Desktop artificial intelligence is failing to woo consumers

AI PC sales will rise in the coming years, but not because of AI, says Jason Walsh

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Image: Microsoft

A report published in January by analysts IDC predicted that so-called AI PCs will account for 60% of all PC shipments by 2027, with expectations of 167 million units being shifted that year alone.

So what is an AI PC, then? Put simply, it is a PC designed to run AI technology locally rather than remotely on some cloud server somewhere. In other words, AI PCs are computers that include specific system-on-a-chip (SoC) capabilities designed to run generative AI tasks locally.

As someone who has been vocal raising concerns about the endless gouge that is the rush to declare everything ‘the cloud’ and slap a subscription on it (a move driven more than anything else by a change in accounting practices) you would be forgiven for thinking I would see this as good news.

In a way I do. Anything that means users claw back power from the centralising tendencies of the IT industry is fine by me. However, it is still unclear that running AI locally brings any benefits. 

Analysis from Forrester points out not only that AI PCs becoming the norm is inevitable, but also that there is no “killer app” for the things.

Both points seem correct to me: upgrade cycles come in waves and as PC manufacturers solder ever more silicon onto their motherboards it is certain that a few chips specifically designed for AI will find their way into the bill of materials. At the same time, though, there is little indication that running a language model on a local machine brings any benefit.

Andrew Hewitt, principal analyst at Forrester said that the adoption of new PCs will be driven more by things like the forthcoming Windows 10 end of life

“While the user experience improvements of the AI PC are important, what the industry is forgetting is that user experience improvements almost never change IT purchasing behaviour,” he said.

Certainly, the same processors that are useful to AI will be welcomed by anyone performing calculation-intensive tasks, so sales should be fine in engineering, finance and the rest. However, the general direction of travel is toward the server and unless there is a move away from large language models this seems unlikely to change.

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