This year HP Inc brought its annual Amplify partner conference to Music City, Nashville – but it wasn’t guitar notes the hardware giant wanted to project.
AI the edge was the overriding theme this year at the Gaylord Opryland resort, with AI PCs front and center and an ensemble of other AI-equipped devices close behind.
It’s clear HP has gone all in on Copilot PCs, Microsoft’s designation for the new class of AI-native Windows devices, as HP completes its overhaul of its consumer and commercial PC roster ready for what it has billed a new generation of PCs sporting neural processing units (NPUs) for AI computation.
In addition to its physical offerings, HP has put the spotlight on independent software vendors (ISVs) to how business users were going to be able to leverage local AI compute to their advantage. This was the case throughout last year’s HP Amplify AI event in New York, which fired the starting pistol on HP’s AI PC aspirations.
This year its lineup of AI-enabled PCs became more extensive, as well as more fleshed out. HP has used the event to build out its commercial PC and workstation portfolio, to ensure it could offer users an AI PC for as many enterprise use cases as possible.
On stage at the opening keynote of Amplify 2025 Alex Cho, president of Personal Systems at HP, said that while last year’s AI PCs showed ambition, HP was now turning this into reality and dubbing the event the “big bang” moment for HP’s AI PCs.
“We are announcing today the world’s largest AI PC portfolio, the world’s largest,” Cho said. “I don’t have one product here to show with you today, because we have over 60 new platforms that we have completely redesigned to enable AI like never before.”
Last year, the industry still had questions about whether AI PCs were ready for the mainstream and whether the software landscape had caught up with this new hardware. These questions still remain and HP is addressing them head on.
For example, Cho announced HP’s new AI ISV acceleration program, aimed at catalyzing new AI application development for its device ecosystem.
“We have collated over 100 top tier AI applications that are applicable across multiple job types to enable the future of work,” Cho said. “Last year it was a spark of an idea, this time we’re delivering it big time.”
HP made a concerted effort throughout Amplify Conference 2025 to show progress is being made in this area and there is no doubt the wider software landscape for AI is maturing, though whether it is quite ready to create meaningful value for businesses right now remains to be seen. Regardless, AI PC adoption looks to be on the cards for many businesses as Windows 10 end-of-life beckons towards the end of the year and more enterprises adopt the AI-enabled Windows 11.
Recent IDC research projected AI PCs will account for 93.9% of the commercial market by 2028, with 60% of surveyed IT leaders indicating they plan on replacing their old fleet with new Windows 11 PCs rather than simply updating the operating systems of existing devices.
This shows the appetite is there from end users, and HP thinks they will quickly see returns on investing in AI PCs capable of running LLMs locally. For example, HP began deploying AI PCs internally last May across a range of users and found that on average individuals were able to save four hours per week in terms of productivity benefits.
AI PCs as a first step toward AI at the edge
In a recorded conversation shown onstage at the event Lisa Su, chair and CEO at AMD, told Enrique Lores, CEO at HP, that she expects every PC in the future to have an AI component.
The notion that the distinction between AI PCs and regular PCs will disappear down the line was frequently hit on at Amplify Conference 2025. But David McQuarrie, chief commercial officer at HP, added that while he agrees with the broad trend, the dividing lines between the two remain useful for now.
McQuarrie said there will be many non AI PCs that continue to sell, admitting this number will most likely be “more than we would like”, but detailed why he is telling customers the time is now to get on board and transition to next-generation hardware:
“What we counsel customers, we have had a number of customers here this week, is ‘begin now’.
“If you’re a 10,000 employee company, there are some that will switch all 10,000 devices and we have those conversations, but we need them to get started,” he said, adding that those who don’t ready their hardware soon could face long-term impacts. “If they don’t get started and figure out how to get the best from it, we worry that those companies will be left behind.”
Lores and all HP executives were clear throughout Amplify 2025 that AI PCs will soon hit the mainstream. They also set out their vision to drive AI at the edge, so customers can take advantage of the cost, security, and latency advantages of running AI where data resides rather than the other way around.
The company’s belief is that smaller, more targeted models will be the future of how AI is used in industry . Although AI PCs were easily the most obvious area HP were focused on driving this AI at the edge vision, Lores emphasized that the overarching goal was to drive this change across its portfolio.
HP aims to form a hybrid approach to AI with both AI at the edge and cloud-based AI working in tandem across its ecosystem. Eventually, HP wants to infuse all of its devices with AI, with new AI printer features announced at the event. The company’s target is to build out a complete portfolio of AI-enabled devices that provide a consistent ‘OneHP’ experience which can all connect seamlessly.
The next big goal is to develop a new industry standard for connectivity to make this a possibility and ensuring CIOs and IT DMs the tools to manage this new portfolio of devices.
AI PCs are just the tip of the iceberg for what HP says will be a big shift towards a tech stack defined by local AI capabilities and the firm will continue to build out this portfolio anticipating a new era of agentic AI where the hardware is able to support running agents locally.
We’re not there yet, but this is the next big ambition HP is trying to turn into a reality. For now, however, HP can use its AI PCs as a good litmus test for customer uptake and value generation. Much rests on these devices – at next year’s event, we’ll all be able to pore over the results for ourselves.
