Inside HP’s AI bet to rebuild itself for the ‘work intelligence’ age

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) returns to Las Vegas from Jan. 6 to 9, the tech industry is gearing up for its annual spectacle of prototypes, silicon benchmarks and AI-branded gadgets. But one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology over the coming year will unfold far from the keynote stages and demo floors.

HP, the 85-year-old Silicon Valley company long defined by PCs, printers, and enterprise hardware, is repositioning itself as a work-intelligence platform—where devices learn continuously, services anticipate needs, and AI dissolves the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and the cloud.

Under Jim Nottingham, senior vice president and division president of Advanced Compute Solutions, HP is treating AI not as a feature or a marketing layer but as a structural force reshaping how the company builds products, manages its supply chain, and generates revenue.

As enterprise spending shifts toward intelligent, autonomous systems, that strategy is becoming central to HP’s future and to whether it can compete with contemporaries, including Dell and Lenovo on devices, while holding its ground against Microsoft and the cloud hyperscalers that control workplace software, data and AI workflows.

Nottingham said HP’s transformation began with an uncomfortable realization that “work was not working as well as it should.” Customers had raised these issues for years, but the true scale of the problem became clear only after HP measured it through its 2025 Work Relationship Index. The findings were striking as just 20% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work, meaning most feel overwhelmed by fragmented tools, constant interruptions and systems that make work harder rather than more productive.

“We heard versions of this from customers across industries and geographies,” Nottingham says. “When you have visibility across millions of devices and organizations of every size, patterns like this become impossible to miss.” Those insights forced HP to confront a deeper truth about AI. “You can’t just add AI to a device and call it transformation.”

Instead, HP rethought how devices, software, services and management systems work together across an entire workday. The shift cut across personal systems, print and services at the same time, pushing the company toward a single, platform-led vision of the future of work rather than three separate roadmaps.

“At CES, we’ll demonstrate that platform-led view across the portfolio,” Nottingham says. “AI became the organizing principle because it’s the first technology capable of tying those pieces together and enabling work environments that are more adaptive, secure, and intelligent.”

From hardware economics to intelligence at scale

HP’s reinvention comes at a moment of pressure. Hardware margins are shrinking as devices commoditize, while hyperscalers increasingly control enterprise workflows and set the bar for intelligent work systems. HP’s counter is scale. Few companies span endpoints, managed fleets, printing infrastructure, and workforce software at a global reach. HP is betting that AI layered across that footprint can drive higher-margin services and recurring revenue without forcing customers to replace existing systems.

Recent financial results help explain the company’s confidence. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the company reported revenue growth of 4% year over year, driven largely by strength in Personal Systems. AI PCs accounted for more than 30% of shipments during the quarter, and HP expects that share to approach 50% next year. Subscription and services businesses now generate billions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, reinforcing a shift away from one-time device sales toward a more durable, platform-driven business model.

Industry experts argue that this shift reflects where enterprise computing is headed, but execution is what separates leaders from laggards. Pierre Baqué, CEO and founder of Neural Concept, said meaningful AI transformation requires intelligence to be embedded into system design from the outset, accounting for real-world constraints and tradeoffs.

“The future of enterprise computing is about leveraging intelligent, AI applications that learn and adapt across the full lifecycle, improving how engineering teams accelerate and validate their operations,” says Baqué.

HP’s AI PCs are built around that philosophy. The systems integrate neural processing units that run AI workloads locally, enabling real-time inference without constant reliance on the cloud. The payoff is lower cost, faster performance and stronger privacy—advantages that matter in regulated industries and bandwidth-constrained environments, and that distinguish HP’s approach from cloud-first Copilot PCs and consumer-led AI designs from Apple and Qualcomm.

“For specialized workers inside companies—the people responsible for the most complex and demanding workflows—the stakes are much higher,” Nottingham adds. “Whether the work involves generative AI, simulation or data science, our solutions streamline complex workflows, remove friction and help increase productivity.”

A different competitive wager

HP is embedding AI across categories competitors often treat separately, including AI PCs, workstations, printing and device management. Print AI applies generative models to formatting, security and intent recognition—an area few expected to see meaningful AI impact. In AI PCs, documents, meetings and workflows can be queried instantly, while tasks such as video editing and image processing shrink from minutes to seconds, even offline.

“By enabling hybrid compute that combines local responsiveness through AI with cloud scale, we are helping these teams work faster and more effectively without disrupting their flow,” Nottingham says. He added that AI PCs now make up a growing share of HP’s shipments, and adoption is accelerating. “It reflects where enterprise computing already is, not where it might be someday.”

HP’s transformation raises a larger question for the industry: If a company with HP’s scale and legacy must become intelligent to stay competitive, what does that mean for every other maker of work devices?

Autumn Stanish, a director analyst at Gartner, says the industry’s shift from device-driven revenue to software, services and lifecycle-based models has been inevitable.

“This has been inevitable for a long while now, and a very slow transition for the hardware industry,” she said, as longer device lifecycles and price pressure eat into traditional hardware profits. “Device pricing isn’t going rise enough…to make up for that lost revenue,” pushing companies to look beyond selling PCs and other systems. 

She notes that HP’s expansion into digital employee experience tools such as DXP, along with managed device lifecycle services now offered by HP, Dell and Lenovo, reflects where competition is moving. “Cloud AI processing is expensive for providers and customers alike,” she added, making local, on-device intelligence increasingly essential.

The future of work, then, may arrive not through spectacle, but through quiet reinvention—where AI fades into the background and systems adapt to how work actually happens.

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