PC makers say tomorrow’s AI PCs just need to keep it simple

Believe it or not, AI is already subtly reshaping the PC.

No, we’re not talking about the microprocessor or integrated NPUs. There, progress has been slow and stuttering, as chip vendors and Microsoft work toward establishing an ecosystem of Copilot+ PCs.

Instead, PC vendors are looking for ways to reinvent the familiar with AI capabilities. Within Windows, you’re already seeing this with generative AI and filtering influencing the direction of Photos and Paint. But we wanted to know what PC vendors thought about the future of the AI PCs they’re building. The unexpected answers? Voice. The phone.

Unlike, say, monitors, an AI PC is a fusion of the underlying processor, the surrounding hardware, the operating systems, and any AI apps and services PC makers layer on. All of those companies have their own agendas, and their own perspectives. What PC makers appear to agree on is that consumers need to hear a single, unified message about why they need an AI PC — and that’s still being worked out.

Related: Rising to the TOPS: How will NPUs and Windows AI grow in 2025?

The year of the Copilot+ PC wasn’t really

To be fair, I didn’t think I would hear that much from PC vendors about the AI PC’s future. After all, the AI PC is barely in its infancy.

This was supposed to be the year of the AI PC. Microsoft picked out the Copilot+ brand as the signal to consumers that they were buying a “real” AI PC, not the half-hearted first-generation AI PCs with minimal AI TOPS. Second-generation AI chips including AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 and Intel’s Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) were supposed to debut — they did — and be blessed as Copilot+ PCs — they were — offering all the features of Copilot+ PCs. They didn’t. Copilot+ kicked its premier feature, Recall, down the road for further testing, and the AMD/Intel Copilot+ PCs still can’t run all of their expected features without the necessary updates from Microsoft.

Mark Hachman / IDG

That means we’re exiting 2025 with still just one chip architecture that really qualifies as a Copilot+ PC processor: the Snapdragon X platform from Qualcomm. What a mess.

So PC makers moved on.

Using AI to improve voice

So far, one of the more effective strategies has been to find applications PC users already like and enhance them with AI.

Ever since Windows 10, Microsoft has hoped that users would engage in back-and-forth conversations with Cortana, now replaced with Copilot. But users now can interact with AI and large-language models via voice in true conversations, both on their PCs and on their phones. Some users may be too shy to do that. Even so, those users will need to talk to their colleagues via Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet — and AI is playing a quiet, understated role in filtering out unwanted noise.

Asus showed off a version of AI noise filtering early this year, and it was amazing. But AI’s ability to actually “talk” has prompted changes, too.

Mark Hachman / IDG

“I think AI is going to unlock new ways we interact with a device,” said Tom Butler, executive director for Lenovo’s worldwide commercial PC portfolio, in an interview. “It’s not going to necessarily change… the traditional structure of keyboard, screen, your folding laptop. But I think the way we interface or interact with the device is going to change. And for quite some time, we’ve had voice capability on the device, but there’s really been no [significant] reason to have a conversation with the device. Now, with AI engines running and supporting natural language interface, you can now have a conversation with these AI engines.”

Eric Ackerson, Acer’s associate director of product marketing, agreed.

“I think some of the changes have already happened for us in the 2024 product releases, in terms of little things that users can’t see: the number of mics, the type of mics that are used for voice interaction with the PC, for the various Copilot features, voice-to-text, and so forth. There are small, little hardware changes there that the user won’t see, but definitely benefits from.”

To help make it a bit more obvious, Acer also built in an “AI activity indicator” that helped signal users that AI was active, Ackerson added. Otherwise, the physical design of Acer’s AI PCs will look and feel mostly the same during the first half of 2025, he said.

Is the phone the remote control for the PC?

Microsoft, too, has a role to play.

One of the things that makes Samsung interesting is that its PCs are part of an ecosystem that connects to its Galaxy Buds earbuds, Galaxy Tab tablets, Galaxy phones, and an array of consumer devices connected by SmartThings. One Samsung executive said he sees Microsoft possibly leaning on the phone more as an entry point to the PC.

Microsoft

According to Rafael de Ory, a senior product manager at Samsung, Microsoft is doing a great job “identifying a handful of different features that really resonated with consumer needs,” he said, pointing to the way in which Android phone and iPhones interact with Windows PCs and Phone Link. Today, Phone Link can exchange photos between a phone and a PC, send messages, and even place calls.

“I do believe that this is a great entryway to kind of introduce consumers to the first steps of an ecosystem,” de Ory sad. “Take what you already have on you in your pocket, your phone, and have that communicate with your PC.”

“We would be looking to work with Microsoft to evolve features like that, where we were able to leverage the best of our hardware and the best of AI to show better communication across our ecosystem — being able to say… ‘extend my screen to my tablet,'” de Ory said. “Or if you were connected to Samsung’s [home ecosystem] SmartThings, ‘hey, please make sure the garage door is closed.’ ‘Turn my TV on.’ Things that really start to bring the value from AI and form a convenience factor.”

“Based on conversations that we’ve had with Microsoft, they’re definitely understanding the need to enhance and optimize some of those experiences,” Samsung’s de Ory added.

Consumers need to understand why they need AI, and from where

One question that some vendors have is what difference a few TOPS may make from one generation to the next — especially when GPUs offer sharp step increases over an NPU. Nvidia is expected to release consumer versions of its “Blackwell” (GeForce 5000) GPU in or around January, in versions both for the desktop PC as well as laptops. While no one knows the potential AI performance of those chips, they’ll certainly be substantially higher than what an integrated NPU offers.

The tradeoff, of course, is efficiency: A GPU will be able to easily outperform a CPU’s integrated NPU, but at the cost of additional power and heat. “You’re going to get the good and the bad that comes with it,” Acer’s Ackerson said.

IDG

“I think there will be a growing number of not just businesses, but professional users that want to take advantage of that GPU to do local device AI,” Ackerson added.

All three PC makers agreed that better messaging has to be part of the AI PC’s future. Lenovo’s Butler compared AI to the early days of the dot-com boom, where no one really knew what a “.com” domain could do for you, but that you needed it.

“Overwhelming, leading toward confusing” is how Acer’s Ackerson described the industry’s approach to AI marketing. Each company has their own emphasis, their own features, from Qualcomm’s NPU-centric approach to Nvidia’s feelings that the GPU is best. And there’s an element of fear, too, that AI will end up taking jobs away.

“I think consumers are just generally confused, because there’s so much to take in, and they don’t know where a good source of information is or what [AI] can truly do,” Ackerson said. They think AI is a complete solution that does everything, and it’s not.”