AI Models Locally
"By using the clinician’s laptop, it frees up clinician time whilst also ensuring the privacy and security of the patient’s information," said Flower. "It has that secondary advantage — it reduces the cost to run the solution since we’re not consuming expensive cloud tokens when we can use the neural processing unit on an AI PC, effectively, for free."
The Rise of AI PCs
Companies are discovering that if they want to take full advantage of AI and run models locally, they need to upgrade their employees’ laptops. This realization has introduced a hardware revolution, with the desire to update tech shifting from an afterthought to a priority and attracting significant investment from companies.
The Numbers Speak for Themselves
Researcher IDC predicts that AI PCs designed to run generative AI tasks locally will grow from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to over 167 million by 2027, eventually accounting for almost 60% of all PC shipments worldwide.
The Industry’s Response
Device manufacturers are already seeing this growing interest in AI PCs. Microsoft, a major player in the AI market, has introduced a new hardware category called Copilot+PCs, developed with partners such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo.
The Benefits of AI PCs
The benefits of AI PCs go beyond running AI models on devices. For example, a PC can overheat when it uses a power-intensive application, the fan may start blowing, and the device might begin running slowly. That situation can occur partially because the excessive workload is offloaded to the CPU or GPU, other key components of PCs.
Conclusion
As the refresh cycle for many businesses’ hardware approaches, and its advance is accelerated by other external factors, such as Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10, many organizations are forced to purchase new devices. This leaves one question: should businesses go for legacy or AI-capable devices? Because of the productivity advantages, most industry experts agree that upgrading to AI-capable PCs is the obvious choice.
FAQs
Q: What is an AI PC?
A: An AI PC is a laptop designed to run AI models locally, using a neural processing unit (NPU) to handle AI tasks efficiently.
Q: Why is running AI models locally important?
A: Running AI models locally ensures the privacy and security of sensitive information, reduces the cost of running the solution, and frees up clinician time.
Q: What is the market demand for AI PCs?
A: Researcher IDC predicts that AI PCs will grow from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to over 167 million by 2027, accounting for almost 60% of all PC shipments worldwide.
Q: What are the benefits of AI PCs?
A: AI PCs deliver significant performance improvements for the apps users already use, leverage new CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures, and deliver significant improvements in battery life due to the inclusion of small cores and highly power-efficient NPUs.
