AI PCs technologyreseller.co.uk 33 next generation AI PC with a speed greater than 40 TOPS. In its most simple form, that is what differentiates an AI PC from a non-AI PC. TR: People are using those two letters, AI, at every opportunity. Is there a risk devices are going to be sold as AI PCs when they might not be? BL: In our industry, we have different vendors with different strategies who may disagree on the terminology, but what everyone can agree on is the requirement for a neural processing unit. Beyond that, Microsoft might say their view of an AI PC is that you have Windows 11, you have a Copilot button and you have a neural processing unit. Apple would probably disagree with that: one, because they are not going to put a Copilot button on their machine; and, two, because they've had neural processing units on their machines for some time without calling them AI. When we talk about TOPS, I’m a little cautious in case we get ahead of ourselves and we start to see competing messages on the market, for example if Apple were to say ‘you're talking about a technology we had three or four years ago and you didn't notice it then so why do you care if it's 40 TOPS today?’. Vendors will have a view. Software manufacturers may have a view. Processor manufacturers will definitely have view. Qualcomm, Intel, AMD typically talk about NPU and TOPS as their current focus. TR: Some of the projections for AI PC sales are very impressive. What are some of the challenges to be aware of? BL: The first one, the most obvious one, is use case. Costs will go up and not only hardware costs. The use case is defined by the application and the application costs will be there, whether it's CoPilot, whether it's a Google application, whether it's Adobe. Where you need the hardware plus the app, costs will go up. That raises the question of who needs AI? Many CIOs and CFOs will be asking what they get in return for those costs. When we talk about the benefits of an AI PC, the number one point that comes up is productivity. Tools such as Copilot give a huge amount of productivity and allow people to become multi-skilled. For example, before, if you wanted to do copy or imagery work, you would often have to go to multiple people, which impacted productivity. Now you could potentially get Copilot to do it for you. If you look at the growth projections, I don't think we're getting ahead of ourselves. The number I hear bandied about is that this year a maximum of 15% of machines will be new AI devices. Then, when we get into 2027, we talk about 60%-65%, maybe 70%. That tells me that a lot of people will still be transacting on the devices they use today and that’s probably because they won't have the need for an AI-enabled PC. That’s fine, but what we need to be wary of is everyone saying I'll wait for the next generation to come out. The job of the channel, whether that be vendor, distributor or reseller, is to convey the real benefits of AI to their customers so that they see the value in investing in the applications and understand that those applications work better on hardware that's AI-enabled. That's our first step in this journey, education. TR: Might people argue that they have been using AI satisfactorily on their existing devices? BL: For me, it's all about having the applications to provide a use case, and so far there are two names that people recognise. The first one, which woke us up to AI, is ChatGPT. If you ask people what AI means to them from a software perspective, most will say ChatGPT. That's a web-based application. Of course, we know there are security risks and data risks around what you type into ChatGPT because you're sharing what you want with an external person, which brings you to this edge concept. How do you take the power of the cloud and bring it safely onto the edge device so you don't need to share everything with everyone? You do that with Copilot. The truth is you've got two versions. You've got Copilot, available on every Windows 11 machine now coming out, giving functionality similar to what people use ChatGPT for. That's the cloud-based offering. Then you have Copilot for Microsoft 365, with subscription-based enterprise licensing, which is where you will experience the benefits of the machine and the ability to do a lot of computations on the edge. Almost every person will have an AI assistant. We call it a personal computer and it really will become very personal. It will learn about you and get used to how you speak and how you think, to the point where it'll start to answer emails for you, write them up, write a response. You'll just say I agree or I don't. We'll also get more used to collaborating between tools and apps. I always explain Copilot in terms of its ability to transform the way we work, really continued...
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